"In the startup community, there’s a real stigma to depression. Every time someone comes around and asks ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ you’re always like 'Best day ever, man! Killing it! We’re crushing it!' You have to do that." →
A little note/overshare on this piece: I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I didn’t have some skin in the game, here. I’ve never been big on unilateral issue advocacy, but having personally dealt with this first-hand - something that my family is genetically predisposed to, and part of the reason I never met my Dad’s mother (a guilt-ridden Holocaust survivor who killed herself when he was in college*) - it’s an issue that’s more often than not buried and lurking beneath the surface for everyone I know.
The worst part of it is the K-hole effect, of struggling as one’s pride sinks at the prospect of being beaten down by this, which only makes you feel worse. The logic goes something like: I suck at life, and I really suck at life because I feel like I suck, ergo, fuck my life, I really fucking suck. This combined with what Josh Weinstein kept referring to as the “pluralistic ignorance” of depression — wherein, nobody talks about it because they believe nobody else deals with it because nobody talks about it — makes it a particularly nasty societal ill, made all the worse by the ease with which one actually can begin to find ways to live with it better.
Anyway, it’s the first thing I’ve written in a while where I feel a little satisfied with the final result. [Also, I couldn’t have done it without those brave enough to talk to me - especially Josh Weinstein - or Adrianne Jeffries, who was instrumental in helping with everything from helping me meet sources to the obsessive editing of the first four paragraphs late last night, but that’s another story.]
*Obligatory Tuesday “Fuck the Nazis.”
