You Can Imagine a Thousand Futures. You Just Don't Want Any of Them.

Living Like a F***ing Mortal is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. You can't chase a dream if your brain deleted the 'want' button. This may sound strange coming from someone who's supposed to help you feel better: You might not be depressed. Not in the way you think you are. What's there instead is quieter and, in some ways, more disturbing.You don't want anything.You haven't wanted anything in a while. And you can't quite figure out when that happened, or how to explain it to anyone without sounding insane, because you're still functioning. You're still showing up, you just aren'tthere. This is the essay I wish someone had written for me before I understood it clinically. Not about depression as sadness, but depression, or something adjacent to it, as absence. As the quiet deletion of wanting itself. A client of mine, a woman in her early thirties who ran a small team at a fast-growing company, put it to me this way. She said, 'I keep waiting to feel like I'm supposed to feel. I got the promotion I wanted last year. I have a partner I love. I have a life that would have made ten-years-ago me so happy. And I feel nothing. Not sad. Just... nothing.' She wasn't in crisis. She was in absence. Those are different rooms, and we tend to only build exits for the first one. A quick note before we go further:what I'm describing here overlaps with several things, including depression, burnout, chronic stress, and even certain medications' side effects. This essay is an existential and cultural read on a pattern I see constantly in high-capacity people, not a diagnostic checklist. If what follows resonates and it's been going on for a while, please also bring it to a doctor or therapist who can rule out the physiological pieces. This piece is meant to help you feel understood, not to replace that conversation.