People wait for it to look like grief. Often it looks like nothing much at all, which is why it goes unnamed for years.
Most people carry a picture of what this is supposed to look like. Crying. Not getting out of bed. An obvious, visible unhappiness that other people would notice and ask about. Because they are not doing that, they conclude it does not apply to them, and go on for another two years.
Very often, not much. Things you used to want, you do not want. Not painfully. You simply notice, at some point, that you have not wanted anything in a while, and you cannot say when that started. Food, music, the holiday you had been looking forward to: everything comes back with the same reading. You are still doing the things. That is the part that keeps people from taking it seriously, including their doctors. Attendance is not the same as presence, and it is entirely possible to have a full calendar and be almost entirely absent from it.
Because there is no moment. Nothing happens on a Tuesday that makes you say this has become something. And because it is genuinely hard to notice the absence of a feeling. Pain announces itself. Flatness is a subtraction, and subtractions are quiet. People frequently only see it in retrospect, when something lifts and they realise how long the room had been dim. There is also the comparison problem. Almost everyone I have sat with on this has, at some point, said a version of *other people have real problems*. Which is true, and irrelevant, and functions mainly to keep the thing unexamined for longer.
Sometimes something identifiable: a loss that was never properly grieved, an exhaustion that went on too long, a decision made years ago that quietly cost more than expected. Sometimes not. Sometimes there is no story that explains it, and people find that harder than having one, because without a cause they cannot see what they would even do about it. I would say only this about that: the absence of a reason is not evidence that it is not real, and it is not evidence you are being self-indulgent. Those are the two conclusions people reach on their own, and both are wrong.
Naming it is a larger part of it than it sounds. A lot of what makes this heavy is the private conviction that it does not count. Beyond that, it depends on what is underneath, which is what the work is for. I am not going to offer you five techniques, partly because it would not be honest and partly because the person reading this has almost certainly already tried the five techniques.
If it has been months rather than weeks. If sleep or appetite has changed noticeably in either direction, up or down. And if the weight of it has a shape to it, particularly first thing in the morning. I am not a psychiatrist and cannot prescribe. What I can do is say when I think it is worth a conversation with someone who can, and I do say it, reasonably often. If you are having thoughts of harming yourself, please do not sit with that alone tonight. Tele-MANAS is free and staffed around the clock on 14416.
Written by Satlaj Sachan, a counsellor in Bengaluru working Book a first conversation.