There was a beautiful essay in the Washington Post last week by Laura Zigman on the moment she cried “uncle,” and took the “happy pills” that she was so adamant on not taking. It’s a wonderful description of depression and how lonely our world can be.
I have searched and searched for the online version, but I can’t find it.
So I’ll type out the first few paragraphs.
The piece is called “Coping Outside the Box: Antidepressants Don’t Kill the Pain, but They Can Be a Huge Relief.”

Everyone has a moment in time that divides his or her life into “before” and “after.” For me that moment was 10 years ago, when I was 34. I had just left New York and moved to Washington–trading my soul-deadening career and size-0 studio apartment for a 9-to-5 job and a big one-bedroom overlooking Rock Creek Park and the zoo, trading my no-life life for an actual life, not to put too fine a point on it, and feeling really good about it–when depression struck. Again. The way it had repeatedly since second grade.
It was then that I finally realized that I would never be able to outrun myself; wherever I went, wherever I moved, however stealthily I tried to sneak away, I would always bring myself with me. And at the thought of that–at the thought of a life sentence with chronic clinical depression as my cellmate and no chance of parole–I finally knew the jig was up.

“Uncle,” I cried at long last. Give me the meds.
Describing what depression feels like is a little like trying to describe what chocolate tastes like or what classical music sounds like or what red looks like. But for me, being depressed was like being inside a sealed glass box right in the middle of a big huge party: I could see out and people could see in, but that’s about as far as it went.
For most of my life I knew what I was missing out on–everything–and even though much of the time I was too depressed to care, every once in awhile my heart would leap like a normal person’s and I would grasp, in the flash of an instant, that my life was passing me by. Those times my spirit would float up to the ceiling and look down at myself pushing against the glass walls of my box like a frantic mime. But, like every other trapped mime in the history of the world, I could never find my way out.