The Way Through

How Healing Depression Became My Life Path

I used to think suicide was the only way out.

I was good at faking happiness. I smiled. I performed well at work. I checked the boxes. But inside, I was drowning. Sometimes it spilled over—crying in work bathrooms, rage in traffic, lashing out at people I loved. Mostly I just pushed everyone away, bitter about the suffering that filled every day.

I kept thinking: there has to be more than this.

Doctors told me I'd need medication for life. The goal was to minimize the lows, even if it meant numbing everything else. I became a shell. I knew it. There had to be another way.

So I tried everything. Exercise. Nutrition. Supplements. Affirmations. Self-help books. I forced my body to move, lifted weights, fixed my posture, eliminated foods. I became obsessed with optimization.

Some of it helped. Some of it just inflated my ego. But none of it touched the real question: Who am I?

That's when I found yoga—not the stretching, but something underneath it. Breath synchronized with movement. Mind meeting body. For the first time, I felt something align.

I dove into spiritual practice. Ram Dass. Meditation. An incredible yoga studio focused on self-realization. Finally, I thought, I'm coming home.

But then a strange thing happened. The more I dissolved my ego, the more disconnected I felt. The people closest to me started to feel like obstacles to my spiritual path.

It took me too long to see: they were the path.

Presence was what changed. Not transcendence. Not escaping my humanity. Just the ability to be fully here—with others, with myself, with what is.

I discovered that the suffering I'd been trying to escape wasn't the problem. It was the doorway. Depression didn't dissolve because I found the right technique. It shifted when I stopped running from it. When I learned to feel everything—not just think my way through it, but feel it in my body, breathe with it, sit with it, let it pass through.

The hardest things we go through aren't mistakes. They're teachers. They shape us into people who can sit with others in their darkness without flinching, without trying to fix them, without needing them to be different.

I don't have this figured out. But I know now that healing isn't about rising above our humanity. It's about coming home to it.