I Don’t Know How to Explain How Low I Feel

Over the past few months I have written a lot about confidence, rejection, purpose and what happens when the version of yourself you were once reasonably certain about becomes harder and harder to recognise. Mental health has been sitting underneath almost everything I have written, sometimes fairly obviously, but even then I think I have mostly been writing around depression rather than trying to explain what being depressed actually feels like when you are still very much living inside it. Perhaps that is because I have never really known how to explain it, because even now, after therapy, medication and far too much time thinking about my own brain, I still struggle to answer the fairly simple question of how I am actually feeling.

The honest answer is that it changes almost every day, although somehow everything still feels the same underneath. There are days where I am completely numb and I cannot seem to make myself do anything, days where I cry and cry and cannot pull myself out of whatever place my head has decided to go, then other days where I can laugh, talk about marketing, take my little boy somewhere, go dancing or become completely absorbed in some branding idea that has appeared in my head. If you met me on one of those days you might not think anything was particularly wrong, because I am still capable of being me on the outside, but beneath all of those different versions of the day there seems to be one feeling that keeps coming back… I feel absolutely useless, and the longer that feeling has been allowed to sit there, the more it seems to have started rewriting everything else I believe about myself.

That word hurts because usefulness has always mattered to me far more than I probably realised. I like contributing, I like being needed, I like knowing that something is better because I was involved in it and I like having evidence that the time and energy I have poured into something actually achieved something. For most of my adult life work gave me a huge amount of that evidence, but over the last few months the evidence my brain seems interested in collecting has become very different, because every unanswered application, every rejection, every difficult day at home and every moment where I cannot seem to access the energy I used to take for granted becomes another little entry in the case against myself. It is as though my brain has decided to become the prosecutor, judge and jury all at once, while conveniently misplacing every piece of evidence that might help the defence.

“I am still capable of looking like myself from the outside… I just do not feel very much like myself on the inside.”

The NHS describes depression as something that can involve hopelessness, low self-esteem, guilt, loss of motivation, difficulty making decisions, reduced enjoyment, changes in appetite or weight and thoughts of self-harm or suicide, but there is something very different about reading a list of symptoms and slowly realising that they are no longer abstract words on a website… they are becoming descriptions of your life (NHS, 2026). What the list cannot really explain is how those things begin feeding each other, how feeling exhausted makes you achieve less, achieving less makes you feel useless, feeling useless makes it harder to start anything and suddenly another day has disappeared while you are somehow even more tired than when it began.

When A Break Stops Feeling Like A Break

When my previous role came to an end, I made a conscious decision not to immediately jump into whatever happened to appear next, because I had an opportunity to spend more time with my little boy before he started school and I knew that was time I would never get back. I expected to have that break, enjoy those months with him, reset after putting so much of myself into work and then find the right next role reasonably quickly, because although I knew recruitment was difficult, I genuinely believed my experience would eventually get me through the door somewhere.

I do not regret taking that time with him, not even slightly, because those months gave me memories with him that I will always have and I know there will never be another period where he is that exact age again. What I did not expect was for a break that was meant to last a relatively short time to become something much harder to define, because the weeks became months, applications became silence or rejection and the next chapter that I assumed would eventually appear simply kept refusing to start. I have reached final stages, had conversations that felt incredibly positive and come away from interviews genuinely believing I had shown somebody what I could bring, yet enough of those opportunities have disappeared afterwards that I have gradually stopped allowing myself to imagine what happens if one of them actually works out.

That is probably where work started becoming something much bigger than employment in my head, because I am not only looking for income anymore, I am desperately looking for some of the things that income used to sit alongside. I want a reason to get up with somewhere for my brain to go, I want people who need something from me, I want problems that require thinking about and I want to finish a week knowing I have contributed to something meaningful. I miss having a team, I miss having something I am building and, if I am completely honest, I miss having other people recognise that I am good at something because my own ability to recognise that has taken an absolute battering.

