The Depression Slide

On depression, stacking, and the particular war of living inside a neurodivergent, hyper-vigilant systems mind

Author’s Note

This piece contains detailed descriptions of suicidal ideation, depression, and a past attempt. If you are currently in a dark place, please consider coming back to this when you’re steadier. If you’re somewhere in the middle, barely holding it together, read slowly, and give yourself permission to stop.

Please seek out support resources wherever you are.

You are not alone!

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Depression is not a cliff dive. The cultural shorthand we’ve built around it does everyone quietly carrying it a disservice. We talk about it in crisis language “the edge”, “the bottom”, or “the fall”, as if it arrives all at once in a single catastrophic moment that announces itself clearly enough to act on, as if the person inside it should be able to point to the exact second it began. Mine doesn’t work that way. Mine is a slide. A long, deceptively gradual slide beginning so far back, by the time I realize I’m moving, I’ve already lost significant ground. It doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t send a calendar invite. It builds, one boulder at a time, quietly and methodically, until the cumulative weight becomes something my body simply cannot hold upright anymore.

This piece is what it looks like from inside my mind and body, all of it, including the parts that don’t have a cleaner way to be said.

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The Stack

Last year, I was deep in the work of shedding my tech identity, something I’d spent the better part of two decades building and living inside. “Career transition” doesn’t begin to cover it. We’re talking about a categorical firmament shift of personhood, the kind where you dismantle the load-bearing architecture of who you’ve told the world you are while simultaneously trying to construct something new on ground that hasn’t finished settling. I spent considerable time trying on identities, therapist, sex therapist, counselor, social worker, teacher, clinical psychologist, conference speaker, executive coach, life coach, fitness trainer, personal trainer, photographer, masseuse, massage therapist, executive consultant. The list might make you laugh, and that’s fair. But look closely and you’ll see the thread underneath all of it:

I want to help people better themselves.

That thread was the crucial discovery, because it told me what I was building toward even before the label arrived. So, like a neurodivergent systems mind when no existing container fits, I started building my own, an entire ecosystem of businesses shaped around who I actually am and what I’m actually good at. Here’s what nobody tells you about that kind of transition: your body is still living inside the old identity for survival while you construct the new one.

I don’t have the luxury of taking years off to build in peace. My body runs a constant coherence check between inner reality and outer expression. This kind of sustained incongruence in a system like mine isn’t just uncomfortable, it’s physiologically expensive, bleeding energy from every available channel. This was the first boulder.

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Boulders two, three, and four arrived together.

Over several years, I’d built something genuinely meaningful at a local gym, not just a workout routine but a community, close friendships, and daily time slots carved out specifically to be near people I cared about and was considering going into business with. It was real load-bearing architecture in the new self I was constructing, giving color and shape to the person I was becoming outside of tech.

Early this year, I drew some boundaries in that friend group after an incident. Rather than sitting with me to work through it or even having a direct conversation, they decided excommunication was the cleaner option. The notification came via an AI-generated membership cancellation email. Thousands and thousands of hours of investment, years of showing up, people I genuinely loved, gone via a message a robot wrote. The friendships were a deep loss. The community was a compound fracture. The gym space itself became a daily reminder that both were gone, every single morning I had to decide where else to go. Three distinct losses delivered in a single blow.

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Boulder five was the relationship.

Since late last year, I’d been with someone, and it was going well for being early. Then I started noticing incongruences, not the normal humankind, where two people’s quirks rub against each other in learnable, navigable ways, but relational incongruence: communication dropping off, physical connection thinning, the body pulling back before the mind has caught up with why. I addressed it as carefully as I could, knowing we were still finding our footing. But naming the incongruences caused my partner to look more honestly at her own motivations, and what she found there led her to end things.

The loss wasn’t only the relationship itself. It was what the relationship represented: the possibility of being fully received by someone capable of holding all of me. Watching that door close, stacked on top of everything else already sitting on my chest, landed with its own specific and particular weight.

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Boulders six, seven, and eight belong to my tumor.

Since learning about my benign pituitary tumor and neighboring aneurysm in the summer of last year, there has been a large, low voice floating in the background of everything I do. The aneurysms have since been handled. The tumor is another matter, managed with medication and hormone replacements, present but not immediately threatening, or so it was.

