Leaving depression is like escaping a black hole: seemingly impossible from within, optimistically improbable from the outside with the looming threat of relapsing into the gravity of it all.

When you leave, you hope that you’ll have people, allies, friends helping you along the way, pulling you out. You’re learning to walk again for the first time and you need the help, but there are bound to be time when you trip up. That’s not supposed to happen, you now have other people with you; that must mean that they’re not good enough. Maybe they’re tripping you up on purpose; that must mean they’re not good for you.

Leaving depression, when you can’t even trust yourself, how can you expect yourself to trust other people?

I love ideals: grandiose, spectacular visions of what can and should be. The problem with that is reality never seems to ever reach the heights of my ideals and it’s greatly disappointing. This is especially true for my ideals for people and the reality of them, myself included. I expected other people mend me, help me heal whole after depression, but that never happened. And it got me deeply discouraged.

So I went back to the drawing board, and I realized it was all about responsibility.

I didn’t trust myself. This is something that should have been obvious, but it’s something I lost track of when I surrounded myself with other people. Perhaps I did so intentionally, trying to absolve myself of responsibility. I was not able to entrust myself with the responsibility to make sure I came out of everything okay, so I put that responsibility on other people. But it can’t work like that. You can’t put yourself in a position where the betterment of your life is pitted against the betterment of someone else’s. You don’t abduct someone else’s development just so you can achieve your own. Ultimately, you are the only person you can rely on for your own happiness.

From the drawing board, I realized something so obvious but so difficult to grapple with: I need to take responsibility.

I needed to take responsibility for myself because expecting personal progress to come any other way would just be wasted energy in a lost cause. Personal progress comes from digging deep, from being uncomfortable. The problem with ideals is that it portrays reality as being glorious. And sometimes, when the planets align and the moon is blue and all the piece fall into exactly the right place, reality can be glorious. But more often than not, reality is gritty, it’s ten feet of mud, it’s not something that can be made better by wishful thinking. Reality is about the fight.

To make myself a better person after depression, I had to take responsibility for myself. I had to deeply scrutinize my flaws, my strengths. I had to learn what that parts of myself I had to improve and the parts of myself I had to accept. It’s a process, for me, best done alone so I can focus on discovering myself. But once I started understanding myself and what I could do for other people, I started to understand how I could be happy and make others happy.

It’s still an ongoing process but it’s a process I’m seeing the dividends of and looking forward to seeing dividends from for a long time coming