Research into unemployment has long suggested that employment gives us more than money, providing things like structure, activity, social contact, status and a sense of purpose, with more recent research continuing to link the loss of those things with poorer mental health (Paul et al., 2023). I can understand that much better now because the financial side is obviously difficult, particularly when being able to provide for my family matters so much to me, but money alone does not explain why this has affected me as deeply as it has. If somebody offered me any random job tomorrow I could solve part of the financial problem, but I do not think that would automatically solve the question that seems to sit behind almost everything at the moment… what is my purpose, and where do I actually fit if the thing I thought I was good at has suddenly become something I am struggling to find a place to do?

I used to know the answer to that more easily. I was building things, solving things, making decisions, helping people and contributing financially to the life my family was building together, while now I sometimes feel as though I am standing still watching everybody else continue without me. I know intellectually that a person’s worth cannot possibly be measured by a job title or salary, and I would never judge somebody else that way, but depression seems to have created a completely different set of rules when the person being judged is me, because apparently all the compassion I would happily give somebody else becomes much harder to find when I am the one who needs it.

When The Days Stop Having A Shape

I never realised quite how much my working week held the rest of me together until I no longer had it. My calendar used to be full, sometimes ridiculously full, and there was almost always something happening next, whether that was a meeting, deadline, campaign, event, problem or one of the dozens of things I had decided needed improving. There were definitely times where I wanted less happening and would have happily removed half of the meetings from my diary, but even during the busiest periods there was a shape to the week… Monday felt like Monday because something different was expected from it than Thursday.

Now the days can blur into one another so much that sometimes another week seems to have disappeared without me really understanding what happened inside it. I started making lists because I could feel myself needing something that looked vaguely like the structure I used to have, and having tasks to complete does help because at least I can point at something at the end of the day and say I achieved that, but there is only so much structure you can manufacture from housework, applications and jobs you have effectively invented to stop yourself sitting still. Eventually the list starts looking suspiciously similar to the one from yesterday, then another day disappears and I am left wondering whether I actually moved anywhere at all.

“I used to think I needed less happening in my life… now I realise how much I needed something to be happening.”

My autism almost certainly adds something to this because routine, predictability and knowing roughly what comes next have always helped me regulate far more than I understood before I was diagnosed. That does not mean every autistic person needs the same routines or becomes depressed without them, because autism does not work that neatly, but for me the lack of structure has created an enormous amount of empty space and my brain does not seem particularly good at leaving empty space empty. It fills it with questions, scenarios, applications, interviews I replay afterwards, decisions I second-guess and thoughts about what I should be doing differently, until somehow I can reach the evening mentally exhausted despite feeling as though I have barely done anything.

The strange thing is that a good day at the moment is not really defined by anything exciting happening, it is usually just a day where life feels slightly more stable. I have had some structure, achieved something, my little boy has had a good day at school and things at home have felt relatively calm, while perhaps there is dancing that evening or I have spent some time doing something with branding that engages the part of my brain I still recognise. None of that sounds particularly remarkable written down, but lately ordinary has started feeling incredibly valuable because ordinary means nothing has pushed me further down, nobody is upset with me and for a few hours I can stop feeling as though I am failing at everything simultaneously.

I Am Exhausted, But I Cannot Properly Explain Why

The exhaustion is probably one of the hardest things for me to explain because I can understand exactly why it sometimes looks contradictory from the outside. I can have days where putting some washing away feels like a ridiculous amount of effort, then somehow find the concentration to spend an hour thinking about branding, writing something or pulling apart an idea because those things require more brainpower on paper but somehow feel easier to access. I can drag myself to dancing when I have spent the entire day feeling flat, then enjoy myself for a couple of hours and probably look completely normal to anybody there, before coming home and feeling exactly the same again.

I wish I understood that properly myself, because then I could explain it to the people around me instead of simply saying I am exhausted and hoping they understand that I do not mean I need an early night. It feels deeper than being tired, almost as though some tasks take energy from an account that has nothing left in it while other things temporarily put a tiny amount back, because working on something creative reminds me that there is still a part of my brain capable of doing something I recognise, while dancing can sometimes switch everything else off for long enough that I get a brief break from myself. The cruel part is that the break never seems to last very long, so I can have two hours where I almost feel normal then come home and realise the heaviness was only waiting outside.

