Andrew Solomon never imagined himself as someone who would crumble.
If anything, he’d thought of himself as resilient, the kind of person who could endure the unimaginable.
He tells it plainly: “I thought I was tough. The type who could survive if I’d been sent to a concentration camp.”
For years, his life seemed to confirm that belief.
In 1991, he suffered a series of devastating losses.
His mother died.
A long-term relationship ended.
He moved back to the United States after years abroad.
These were seismic shifts, the kind of events that could break a person.
But he got through them.
He carried on, intact—or so he thought.
Three years later, in 1994, something shifted.
It wasn’t one big event this time.
It wasn’t the world falling apart around him.
It was quieter, more insidious.
He found himself slipping into a state he couldn’t name, a slow drain of energy and meaning.
“The opposite of depression isn’t happiness,” he says. “It’s vitality.”
And that vitality was leaking out of him.
The Weight of the Everyday
At first, it was the little things.
Andrew would come home and see the red light blinking on his answering machine.
Instead of being glad that someone had called, he thought, What a lot of people to call back.
Eating lunch became a monumental task—not because he lacked food, but because the idea of preparing it, cutting it, chewing it, and swallowing seemed like too much effort.
Even joy, even connection, had become labor.
He was fully aware of how absurd it all was.
That, he says, is the cruel irony of depression.
“You know it’s ridiculous while you’re experiencing it. You know other people manage to listen to their messages, eat lunch, and take a shower, and yet you can’t figure out how to do it yourself.”
Soon, it wasn’t just lethargy—it was anxiety.
The kind of anxiety that didn’t come with a specific fear or object, just a relentless, body-shaking dread.
He described it as the feeling you have when you trip and the ground rushes up to meet you, except it didn’t pass in half a second.
It stayed with him, unbroken, for months.
He began to believe that being alive might be too painful to endure.
The only reason he didn’t end it was the thought of the pain it would cause those he loved.
Then came the day when he couldn’t move.
He lay in bed for hours, staring at the telephone, knowing something was wrong but unable to pick it up and call for help.
When it finally rang, after what felt like an eternity, it was his father on the other end.
Somehow, Andrew managed to answer. “I’m in serious trouble,” he said. “We need to do something.”
The Long Road Back
That call was the beginning.
The next day, he started treatment—medication and therapy.
It wasn’t a cure, though. Depression didn’t let go of him easily.
He would feel better, only to relapse again and again.
He wondered if this was who he was now—someone broken, someone who needed pills to function.
“If I have to take medication,” he asked himself, “does that make me more fully myself, or someone else?”
He wrestled with these questions, even as he continued to fight for recovery.
Slowly, he began to understand that depression wasn’t just a chemical imbalance or a psychological condition.
It was part of him, braided so deeply into his identity that it couldn’t be neatly separated from the rest of who he was.
Finding Resilience in Stories
As Andrew worked to understand his own depression, he started looking outward.
He traveled, interviewed others, and tried to make sense of how people survived.
In Rwanda, after the genocide, he learned something that stayed with him.
Western mental health workers had arrived to help survivors.
Their method was to sit people in small, dimly lit rooms and have them talk about their trauma.
But the Rwandans rejected this approach.
“They didn’t take people out into the sunshine,” Andrew recalls.
“They didn’t include drumming or music to get people’s blood going. They didn’t involve the whole community.”
Instead, they relied on rituals—music, movement, shared experiences—to externalize depression as an invasive spirit that could be driven out together.
It was a stark reminder that resilience often comes from connection, not isolation.
Living with Depression
Andrew came to see depression not as something to be cured, but as something to be lived with.
He realized that trying to shut it out only made it stronger.
The people who did best, he observed, weren’t the ones who denied their depression.
They were the ones who accepted it, learned to sit with it, and found meaning in its shadow.
“I hated being depressed,” he admits.
“I would hate to be depressed again.”
But he also sees how it shaped him, how it forced him to hold onto joy in ways he might not have otherwise.
Depression didn’t destroy him. It taught him.
The Choice to Cling to Life
These days, Andrew’s life isn’t always happy.
But it’s vital.
He feels deeply—joy, sadness, everything in between.
And even on the hard days, he chooses to hold on.
“I love my depression,” he says, not because it was easy or kind, but because it pushed him to find reasons to live.
“Every day, I decide, sometimes gamely, sometimes against the moment’s reason, to cleave to the reasons for living.”
His story is not about triumph or overcoming.
It’s about endurance.
About finding beauty in the broken places. About choosing, again and again, to live.
This post was inspired by Andrew Solomon's Ted Talk, Depression, the secret we share.
