You get up every morning. No one knows.

You are productive. You meet deadlines. You show up. And underneath the productivity there is a flatness that will not lift, a grayness that has been there so long you are not sure it is even a problem anymore. Maybe this is just what life feels like. High-functioning depression is not a milder form of depression. It is a form in which the functioning itself has become the mechanism of suppression. The productivity is not happening despite the depression. It is the depression. The structure, the routine, the performance of being fine: these are the tools the psyche uses to keep something suppressed, something that would require you to stop performing and actually feel what is going on.

I do not treat this with behavioral activation or coping strategies. I work with the suppression itself, the specific way you have learned to keep your own feelings, desires, and dissatisfactions underground by staying busy.

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