Recently, I learned it has grown, and more advanced intervention is now required. What was a nominal I’d learned to carry alongside everything else has become something with forward momentum and a timeline attached to it. The looming reality of surgery or more aggressive medications, the mental complications that might follow, and the uncertainty of what the other side looks like, all sits on top of everything else like a ceiling getting closer. The tumor itself already affects the floor: sleep disrupted, vision impacted, and mood dysregulated in ways that feed every other system in this stack and make them all simultaneously worse. Six, seven, and eight are weights I despise carrying but can’t control nonetheless.

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Boulder nine is financial.

One of my primary income source businesses is falling on hard times, forcing pivots we weren’t planning at this stage and creating financial pressure that doesn’t land only on me, it lands on people whose livelihood is partially in my hands, people I genuinely love. This is the weight entrepreneurial books almost never talk about honestly. When your business supports the livelihood of others you care about, the accountability doesn’t feel like pressure in the abstract. It feels like responsibility with a face on it, and it compounds everything underneath it.

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Boulder ten is the collapse of routine.

Every one of the aforementioned boulders is expanding, shifting, demanding more as it moves. Normal adult responsibilities still exist on top of all of it. The stability of a daily routine, one of the few things that helps a nervous system like mine stay regulated, is actively dismantling itself. A destabilized routine in a hyper-vigilant body doesn’t just add inconvenience; it removes the scaffolding. Everything already precarious becomes load-bearing with nothing underneath it.

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Boulder eleven is exhaustion.

The kind which accumulates when your cognitive system runs at crisis-management capacity for months without relief. The kind not fixed by sleep, partly because sleep has become unreliable, and partly because there is no rest from the thing living inside your own head.

Eleven boulders stacked progressively. Looked at individually, not a single one of these is unbearable. Most people are holding one or more of them at any given point in their lives. The question was never whether any single boulder could break me. The question is what happens when all eleven cumulatively build in a system wired the way mine is.

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The Inside of the Slide

My mind doesn’t idle, it never has. I live inside my head the way most people live inside their homes: familiar, navigable, full of rooms I’ve spent years learning the layout of. That interiority is one of the greatest gifts I carry. It is also, under conditions like these, the thing which turns against me most viciously.

If you’ve read Beauty and the Narrator, you already understand some of what the Narrator does. My internal voice runs constant and precise, documenting everything in real time, tracking tone, sequence, incongruence, and the structural integrity of every moment I move through. Under normal conditions, that voice is an extraordinary tool. When depression hits my mind, it doesn’t dim the lights. It reprograms the Narrator from the inside.

What was precise becomes weaponized. Normal narration, neutral and functional, gets injected with self-hate and self-doubt at the code level, and it doesn’t announce itself as depression. It sounds like me. That’s the insidious part. A simple body cue during a stretch becomes a full verdict. “Extend your left arm to 73%” becomes “stretch your annoyingly smaller left hand across your fatty body while extending your shrinking left arm to whatever percent feels like being a worthwhile man.” Written out like that, it’s almost funny. Running on every channel, uninterrupted, from the moment you open your eyes until long after you should be asleep, the humor evacuates the building fast.

And the volume matters here, because my neurodivergence means I have more sensory channels open than a neurotypical nervous system. This isn’t a comparison of whose depression is worse or more serious, all depression is real and heavy, but the volume is different. Where others might be managing a four-lane highway backed up in their head, I’m managing eight to sixteen lanes. Every additional channel filled with static piles dissonance on top of dissonance in a compounding effect that never plateaus. The stadium in my head seats 30,000 people, and when depression hits, every single one of them is standing and screaming, each voice distinct, each one raging about some specific part of me in utter desperation and exhaustion. It doesn’t quiet. It doesn’t take breaks. It just runs.

Here is what a day inside my mind under depression looks like.

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A Day

My body couldn’t find sleep until three or four in the morning, and daily responsibilities pulled me back out around six. Sleep deprivation alone is an accelerant, it inflames every single somatic system, and not always equally, and stacking that on top of a pituitary tumor already disrupting those same systems produces a dumpster fire of compounding misfortune before I’ve said a single word to another human being.

The Narrator boots at full operational capacity with depression mods already installed. It doesn’t warm up, it arrives charged, demanding, weaponized, and running the injected version of every observation from the first conscious moment. Much like a passive-aggressive toddler who was denied ice cream while everyone else got one, so the Narrator is already at full volume before my feet hit the floor. That framing is genuinely funny in the abstract. If humor hadn’t already escaped, I’d laugh too.

Next is hygiene. The simple act of deciding whether a shower is necessary today becomes a negotiation between the part of me that knows I need it and the part calculating the minimum expenditure of effort required to keep the Narrator from launching the next treacherous wave.

