Mental illness is a very much a matter of physiology and not one of will. Anyone who tells you to just try yoga or change your diet or think happier thoughts should have their teeth turn to ashes in their mouth. And I understand the importance of destigmatizing mental illness by rendering it within a medical framework. For too long we have viewed it as a moral indictment, to disastrous effect. However, I also think this tends to throw a certain responsibility back onto those of us who struggle with it. Yes, my own personal brain chemistry is something I must reckon with, but doing so while navigating a cruel health care system, with the goal of remaining healthy enough to face a laughably uncertain financial future, all in service to surviving a world that is everywhere immiserating, hardly seems a good way to answer “how do I live.” The best answer I’ve managed to come up with is that you live with intention of making that question easier for other people to answer. For me, the worst aspect of chronic depression (besides the boredom of it all) is the urge to be alone. If you’ve read my previous columns, you’ll notice that I almost always find a way to bring up our beholdenness to others. This is because I’m a lazy writer, but also because the fact of mutual obligation is what gives me the motivation to write at all. It’s also what animates any politics worth having.

It has been a long goddamn winter. (At least it has here on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, i.e. the center of the known universe.) If you and your people are anything like me and mine, all your conversations over the past few months have tended towards serious discussions of the end times—which, for the naturally melancholic among us, can be a strange comfort. "Finally," you may have thought, "people get it! I'm not alone!" But now the sun has started to come out, and today you looked around and saw all the people smiling and frolicking, and the birds were singing about how much they want to have sex with each other, and you were like, "Oh, goddammit. Why do I still feel like garbage?"