That is where I keep wondering about the overlap between depression and autistic burnout, because I recognise pieces of both without really knowing where one ends and the other begins. Research into autistic burnout describes prolonged exhaustion, reduced ability to function and a lower tolerance for stimulation when demands continue to exceed the resources available to meet them (Raymaker et al., 2020), and I am cautious about attaching that label to everything because not every bad day is autism and not every shutdown needs a scientific explanation. At the same time, there are moments where the description feels painfully familiar because I can reach a point where I do not want to talk, decide, think or do anything… I just need everything to stop asking something from me.

When that happens I tend to withdraw and go quiet, not because I am trying to punish anybody or because I have decided I no longer care about what is happening around me, but because I genuinely do not know what else to do. I do not have some sophisticated emotional explanation running through my head while I sit there silently, quite often I could not tell you what is happening at all, I just feel awful in a way that is almost physical and I need to shut everything out for a while. That lack of explanation can become another problem in itself because somebody understandably wants to know what is wrong, I cannot give them an answer that makes sense, then I start feeling guilty for not being able to explain something that is already making me feel guilty, until even the effort of explaining why I cannot explain it becomes another thing I do not have enough energy for.

I Am Not Lazy… But Sometimes I Am Scared That Is What People See

I think one of the reasons this period has damaged me so much is that the person I am at the moment feels almost completely incompatible with the person I know I have been. Anybody who worked closely with me would probably struggle to describe me as lazy because if anything I have normally had the opposite problem, finding it difficult to switch off, taking on too much and constantly spotting another thing I wanted to improve. Work would finish and part of my brain would still be running through ideas, then I would volunteer for something else, help with football or create another project because doing absolutely nothing has never really come naturally to me.

That makes the days where I cannot seem to start anything incredibly frightening, because I am not enjoying having less responsibility or feeling relieved that somebody else has to pick things up, I am sitting there knowing there are things I should be able to do and wondering what has happened to the person who would once have simply got on with them. I can see something that needs doing, know it is not particularly difficult and still feel as though my brain has placed some enormous barrier in front of the first step, then if somebody points out that it has not been done I do not hear a reasonable observation about a household task… depression translates it into further proof that I am failing.

That is the cycle I find difficult to communicate, because from the outside I can understand why somebody might think I just need to get up and do it, whereas internally I am already tearing myself apart for not having done it without being asked. I know I am home more than I used to be, I know there are things I should remember and I know there are days where another person has carried more because I have not managed what I expected from myself, but none of that makes me think I should try harder next time… it usually just makes me feel worse about who I have become, because the person who used to pride himself on being reliable suddenly cannot even trust his own brain to remember the small things.

There is probably nothing anybody can say in those moments that immediately fixes it either, because I am not looking for somebody to tell me everything is fine when I can see things are not fine. What makes it harder is feeling misunderstood, feeling as though another criticism has landed when I am already lying on the floor emotionally and then having absolutely no idea how to explain that I am not trying to avoid life… I am trying to find enough of myself to participate in it.

The People I Love Get The Part That Hurts Most

This is where depression stops being something happening to me and starts hurting in a way I find much harder to live with, because I could probably cope with feeling useless professionally far more easily if I did not also feel as though the people I love are experiencing the consequences of it.

My little boy is five and he is currently going through the ADHD assessment process, which has made me think much more about how two neurodivergent brains can love each other enormously while sometimes needing completely opposite things from the same moment. He has an incredible amount of energy, he can be loud, impulsive, repetitive, funny and determined, and when I am doing well I can understand most of that for what it is, but when I already feel as though I am permanently somewhere between depression, exhaustion and autistic burnout, the things his brain needs can clash horribly with what mine is begging for.

