When my doctor first told me last summer that I had anxiety, I didn't believe him. I didn't feel anxious and I sure as hell didn't have anything to be anxious about. I kept brushing off the symptoms (heart palpitations, a persistent choking sensation in my throat, sleepless nights) looking for some magic pill that would make it all go away. It wasn't until I landed in the ER one night with a full blown panic attack that I decided to take the doctor's diagnosis seriously.

"Get rid of stress," she said. I learned how to relax and breathe through stressful situations.

"Make sure to get enough exercise," she said. I ran a marathon and took up yoga.

"Eat well and drink plenty of water," she said. I swore off fast food and kept my diet as clean as possible. Not quite organic, think natural.

"Find something you enjoy to make you happy," she said. I quit my job and decided to go to graduate school.

I followed the doctor's orders under the assumption that what was going on inside my brain was directly related to the things going on around me, in other words, situational. If I could only change everything around me, I would start to get better.

But what I didn't expect was to do all these things and feel worse as a result. It never occurred to me that I might have something deeper going on. I started missing work and used up all my vacation and sick time for the year before the end of April. I stayed in bed all day with the TV on as white noise, I didn't even hear it. I completely lost interest in anything and everything I used to find enjoyable. I cried constantly and for no reason and isolated myself from friends and family. Somewhere in the midst of all this, the Boy Toy hit the road, I'm not sure exactly when.

After about 6 weeks of being unable to function normally, my mom sent me to see a therapist. Through several sessions with him, I've begun to realize that I'm fighting a much bigger beast than I ever expected. He agreed with my doctor's original diagnosis, but that anxiety is only part of the problem. He told me I've probably had a mild form of depression for many many years but because it's gone untreated for so long, I've grown to assume depression as part of my personality, not recognizing it as a legitimate disease and the toll it's taken on my life.

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These last few weeks or months is something he called a "major depressive episode", like layers of an onion, the anxiety revealing itself last year as yet another symptom of a much larger issue. It's not situational, it's medical. If I had cancer or diabetes, you wouldn't tell me to "cheer up and get over it" or to stop having cancer or being diabetic. Like any other disease, the symptoms are real. The pain is deep. The healing is long. But there is healing.

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I have an appointment with a psychiatrist next week to (hopefully) get a better idea of what kind of depression I have so he can start to treat it with the right combination of cognitive talk therapy and medications. If you (or anyone you know) think you may have depression, please seek medical help. I'm learning that there is hope after all.