This person lacks a peer community, and that may be a general problem in her community.....
2012 was the first time I told anybody that I suffered from depression, it was only a few people and I was pretty offhand about it. I told them it was something I’d had, something that was gone, it was past tense. This was a lie, I’m not sure if it was a lie to them or to myself.
Later in the year was the first time I told someone I was actively depressed. When they asked how I was, I felt like it was the first time that someone wanted a real answer. I was able to tell them how I felt and they would have seen what would have looked like me at my saddest. In fact it was the happiest I’d been in more than a decade. It felt like a release, I felt safe to be me for the first time. Outside of that space I had to maintain the false me that I had practiced and perfected over years. My happiness started to change in a more permanent fashion, not taking me all the way to happy, but closer than I’d ever been.