It's a Wednesday afternoon, and I am sitting in the tiny, brightly-lit office of my school psychiatrist, trying to get back on track after yet another burst of sadness. For the first time in a couple years, it’s a big one. I’ve usually got reasons for my sadness, for the most part. But even when bad things happened, the sadness always seems much bigger than the reasons behind it. It’s been that way my whole life and I could never figure out why.

I’ve always known I was an anxious person. I’ve been diagnosed with a handful of different types of anxiety. I’ve been that way for as long as I can remember. But something about that never quite fit with what I was feeling and when I got to feeling sad. It felt related, maybe, but not like an explanation. It’s like saying your feet hurt if you’ve hiked twelve miles in heels. Sure, part of the pain comes from the stilettos, but even if you’d done it in sneakers, you’re still walking twelve miles. Your feet are gonna hurt. I’d just never thought to blame anything but the shoes.

So now I’m sitting in an office trying to put a name to this sore-foot feeling in my heart, and I’m answering a lot of questions I never really got asked when we were talking about my anxiety.

“Do you experience crying spells?”

My entire life, sometimes for no reason I felt this way. Growing up there were a lot of nights I’d just cry myself to sleep and never really be able to pin down why, I just felt the need to do so, to clear something from me. Take off the shoes. Stop in my tracks, if only for a second. Feel grass underfoot.

“And what about family history? Any mental health conditions we should be aware of?”

There is a lot of anxiety, yeah. I was biologically predisposed to lying awake at night and worrying about something stupid a bully said to me when I was fourteen, or panicking over how I don’t already have a 90k a year job and a life partner at 23 (what do you mean, no one else does either?), or the fact that when someone said hello to me earlier in the week I didn’t really hear it until I’d already walked by them and they probably thought I was so rude. Sometimes it was just a general feeling of unease, like when you’re walking outside at night and know full well you’re alone, but are you really? That urge to run back inside and turn the lights on or glance over your shoulder every now and again.

The anxiety at least I could channel, though. When I was feeling panicky, I’d just hop out of bed and turn that pent-up energy into productivity. But every now and again for no reason at all, I’d find myself feeling… heavy. Like my body is sleeping. Unmotivated, no energy, even with my brain racing. Unable to pull myself out of bed – and if something bad had happened recently, this feeling increased to the point that I couldn’t make it to class, that I slept all day and still felt too exhausted to stand up in the shower without leaning on the wall. I hated everything, especially myself, especially for feeling so weak.

“Do you find yourself incapacitated by these feelings? When something goes wrong in your life, do you feel like it hits you harder than it maybe would someone else you know?”

Yes, yes I do. A bad break-up, a loved one’s illness, a friend’s sadness, even tragic events in the news sometimes made me feel utterly hopeless, where the average person around me seemed able to continue functioning. I would get physically ill. I’d always just assumed I was overly-empathetic, fragile. Weak, the sad part of my brain would tell me, but the more questions I answered the quieter this part of me became. It was starting to make sense. There was a pattern.

The questions continue. He asks about my sleep, my energy, my social life, my motivation. He asks about suicidal thoughts; I am honest. The more I divulge, the more I feel more at ease. And then, finally, a diagnosis.

“Based on these results here, and on your family history, I would guess that you have been living with depression for a long time. Probably your whole life.” The doctor’s tone is calm, matter-of-fact, non-judgmental. “And I would say that in your case it is genetic.”

He goes on to explain serotonin, chemical imbalances; information I already knew but never knew applied to me, and then he says the words I’ve needed to hear my whole life:

“None of this, the way you are feeling, is in any way your fault.”

Hearing this brings me to my first happy tears in a very long time. I wasn’t just overreacting to everything. I wasn’t fragile, or weak. I’d always worried it was something wrong with me personally rather than chemically, that I wasn’t strong enough. But here was this perfectly sound, medical explanation for what I was feeling, and a solution.

Today, I walk to the pharmacy and drop off a prescription for antidepressants. If my body cannot make the chemicals it needs to get out of bed, to write books, to laugh, to feel joy, I can forgive it for that. I can work on that. My lungs need my inhaler, my eyes need their contact lenses. My brain needs fluoxetine. And there’s nothing wrong with that. In the words of poet Sabrina Benaim, “I can forgive my body for being a machine, after all.”

I will always have to live with my depression. I don’t think medication, meditation, therapy, or a support system will erase that. It would be silly to think so. I still have asthma when I’m using my inhaler. I’m still walking miles everyday. But now I have something to carry me when my feet get tired. And for that, I am grateful. For that, I am joyful.