Sometimes I need quiet and he gets louder, I need some space and he wants my attention immediately, or I desperately need something to happen in the way I expected while he is five years old and therefore has absolutely no obligation to care about whatever internal plan Daddy had created. I can become shorter with him, he can start pushing back because he is frustrated with me and suddenly we are both dysregulated, except afterwards he is able to move onto the next thing in a way I often cannot because I am left sitting with this overwhelming guilt that I have let him down again.

That guilt is probably one of the feelings I can actually identify without needing half an hour to analyse it, because it arrives immediately and it hurts in a place I do not really know how to describe. I worry about whether he thinks Daddy does not want to play with him when sometimes I simply cannot find the energy to engage, I worry about whether he notices Daddy disappearing into himself and I worry about whether one day he will remember this period of his childhood as a time where I was always tired, impatient or somewhere else mentally when all I want him to remember is that his Daddy loved him beyond words and was trying harder than he probably ever realised.

I do not want him to have to understand depression at five years old and I do not want him carrying responsibility for making Daddy feel better, because none of that belongs to him. I just want to have enough left to enjoy him properly, to listen when he tells me the same thing for the sixth time, to play when he asks me to and to be the person he wants around rather than somebody whose buttons he knows he can push. When I get that wrong it does not make me angry with him afterwards… it makes me hate what this period is taking away from both of us, because he only gets to be five once and I only get to be Daddy to a five-year-old once too.

My wife gets a different side of the same exhaustion because she is pregnant, dealing with everything that comes with that and understandably does not want to feel as though she has another person in the house she needs to manage as well. There are things she still has to remind me about, things I forget and moments where I know she looks at me being at home and cannot understand why I have not done more, and the hardest part is that I can understand her frustration while also feeling completely incapable of explaining why I am struggling as much as I am.

“The people I love probably see me doing less… what they cannot see is how much energy I am using hating myself for it.”

Sometimes I think the gap between what depression feels like and what it looks like from the outside is where the most damage happens. She sees something that has not been done, while I see another sign that I am failing her. She sees me withdraw and go quiet, while inside my head there may not actually be anything coherent happening at all, only the feeling that I cannot process another conversation without completely disappearing into myself. Then because I cannot explain it, silence fills the space and silence can be interpreted in dozens of ways that are probably more deliberate than whatever is actually happening, while I am sitting there wishing I could just hand her a map of my head because words are clearly not doing the job.

I wish I could explain those moments better, not because explanation would remove my responsibility or suddenly make everything easy for the people living alongside me, but because I hate the idea that the people I love could mistake a lack of capacity for a lack of care. I hate the idea that my little boy could ever think Daddy was not interested, or that my wife could interpret silence as indifference when the truth is often the complete opposite… I care so much that every time I feel I have let either of them down it seems to become another thing I carry into the next day.

I Struggle To Explain It Even To The Person Trained To Help Me

Perhaps the clearest sign of how difficult this has become to put into words is that I struggle to explain it properly in therapy, where explaining how I feel is fairly fundamental to the entire arrangement. I can talk for an hour, give detailed context, explain what happened and analyse why I think something affected me, but when my therapist asks how I actually feel underneath all of it I can reach exactly the same answer I seem to reach everywhere else… I genuinely do not know.

We started therapy around the time my medication was increased earlier this year and since then life has been so unsettled that I have no idea what baseline we are measuring anything against. I cannot tell whether the medication has made me feel better because clearly I am not currently feeling particularly well, but at the same time I have this very strong sense that without that increase, with everything else that has happened, I might have been pushed much further over the edge than I have been. It does not feel as though the medication has fixed me, it feels more as though it might be one of the things helping me cling on while everything else is moving around underneath me.

There may also be an autistic element in why naming the emotion itself can be so difficult, because research around alexithymia has found that difficulty identifying and describing emotions is more common among autistic people, although it is not universal and is not the same thing as autism itself (Kinnaird et al., 2019). I am not trying to diagnose myself with another label because I recognised myself in a description, but I do recognise the experience of knowing something feels terrible before knowing exactly what kind of terrible it is… whether I am depressed, anxious, overwhelmed, ashamed, burnt out or simply so exhausted that every emotion has started blending into the next.

