People keep saying "but you don't look depressed." I was cooking dinner. Laughing at jokes. Showing up to work on time. From the outside I was fine. From the inside I was operating on autopilot while something hollow sat in my chest.
The hardest part was not the dark days. It was the ordinary days when I felt technically okay but couldn't shake the sense that something was deeply, quietly wrong. No energy for the things I used to love. Conversations felt like performances. Food tasted like nothing. And when people asked how I was, I said "I'm good" because what is the alternative?
I think there are so many of us in Nigeria carrying this invisible weight and we don't name it because it doesn't look dramatic enough to count. Depression in our culture is supposed to look like someone who can't get out of bed. So if you're getting out of bed — you must be fine.
I want to open this conversation. If you have experienced this quiet, functioning kind of depression — how did you recognize it? How did you finally name it? And what helped you start taking it seriously?