Depression has made ordinary life feel heavier than I can justify to people who haven’t felt it from the inside

Dear Delyara, On the outside, I still move. Still answer. Still cook, clean, reply, turn up, remember, smile when required. From the outside, I can look like a tired adult having a rough spell. What people cannot see is the weight attached to every ordinary task. The cost. The drag. The strange distance between me and the person performing my own day. It is not only sadness. That would almost be easier to explain. It is effort. It is flatness. It is the humiliation of finding simple things emotionally expensive and then still having to do them because life does not pause out of respect for depleted minds. I am tired of how much depression still gets measured only by how collapsed a person looks. Some of us are performing functionality in the middle of it. That does not make it less real.