That is why writing sometimes gives me something talking does not, because I do not have to produce an answer immediately. I can write half a paragraph, realise it is wrong, change it and suddenly find a sentence that gets closer to whatever I have been trying to explain for weeks, which is probably part of the reason this article has become so important to me. I am not writing it because I think I have finally understood depression, I am writing it because perhaps if I can get enough of what is happening out of my head and onto a page, somebody close to me might understand a little more than I have been able to explain aloud, and perhaps I might understand a little more too.

Hope Has Started Feeling Dangerous

One of the things that has changed most over the last few months is my ability to feel hopeful without immediately trying to shut it down. Earlier in the job search I would find something I really wanted, research the company, imagine what I could bring and start thinking about what life might look like if it worked out, because that is how my brain naturally approaches opportunities… it wants to build the picture, understand the possibilities and start solving problems before anybody has even offered me the chance.

Then there was one opportunity I genuinely thought I might get and I allowed myself to believe it enough that when the answer eventually came back the other way it absolutely crushed me. At the time I probably did what I usually do, tried to process it logically, understood the reasons where I could and carried on applying, but somewhere inside that experience I seem to have learned that hope creates something for disappointment to destroy, and once you have been hurt badly enough by something you start becoming very good at avoiding the thing that made the hurt possible in the first place.

Now I can come out of an interview feeling it went well and almost immediately start telling myself not to read anything into it, because I would rather stay emotionally flat than spend several days building another future in my head that somebody else might remove. Positive feedback still registers intellectually, but it does not seem to travel very far emotionally, while a rejection can become another confirmation of everything I already fear about myself.

It is a completely unfair scoring system. The negative evidence goes straight on the board, the positive evidence gets challenged, qualified and asked to provide supporting documentation before my brain will accept it, which is probably the most depressing marketing joke I have ever accidentally created about myself.

People can tell me I am good at what I do, but my brain asks why I am still looking. People can tell me my family needs me, but my brain reminds me about the things I have not done. People can tell me things will get better, but after enough months where they have not got better in the way I hoped, part of me simply asks for proof, because reassurance currently seems to disappear much faster than rejection does.

“People can tell me it will get better… but at the moment my brain keeps asking them to prove it.”

That is not because those words mean nothing to me, because they do, and sometimes somebody believing in me is enough to get me through another day. The problem is that reassurance currently seems to have a very short half-life, whereas I desperately need some wins that feel real enough to survive contact with my own brain.

At the moment the clearest version of that would be getting back into the right kind of work, because it would give me some routine again, somewhere to direct my brain and the feeling of being part of something rather than permanently waiting outside it. I know a job would not magically cure depression, repair my confidence overnight or undo everything that has happened over the last few months, but I think having purpose again would give me something solid to start rebuilding around, and right now even the idea of having something solid feels incredibly important.

The Part That Is Hardest To Admit

There is a part of this article I would much rather leave out, partly because it is painful to write and partly because I know people I care about will read it, and the last thing I want is for everyone around me to suddenly become frightened every time I have a bad day. At the same time, I cannot write an article about depression while carefully removing the part that explains how low it has actually taken me, because that would simply be another version of putting on the happy face and telling everyone I am managing when the truth is that there have been moments where I have felt lower than I ever remember feeling before.

There have been times recently where I have thought my wife and children might be better off without me, where my brain has taken everything I currently feel I am failing at and reached the conclusion that somebody else could probably provide more, cope better or simply be easier to live with. I have wondered whether my wife could eventually find somebody who gave her the security and stability I currently feel I am not providing, whether my little boy would be happier with somebody who had more patience and energy than Daddy seems to have right now, and whether the baby we are expecting would grow up without ever knowing enough about me for my absence to properly hurt. I have questioned who would really miss me, how quickly life would eventually continue and whether perhaps everyone around me would struggle for a while before ultimately discovering that things were somehow easier without me in them.

