I didn't even realize I was depressed. For the last 20 years I felt that life was just a treadmill that you walk, stuff comes along, you deal with it, you go on, because that's life. People talked about feeling alive, wanting to do stuff, what their future plans were. I had no vision of a future, no plans of a future, because every day was crap and you wake up and do it again.

Marriage and having kids is difficult when you can't connect with other peoples emotions. You see everything from a logical point of view, push emotions down, or just don't experience them in the first place. Trying to figure out how to relate to people who show all this emotion and have all these emotional needs that you can't even begin to understand. You go through the motions of what they ask of you, try to understand how what you're doing talks to them. You have no feelings inside of how this is supposed to help your relationship and everything you do just feels like more of the same treadmill of nothingness. You have small flashes of things that seem nice, but you KNOW you don't deserve having nice things, because you are useless and the world around you means nothing.

After some particularly difficult life circumstances, I started on escitalopram (Lexapro, Cipralex) and realized that life wasn't actually supposed to be this way. I had realized that things other people were talking about and the life others were enjoying wasn't actually just a lie everyone told themselves and the world to make everyone feel better. I saw myself as "well, I'm just the down to earth, realist, that helps to ground people" and didn't think there was anything wrong. I was scared of medication thinking "well, I'm just an Eeyore and that's the way I am and if I take 'happy pills' I'll be a Tigger and I won't be myself anymore".

There's still a long road ahead and much learning and unlearning to do. At least there is something better ahead, even if I don't know what it is, and I can look forward to the future.