On Being Diagnosed With Depression

“Have you been avoiding me?” my therapist asks as he fetches me from waiting room 2. We walk down a long, beige hallway to his sparsely furnished office. As I plop onto a cheap foam couch adjacent to his desk, I wonder how many other people have sat on this exact cushion. The thought strikes me as sad. My therapist is nearing retirement (so he says), and the frequency with which he mentions this is truly alarming. He always wears all-black converse that zip up the side; I find this strange, but say nothing.

“Maybe,” I respond, although the real answer is yes. Definitely. Of course I’ve been avoiding him, skipping my last two scheduled sessions because I’ve felt increasingly terrible, and the last thing I want to do when I feel terrible is talk to someone about it. He quirks an eyebrow at me, “And why is that?”

I see a therapist who specializes in eating disorders, because I’ve had an eating disorder for a very long time. “A very long time” is a vague way of saying, over half of my life. I don’t know why I started “having” an eating disorder, but I’m willing to bet it’s a lot like coming down with polio, or cancer, or diabetes. Nobody can really point to the exact moment in time their bodies begin metastasizing, just like I cannot point to the exact moment in time I decided to begin starving myself. In the grand scheme of things, the inception doesn’t really…