Even writing that now hurts because I can see how cruel those thoughts are, not just to me but to the people I love, and I know that depression is taking love and twisting it into something almost unrecognisable. It is making me look at the fact that I desperately want the best for my family and turning that into an argument that perhaps the best thing for them would be less of me, when another part of me knows that is not how love, family or being a Daddy actually works. The darkest thoughts do not arrive because I want to stop loving them, they arrive because I love them so much that when I feel useless, broken or incapable of giving them what they deserve, my brain starts trying to convince me that removing the problem would somehow be an act of kindness.

Then I think about my little boy growing up and I know I want to be there, not just for the huge moments but for all the ridiculous ordinary ones too. I want to see what he becomes obsessed with next, I want to watch him grow into whatever strange mixture of confidence, chaos, humour and determination he is currently becoming, and I want him to be able to look back and know that even during the period where Daddy was struggling more than he understood, he never stopped loving him for a second. I think about the baby we are expecting in March and how desperately I want to meet them, hold them, learn who they are and watch them become their own little person, because right now I know almost nothing about them and yet somehow already know I would miss an entire lifetime if I was not there to see it.

I think about my wife, the life we have already built and all the ordinary days I still want us to have, even the difficult ones where we are both exhausted, somebody has forgotten something and the house looks nothing like the version adults apparently pretend their houses always look like. I think about friends, family and people who probably have absolutely no idea how bad some days have become because I have spent years becoming very good at saying I am fine, changing the subject and carrying on, then somewhere underneath all of that there is also the stubborn part of me that refuses to let my own brain have the final word.

My wife knows how low I have been, I am in therapy and I am not keeping those thoughts entirely to myself, because one thing I am slowly learning is that trying not to worry anybody can become dangerous when it means you hide the very thing people need to know. I still hate feeling like a burden, I still instinctively want to protect everybody else from what is happening inside my head and I still find it almost impossible to say some of these things aloud, but perhaps part of surviving this is accepting that the people who love me would rather carry a little of the weight with me than discover I had been carrying all of it alone.

What keeps me going is not some dramatic revelation where everything suddenly makes sense, and I wish I could say there was one sentence I repeat that immediately makes the darkness disappear. Sometimes it is simply my little boy, sometimes it is the baby I have not met yet, sometimes it is my wife and sometimes it is nothing more sophisticated than stubbornness, this tiny part of me that still wants to prove my own brain wrong even when almost everything else inside it seems determined to argue the opposite.

I do not think I want some perfect inspirational ending to those thoughts because that would make them easier to read than they are to live through. I just know that I still want to see what happens next, I still want more time with the people I love and somewhere inside all of this there is still enough of me left to believe that perhaps the version of the future depression keeps showing me is not the only one available.

I Do Not Know If I Get The Old Me Back

That might be the question underneath everything at the moment… whether this is something I recover from and eventually recognise myself again, or whether the last six months have changed me in ways I do not yet understand.

My confidence in myself has almost disappeared, the motivation and energy I used to rely on feel inaccessible and even things that genuinely make me happy seem to lift me for a much shorter amount of time than they once did. I am trying to build this identity around being a brand marketer because I know how passionately I think about brands, customer behaviour, psychology and all the tiny details that make something connect, but on the darkest days another part of my head asks what difference any of that makes if nobody else sees enough value in it to give me the opportunity to do it.

Physically I can see the toll too, because I have lost weight, my hair has started falling out, headaches are happening more often, I seem to be going greyer and I feel exhausted so consistently that being exhausted has almost become my normal setting. I know not every physical symptom should simply be blamed on depression or stress and those things deserve proper medical attention too, but they are part of what this period has looked like for me… it no longer feels as though what is happening is contained neatly inside my thoughts.

