What Depression Takes

It’s not old age.

Not “losing my mind.”

Not Alzheimer’s disease

whispering its way in.

It’s depression.

And it doesn’t just take happiness,

It takes things you don’t notice leaving.

Moments.

Memories.

The proof that you were even there.

There are photos on my phone

from three weeks ago

that feel like they belong to someone else.

I look at them

like I’m flicking through a stranger’s life.

A cup of coffee.

A stretch of sky.

A version of me

I don’t remember being.

So I scroll,

backwards, forwards,

trying to stitch it together.

This one came before.

That one came after.

If I look long enough

something might click.

Sometimes it does.

A sound.

A sentence.

A feeling that lands softly in my chest.

And I think,

Oh, there you are,

But sometimes

nothing.

Just a blank space

where a moment should live.

And that’s the quiet cruelty of it.

Depression doesn’t just sit in the present,

it reaches back,

softly, steadily,

and takes pieces of your past with it.

Blurs the edges.

Fades the details.

Turns whole days

into something that feels…

unlived.

Like I was there,

but not fully inside it.

Like I was watching

from just behind my own eyes.

People don’t talk about that part.

The part where your life

starts to feel unfamiliar.

Where small, ordinary, beautiful things,

a laugh, a walk, a warm drink,

get filed away somewhere you can’t reach.

Not because they didn’t matter.

But because your brain

was too busy surviving

to remember them.

And I’m learning.

slowly that maybe,

just because I can’t remember a moment

doesn’t mean it didn’t count.

It still happened.

I was still there.

Even if my mind

didn’t keep the evidence.

Even if all I’m left with

is a photograph

and a quiet hope

that I was okay

when it was taken. 🤍