My body throws a red flag, I ignore it.

I was invited to a bachelor party for a good friend. We were renting a house boat for the weekend and there were going to be a lot of people there I didn’t know. I thrive on meeting new people. I love to hear about what they do, who they are, and how they got to where they are today. All of this made it very confusing when I didn’t want to go on the weekend excursion explicitly because I didn’t want to meet new people.

I had been working at Kintana, a software startup, for about 6 years and the week before the bachelor party I had been pulled into the inner circle of those who knew about a possible acquisition by Mercury Interactive. I had been at the office a couple weeks earlier on a weekend and the entire finance department was at work. It was the middle of the quarter and the only time finance is in on the weekends is close of quarter. I had started to put two and two together even before they told me, but it still was big news and meant big changes. It was stressful information to have and not be able to tell anybody so Jul and I chalked up my feelings about the bachelor party to stress. I would hang onto this belief for far too long.

That weekend I slept on the roof of the houseboat alone and wrestled with how I was feeling. I was confused and scared for what seemed like no good reason. As it turns out I can physically taste depression and had I been able to identify the taste in my mouth at this point, I would have known what was beginning.

The bachelor party was the beginning of my slide. The next signs came at work. I would call Julie a couple times a day really frustrated with simple situations. My teams would be struggling with a design decision — nothing unusual, just design direction questions. Typically I would step in and, right or wrong, point them in a specific direction. For some reason I couldn’t do this. “I don’t know which way to tell them to go,” I would complain to Jul. So many decisions at work are not right or wrong, you choose a direction and then make it right but no decision seemed like the right one. Each direction seemed to end in obvious doom. As a result I wasn’t confident about any decision and I was afraid to lead. This started to manifest itself physically. I began to visibly sweat when I would get stressed. I stopped driving initiatives and tried to ride along without leading.

The next sign in my descent came after swim practice one morning. I walked in the door after practice and burst into tears. As a very surprised Julie comforted me and inquired into my unexplained outburst. “My lane always makes me lead. Why do I always have to lead? Why can’t they lead? What do these people expect from me?” It got worse from here and I began calling Jul from work about three times a day in tears. I would be distraught about the state of the world. I would be terrified of death. I would be upset that migrant workers didn’t have health care. There was no pattern and no explanation for how I was behaving and I was confused and filled with despair.

You can imagine how confusing this was for my wife. She went from having a confident, driven, stable, and extremely intense husband whom she had to drag out of work everyday to a scared, depressed, confused husband that would call her crying from work 3-4 times a day. Yes, that is right, I would call her from work crying 3-4 times a day. It is that kind of sudden shift that makes you want to look into the fine print around the clause “in sickness and in health.” Fortunately I married an amazing women who stood patiently by my side while I fought this confusing battle and constantly picked me up when I fell.

I have swum competitively my entire life. In swimming you learn to put pain into a small box and just stare at the black line on the bottom of the pool. You fight pain by trying harder. I tried to fight this in the same way, ignoring the big picture. Sudden shifts like this don’t typically happen without reason. What I found really hard about depression was it wasn’t something you could analyze. You were depressed so nothing you were thinking was logical. You couldn’t analyze why you were depressed because you were, well, depressed. So you are stuck in this endless loop. You are depressed, but your analysis capabilities are broken so you can’t figure out the real reason why.

It must have been confusing to those outside of the black box of my life. I remember Chris brought me into a meeting with Mercury execs to give an overview of our products and I couldn’t do it. I struggled to explain even the most basic capabilities and eventually he had to pull me out. I had worked for Chris for five years and I can’t imagine how odd my shift in behavior had to be. I was responsible for the end functionality of the product and I couldn’t advise those designing and building it. Designers would come and ask me to make decisions on product behavior and I couldn’t give them an answer. Developers would ask about optimizations and use models, and I couldn’t see past the horrible complexity of the situation.

I finally pulled the trigger and started seeing a therapist. She helped me get a handle on the situation, but I still felt horrible most of the time. I went to Israel to visit Mercury Interactive development and ran up a $900 phone bill calling my wife two times a day. While we were visiting there was a big potential sale in Budapest. Chris asked that one of us travel there to help the sales team and I flipped out. This is something I normally would go out of my way to do. I love traveling and I would normally jump at the chance to see Budapest, but at the time I was terrified. I told him I would quit before I would go on the sales visit. I can’t even imagine what Chris was thinking at this point.

I can give countless examples like these. All of them represented a fundamental shift in my behavior. I can only shake my head when I remember my thinking at the time,

“This is odd. Must be the stress.”

It reminds me of hiking in Pakistan with a friend of mine. We were on one of our treks and had reached about 14 thousand feet when I started to throw up. “Must have been something I ate,” we thought and continued our ascent only to later realize the obvious — it was altitude sickness. Or when I got sick after an aggressive trip to the wine country where I consumed countless bottles of wine. “Must have been the cheese,” I said to Julie the next morning.

Depression feels like nothing I have ever felt. Before this experience I equated depression with sadness and was extremely judgmental of those who took anti-depressants. Depression isn’t sadness. It isn’t even remotely close to sadness. I saw anti-depressants as a crutch and assumed they fundamentally altered your personality. I had felt sad before and handled it, why couldn’t others? “Suck it up,” I would think, repeating what my water polo coach would yell at me. I naively put pain as the worst feeling a human can experience. I now know nausea is worse than pain — much worse. At least pain makes you feel alive, nausea just makes you want to die. If you think nausea is bad, depression is worse — worse because it leaves you with no reason to live. The sad fact is you can’t understand depression until you have felt it, and once you have felt it you will never forget it.

I know we currently overmedicate here in the US. Our doctors throw Prozac at every problem and send us home with a prescription to fix us. I hear people complain and judge this situation. But the simple fact is for every person that takes anti-depressants for the wrong reasons there is somebody out there drowning and lost that it saves. We take Advil for headaches and antibiotics for bacterial infections. Why are we so afraid of medicine for the mind?

What would you do if you woke up one morning and no longer recognized yourself? What if suddenly you were not the person you had been for the first 29 years of your life? What if you stopped believing anything was good? What if you lost all self confidence? Stopped wanting to work hard? Stopped wanting to work at all? Stopped caring? Stopped having hope?

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