I worry about whether I will get back to where I was professionally and whether I will eventually believe in what I bring to marketing again. I worry about my marriage and whether my wife will ever completely trust that the person she used to rely on is still in here somewhere, particularly after months where she has understandably seen more of the things I cannot manage than the effort happening inside my head. I worry about my son, whether he has noticed too much and whether there are moments from this period that will stick with him when all I want him to remember is that his Daddy loved him beyond words and was trying incredibly hard even when that did not always look the way I wanted it to.

Most of all I keep wondering whether things will ever feel normal again, then immediately realising I am no longer completely sure what I mean by normal. Perhaps normal means having routine again, feeling useful, laughing without the good feeling disappearing five minutes later and being able to finish a day without mentally auditing everything I think I got wrong. Perhaps it means being able to believe somebody when they tell me I am good at something instead of immediately finding evidence against them, or perhaps it is simply waking up one morning and realising I do not feel quite as heavy as I did the day before.

I would love to finish this by saying that I know that morning is coming, because that would make this much easier to read and probably much easier for the people who love me to hear, but right now that would not be honest. I do not know when this gets better, I do not know exactly what will make it better and I do not know whether the person who eventually comes out of this will look exactly like the person who went into it.

What I do know is that I am still trying, even if trying sometimes looks very different from how it used to. I am still applying and interviewing even though I am frightened of getting my hopes up, still going to therapy despite struggling to explain what I need from it and still trying to find little pieces of myself in branding, dancing and anything else that makes my brain feel familiar for a while. I am still trying to be a husband when I know my wife sometimes gets the exhausted version of me, still trying to be the Daddy my little boy deserves when I know I do not always have enough left and still trying to convince myself that being unable to give everything at the moment does not mean I have nothing worth giving.

Maybe eventually I will look back at this and understand what was happening far better than I do now, maybe I will read it and barely recognise the person who wrote it, or maybe some of this will stay with me and I will simply learn how to carry it differently. I cannot promise myself any of those outcomes yet, because at the moment my brain does not respond particularly well to promises without evidence… but there is still a stubborn part of me that wants to stick around long enough to prove it wrong, and for where I am right now, perhaps that is the most honest ending I have.

Sources

NHS (2026), “Symptoms: Depression in adults”. NHS. Information on the psychological and physical symptoms associated with depression, including hopelessness, guilt, loss of motivation, low self-esteem, reduced enjoyment, changes in appetite or weight and suicidal thoughts.
https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/conditions/depression-in-adults/symptoms/⁠

Paul, K. I., Scholl, H., Moser, K., Zechmann, A. and Batinic, B. (2023), “Employment status, psychological needs, and mental health: Meta-analytic findings concerning the latent deprivation model”. Frontiers in Psychology. Research examining the psychological functions provided by employment, including time structure, social contact, activity, status and collective purpose.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36935981/⁠

Raymaker, D. M. et al. (2020), “‘Having All of Your Internal Resources Exhausted Beyond Measure and Being Left with No Clean-Up Crew’: Defining Autistic Burnout”. Autism in Adulthood, 2(2), 132–143. Research exploring autistic people’s experiences of burnout, including chronic exhaustion, loss of function and reduced tolerance to stimulation.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32851204/⁠

Kinnaird, E., Stewart, C. and Tchanturia, K. (2019), “Investigating alexithymia in autism: A systematic review and meta-analysis”. European Psychiatry, 55, 80–89. A systematic review examining difficulties identifying and describing emotions among autistic and non-autistic populations.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6331035/⁠

Cook, J., Hull, L., Crane, L. and Mandy, W. (2021), “Camouflaging in autism: A systematic review”. Clinical Psychology Review, 89. A review examining autistic camouflaging and its relationship with wellbeing and mental health.
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If This Feels Familiar

This article includes discussion of suicidal thoughts because removing that part would not accurately describe the experience I am writing about. If any of this feels familiar to you, particularly if you feel you may act on thoughts of harming yourself, please do not try to carry it alone. In England you can contact NHS 111 and select the mental health option for urgent support, Samaritans are available free on 116 123 and if there is an immediate danger to life call 999 or go to A&E.