Clothing follows the same calculus, less a fashion decision more a thrift-store archaeological dig, tossing shirts and pants, digging through laundry, looking for something that doesn’t externally announce the internal collapse happening behind my eyes. Here’s the specific cruelty of that process: I simultaneously care nothing about what people think of me and still somehow care enough about social display to hide the fact I feel like a worthless failure in my own life. Let that sink in for a moment.

So, I put on the shirt. I make myself presentable enough to pass, and in doing so, I isolate the very thing I need most exposed, because part of me is desperately reaching for connection while the shameful part is working overtime to ensure nobody gets close enough to see what’s actually happening.

Then I add hyper-vigilance to the equation. Every social interaction I move through for the rest of the day gets evaluated in real time for whether my depressive presence has leaked, whether it’s affecting the people around me, whether they can tell, or whether my being in the room is making things worse for everyone in it. That’s the chaffing thorn in my foot, dragged through every conversation, every errand, and every moment of contact with another human being, all day, without rest.

Daily responsibilities arrive, and this is where the Narrator does something so Machiavellian you almost miss it at first: it starts tagging objects, not as threats, exactly, as exits. Pens, cars, bridges, knives, forks, the corner of a desk, a fourth-story window, a balcony, the flow of traffic, etc. each one gets quietly noted, catalogued, and filed under a growing internal index of possibilities. The brain isn’t screaming about them. It’s doing something considerably worse; it’s being rational even efficient about them. My systems mind, the same one that builds frameworks, solves problems, and constructs entire ecosystems of thought, starts running the same process on a different objective: enumerating variables and assessing outcomes. The distortion becomes so complete you start wondering whether you’ve always seen these objects through the wrong lens and this new way of seeing them is actually the more honest one.

Let me be frank here: this is not vague ideation. This is not a dark thought drifting through and dissolving. This is mental terrorism, my own hyper-vigilance turned on itself, feeding oxygen directly into the flames consuming it. Every plan gets evaluated. Each day brings a new iteration, more refined, and more thoroughly considered. One of the most powerful features of my wiring, the capacity to think through a problem completely, exhaustively, from every angle, has been fully repurposed into running the same process on the question of how to end my own life with maximum effectiveness and minimum interference from the one system which has historically stopped me — my Somatic Coherence System (SCS).

Because depression in a body like mine eventually reaches for taking my SCS offline. My body’s signal-detection system is a threat to what my mind is planning, so the mind, overwhelmed, running on no sleep, and having severed almost every available check and balance, begins methodically disengaging it. Dissociation isn’t random in this context; it’s triage, my mind cutting the channels carrying the loudest signals is an attempt to contain the flood. The problem is the signals weren’t noise. They were the last functioning defense and once they go quiet, my mind operates as judge, jury, and very nearly full executioner, projecting onto everyone around me with calm, articulate, deeply felt certainty that their lives will be more whole without the weight of my failing presence in them.

This is when the alarms go off.

When my body has nothing left, it sends up a flare, not always in the language of crisis, not always as an explicit call for help. Most often it sounds like “I’m tired. I have nothing left,” said in a specific register of bone-level exhaustion having nothing to do with a nap.

For anyone reading this who knows someone wired like me: if someone in your life says those words in that specific tone of depletion, pay attention. It is not a throwaway phrase. It is the cognitive center sending up the only external signal it has left, wrapped in whatever deniability shame requires it to maintain. They need you now, not in an hour, not after you finish what you’re doing—now!

By evening my ranks are completely depleted, and my mental mercenaries know it, they work hardest when I’m at my weakest, and by this point the fighting has spiked cortisol into a runaway chain-reaction where my mind is essentially consuming itself. Every channel, every input, and every remaining calculation pointing toward the same conclusion with an awful unanimity. Then something in the deepest remaining architecture of my body throws another alarm, not my mind, my body, my SCS finding one thread still intact even half-offline and pulling it with everything it has left.

I land on the floor, in the fetal position, shaking and weeping with a force that has nothing performative in it, just my body expelling what my mind couldn’t process, doing the only thing still available to it. Brief unconsciousness from the expenditure, and then I’m back. The Narrator somehow reconnects to my body, not fixed or healed, but functional enough to get my corpse into bed, where I lie awake until three or four in the morning fighting to relinquish enough control for sleep to once again take me.

Then it starts again.

My days are ticking time bombs, not gentle waves knocking against a dock, but roaring riptides pulling everything I have under and depositing it back down the shoreline, curiously and inexplicably, still alive.

