Marcus was forty-one and good at his job and liked by most people who knew him. He exercised four times a week. He cooked proper meals most evenings. He had a flat that was clean and a group of friends he saw regularly and a career that was, by any reasonable measure, going well. If you had described his life from the outside, it would have sounded like a life that was working.

From the inside, it had not been working for some time.

He is not certain exactly when it started. Somewhere around 2020, he thinks, though he spent most of that year deciding it was just the circumstances rather than anything about him in particular. Everyone was struggling, he told himself. The world was strange. When the world went back to normal he would go back to normal with it. He waited. The world mostly did go back to normal. He kept waiting.

By 2022 he had stopped waiting and started managing. He had a system. Monday to Friday was structured, which helped — there were meetings and deliverables and colleagues to talk to, and the structure gave him something to hold onto. Weekends were harder. He had developed a habit of agreeing to plans and then finding reasons to cancel in the day or two before. His friends accepted this with the patience of people who assumed he was just introverted and busy, which he let them believe because it was easier than the alternative, and because he was not sure what the alternative was yet.

He had a vocabulary for it by then that he had not had in the beginning. Depression was the word he had arrived at slowly, the way you arrive at something you have been avoiding — by running out of other explanations. He had tried tired, stressed, overwhelmed, not sleeping well, just a bit flat. None of them were wrong exactly, but none of them were the whole of it either. He did not tell anyone. He did not tell his GP. He kept getting through the weeks.

In April 2023, eighteen months later than he should have, he made a doctor’s appointment. He had put off booking it for four months. His GP was unhurried and practical and listened without interrupting, which Marcus had not expected and which made the whole thing easier. She referred him to a service with a waiting list. He said thank you and meant it and went home and ate dinner and watched television and felt, for the first time in a long time, that he had done something that was not just managing.

In June he told his sister. He picked a Sunday afternoon, she came round, he made tea, and he said it while the kettle was still cooling because he had learned that waiting for the right moment meant the moment never came. She was quiet for a few seconds and then said she had wondered, and was glad he had said it. She asked what she could do. He said he did not know yet. She said that was fine. That was the right answer.

He started therapy in September, privately, because the waiting list had not moved. It is not cheap. He has made adjustments elsewhere to cover it, and he does not regret them. He has been going for eight months. It is slow and sometimes frustrating and the most useful thing he has ever done.

He still tells most people he is fine. Not because he is hiding now, but because it is closer to true than it used to be, and because he is learning the difference between privacy and concealment, and which one actually serves him.

Complete story in caption below and on our website

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