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You hear it often enough—casually dropped by well-meaning, middle-class people sipping their oat milk lattes:
“I’ll take depression over anxiety any day.”
As if it’s a simple matter of preference. As if the two are flavors on a menu. As if choosing between them is ever that tidy.
About eight months ago, I decided I’d had enough. I was tired of the spirals, the what-ifs, the neurotic planning, the 4 a.m. heart palpitations. Anxiety had run my life for too long. I told myself I’d shake it off, get out of the pressure cooker, go live—finally live.
So I booked a one-way flight to Europe.
I drifted slowly south, through cities that blurred into one another—Paris, Naples, Belgrade. Eventually I found myself in Athens, where I planned to stay a while. I imagined sipping thick Greek coffee at smoky kafeneia, watching life unfold with a philosopher’s detachment. No appointments. No obligations. Just the hum of Mediterranean life and the echo of ancient stones beneath my feet.
And it worked, for a moment. The anxiety peeled away, like a too-tight jacket shrugged off in the sun. I could breathe. I could sleep.
But then came the stillness. And from the stillness, depression emerged.
Not sadness. Not melancholy. Not the cinematic version of lying in bed with tear-streaked cheeks and sad music playing. This was something else entirely—colder, heavier, stranger.
It was like waking up underwater. Like being locked inside your body with the lights flickering out.
A slow sinking.
A narrowing of reality until it became a tunnel.
No sound, no taste, no desire, no point.
People who say they’d “take depression over anxiety” have never experienced the real thing. They’ve never lived with the kind of depression where you begin to lose your self-hood, where you’re watching your life through a foggy pane of glass, unable to reach through and participate. Where it feels as though your mind is slipping—not dramatically, but subtly, frighteningly.
I became a ghost in my own life. Not quite derealized, but not quite grounded either. I was aware I was supposed to care about things—food, beauty, conversation, time—but it was like remembering a dream after you wake up. The outlines are there, but the substance is gone.
What people don’t understand is that anxiety is often a defense mechanism. A frantic, exhausting one, yes—but still a kind of armor. It’s movement, friction, hyper-vigilance. A sign your brain is still trying to do something. When that energy goes silent, when the noise dies down, it’s not always peace that follows. Sometimes it’s the void.
And in that void, there’s no bargaining. No “I’ll take this over that.” There’s just absence.
So next time someone says, “I’d take depression over anxiety any day,” I won’t argue. But I’ll know. I’ll know they’ve never been there—never really been there—because if they had, they wouldn’t speak so lightly of it.
They’d know that when the anxiety is gone, what’s left behind isn’t always relief. Sometimes, it’s the darkness waiting patiently for you to stop moving.
~
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