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Friday Evening

I’ve been to the bottom of this slide before.

Several years ago, a different stack and an older wound, but the same slide where I almost reached its terminus, my marriage had become a husk. Other things had accumulated in ways which took my SCS mostly offline. I got off work on a Friday evening with a plan already formed and a specific destination chosen. I’ll skip the details of the plan, but what happened next, I won’t.

I sat under a tree with a gun in my mouth for the better part of an hour. My body had been shaking and sweating, sending every signal it had left through every channel still barely open, trying to reach a mind that had already decided it was finished. My mind was doing its level best to comply; to be transparent, this was not ambivalence. It was a system that had run every calculation, arrived at a single remaining answer, and was in the process of executing it.

My phone rang. My best friend.

He pocket-dialed me, completely unintentional on his part, and had no idea. I don’t entirely know why I had my phone, except I’ve come to believe it was my body’s memory system refusing to fully let go, holding onto one last thread it hadn’t told my mind about. I didn’t answer, but when his name appeared on the screen and his face showed up, something in the deepest architecture of myself threw a switch my mind, for all its meticulous planning and efficient optimization, could not override. My SCS, stripped to almost nothing, found that gap and held on for dear life.

The next part of this story usually gets left out, because it doesn’t fit the version people prefer: I didn’t feel relief. There was no sudden return of my will to live, no moment of clarity, no gratitude washing over me in the late golden-evening light. What I felt was worse than before. The Narrator unleashed everything it had, and not just the self-hate, the shame of what felt, in my fully distorted state, like failure; like I hadn’t managed to even do this right. For months afterward, I punished my body with the same precision I’d wanted to end it, no exercise, the worst food I could find, a deliberate program of making my physical self feel the exact pain my mind had been living in. I also started looking for methods to remove my SCS from the equation entirely: driving the car off a bridge with no seatbelt, suicide by cop, an accidental fall from somewhere high enough. If my body was going to keep throwing the alarms, I needed to find a path it couldn’t interrupt.

What saved me wasn’t a single thing, no epiphany, no decision, and no moment where purpose returned in a recognizable form. It was an accumulation in reverse: small things stacking slowly in the other direction, without my permission and largely without my awareness, the weight getting fractionally lighter each week until one day I looked up and realized I was still here, and the reasons had quietly multiplied.

I’m a fan of the Harry Potter series. I own a replica of the Elder Wand. I have since that year. There’s a fan theory that says the inscription near the wand base means “Cheat Death Once,” and whether the theory holds doesn’t matter to me in the slightest. What the wand holds is the reminder that I’ve been at the absolute bottom of this slide before, that my body found the gap when my mind couldn’t, and that no matter how total the distortion feels or how airtight the logic appears, there is a version of this where I make it back.

I’ve been holding it a lot lately.

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What I Want You to Know

There’s no resolution here. I’m still in it, not at the bottom, not where I was on that Friday evening many years ago, and not at the worst of this current stack, but not out from under it either. Every day is a negotiation. Every morning the Narrator boots in terrorist mode while the body runs on insufficient sleep and a pituitary tumor affects the systems I need most for this particular fight. Every day I spend real and finite cognitive resources choosing to stay present rather than disappear into the distortion, and every evening the mercenaries hit hardest because they know I’m most depleted by then.

The reason I’m writing this at all is because I built the Tome to walk directly through shame and this piece is just a continuation of that mission. The Wound Beneath All The Systems named the wound. This piece names the war.

The shame around chronic depression in western culture, and specifically for men where the mandate is to hold everything together and contain your falling apart in private or not at all, is its own accelerant. It isolates the exact people who most need connection, makes the act of hiding indistinguishable from the act of drowning, and pressures everyone watching to accept the surface as the whole truth. It isn’t. Pretending otherwise costs lives.

So, here’s the untidied room. The open door. No resolution, no soft landing, and no final paragraph that retroactively makes all of this mean something beautiful. Just the truth of what it’s like to live inside a neurodivergent, hyper-vigilant mind carrying eleven boulders, fighting the same war it almost lost once before, still here, still swinging.

If you recognize yourself anywhere in this, the Narrator, the slide, the tagged objects, the exhaustion of holding the frontline alone day after day, know that you are not broken, not weak, and not failing. You’re carrying a very specific kind of weight in a very specific kind of body, and the fact that some part of you found this piece and read it all the way through means some part of you is still pulling alarms.

That part knows what it’s doing. Trust it.

— Jeff