Anni 🌈

Functional depression looks really good on you from the outside. You wake up to the alarm, not to some cinematic breakdown. You hit snooze twice, curse under your breath, and get up because there are emails and mouths and bills that do not care what your brain is doing. The toothbrush moves. The shower runs. The coffee machine hums. Your body walks through the script. Somewhere around 08:17 you catch your own face in the bathroom mirror and feel that tiny drop in your stomach. You look fine. That is the worst part. You look completely fine. At work you are even better. You know the right jokes for the group chat. You write the Slack messages with the little emoji at the end so no one misreads your tone. You sit in meetings and nod at the right time, say something smart about timelines, share your screen. Your camera shows a person who is engaged and competent. Nobody sees that the entire time, there is a second movie running behind your eyes. Old conversations. Things you regret. Imaginary disasters. That one sentence someone said three years ago that still feels like a punch. All of it looping like a cursed playlist. From the outside you look like a functioning adult. Inside you feel like a person trapped in a glass box at the bottom of a swimming pool. The water is the thoughts. That constant buzz. You are sitting on the couch at 21:46, show playing on your laptop, phone in your hand, and you are not actually in the room. You are replaying every small failure of the day. The email where you sounded weird. The moment you saw your reflection in a shop window and hated your posture. The way your friend texted a bit shorter than usual. Your chest feels heavy and weirdly empty at the same time. You scroll anyway. You laugh at a meme. You send a reaction back. No one watching that scene would call it depression. You keep telling yourself exactly that. It cannot be that bad. You have a job. You reply to messages. You pay rent on time. You show up for family. You wash dishes. You even make plans sometimes. Functional depression is cruel because it hands you a list of everything you manage to do and uses it as evidence against your own pain. How can you be drowning when you are still walking. There is a version of depression everyone knows how to recognize. The one where you cannot get out of bed. The one where you cry all the time. The dramatic collapse. The movie version. People feel sympathy for that one. They send messages. They ask if you need anything. They bring soup. What you have is different. You get out of bed. You go to work. You smile. You make the joke. You remember the birthday. You look like someone whose favorite phrase should be “I am fine.” So you learn to become an expert at being fine. You say “just tired” so many times it stops meaning anything. You say “busy lately” when what you mean is “I feel like there is a hole in my chest and I keep dropping pieces of myself into it.” You become the one who listens rather than talks because listening hurts less than explaining. When someone asks “how are you really,” you feel this flash of panic. If you open that door, you are not sure you can close it fast enough to still make your 10:30 meeting. Functional depression turns your life into a performance where the main skill is not letting anyone see the stagehands behind the curtain. Your body keeps trying to report the truth in weird small ways. The tension headache that hits every afternoon around 16:12 when your screen starts to blur. The way your jaw clicks because you grind your teeth all night. The random wave of nausea in the supermarket under fluorescent lights. The way your heart suddenly spikes for no obvious reason when you get a harmless notification. None of it is dramatic enough to count as an emergency. All of it adds up to a nervous system tapping on the glass.