The Maintenance Cost

There’s a version of me that used to believe something was fundamentally wrong with me, and not in a dramatic or diagnosable way, but in a quieter, more persistent sense that I had somehow been given a different set of instructions for how to live than everyone else around me. People seemed to move through their lives with a kind of ease that I couldn’t replicate, like they could bend the rules a little without everything falling apart. They could stay up late, skip meals, drift in and out of routines, numb out when they needed to, distract themselves when things got heavy, and somehow return to baseline without much consequence. I couldn’t. When I tried to live that way, things didn’t bend—they broke, and for a long time I thought the goal was to figure out how to become more like them, more flexible, more relaxed, less sensitive to the things that seemed to destabilize me so easily. It took me years to realize that wasn’t the goal at all.

There was a stretch of my life where depression wasn’t something that came and went, it was just there, woven into everything in a way that made it feel less like a condition and more like the default setting. It wasn’t literally every second of every day, but it was close enough that the distinction didn’t matter, and every now and then there would be these brief interruptions, these small openings where things lifted just enough for me to remember what it might feel like to be okay.

Those moments didn’t feel like relief. They felt like exposure. Because now there was something to lose. When everything is consistently bad, there’s a strange kind of stability in it, no surprises, no drop, no fall, but when things improve even slightly, you become aware of the distance between where you are and where you could be, and when that gap closes again, as it always seemed to, you feel it in a way that’s hard to describe. The fall hurt more than the baseline ever did.

So like a lot of people, I started looking for ways to manage that gap, ways to feel better even temporarily, anything that could take me from where I was to somewhere even slightly less painful. Some of those things worked, at least in the short term, and when you’re desperate enough, short term starts to feel like the only term that matters. But there was a pattern I didn’t recognize at the time, which is that every time I used something to lift myself out of that baseline, I stopped doing anything that might actually change the baseline itself. Why wouldn’t I? For a few hours, I didn’t have to live there. For a few hours, I wasn’t trapped inside the same version of my mind. The problem is that I always came back, and when I did, nothing had moved. My life hadn’t changed, my environment hadn’t changed, my patterns hadn’t changed. I had just taken a temporary exit, and over time I started to realize that I had become very good at leaving my life without ever improving it.

It took me a long time to understand that this was the core issue, not that I didn’t have access to things that could make me feel better, but that I was investing almost all of my energy into escaping my experience instead of stabilizing it. And escape has a cost that doesn’t show up immediately, which is what makes it so dangerous, because on the surface it looks like it’s helping, it feels like relief, it feels like progress, but underneath it nothing is actually shifting. Your baseline stays exactly where it is, and no matter how many temporary lifts you create, you always return to the same place, over and over again, until eventually that place starts to feel permanent.

The shift didn’t come from adding something new or discovering some missing piece that suddenly fixed everything, it came from stopping, from recognizing the patterns that felt helpful in the moment but were quietly keeping me stuck and beginning to remove them, not all at once and not perfectly, but intentionally enough that something started to change. I stopped relying on anything that created a quick, predictable shift in how I felt if it meant I didn’t have to engage with my life in a meaningful way, and I stopped organizing my days around chasing moments of relief because I started to see that relief and stability are not the same thing, and when depression gets deep enough, relief becomes unreliable anyway.

There are days when nothing feels good, when the usual sources of joy don’t register at all, when everything that used to work just stops working, and in those moments, chasing feeling becomes a losing game.

What I started to notice instead is that even when I couldn’t feel joy, I could still feel something adjacent to it, something quieter and less dependent on my mood. Not happiness, not excitement, but a kind of weight, a sense that something mattered, and more often than not, that feeling came from things I had done, not things I had felt. There’s something about accomplishment, about contributing, about creating or completing or helping in some tangible way that seems to survive even when everything else gets muted. It’s not as strong, it’s not as bright, but it’s there, and when you’re in a place where most things disappear, that matters more than you would think.

Around the same time, I started paying attention to the variables that didn’t feel important until they were already off track, the basic things that are easy to dismiss because they’re so obvious, sleep, food, movement, time outside, the kind of things that get repeated so often they start to sound optional. They’re not optional, at least not for me, and I had to learn the difference between not being able to do these things and not even trying to do them.

There’s a difference between insomnia and choosing to stay up for hours after you know you should be asleep, between not having an appetite and not eating at all, between needing rest and slipping into complete inactivity, and I had to accept that my brain doesn’t tolerate neglect very well. When those systems break down, everything else becomes harder to manage, and the cost of that for me is not small, it’s not just a rough day or a dip in mood, it’s the risk of falling into something that can last for weeks or months.

That was probably the hardest part to accept, not the behaviors themselves, but what they implied, which is that my life might require a level of discipline and structure that other people don’t seem to need, that I might not have the option of being as flexible or as casual as I wanted to be. It felt unfair, and in some ways it still does, but eventually the tradeoff became clear. I could keep trying to live like someone who didn’t have these vulnerabilities and deal with the consequences every time things unraveled, or I could accept the reality of how I’m built and learn how to take care of it in a way that actually supports the kind of life I want to have. Not perfectly, not rigidly to the point of breaking, but consistently enough that things don’t keep collapsing.

There was one more pattern I had to confront, something I don’t hear talked about very often, which is the tendency to disappear into other worlds, not physically but mentally, through stories, games, shows, anything immersive enough to make my own life feel distant or less relevant. For a while it felt like an escape, and in some ways it was, but over time it started to create a different kind of problem. The more invested I became in those worlds, the harder it was to return to this one without feeling a sense of dissatisfaction or emptiness.

My own life started to feel smaller, flatter, less meaningful by comparison, not because it actually was, but because I was comparing it to something that was never meant to be real in the first place. That comparison quietly eroded my ability to appreciate what I did have, and I had to learn to be more careful with where I placed my attention, not eliminating those things entirely, but recognizing that for me, they come with a cost that I have to be willing to pay.

If you strip all of this down, it comes back to something I resisted for a long time, which is the reality that I am not low maintenance, that I don’t get to ignore the basics and expect things to hold together, that I don’t get to live on autopilot without consequences. And once I stopped arguing with that, once I stopped trying to force myself into a version of life that didn’t fit the way I’m built, things started to shift, not all at once and not in some dramatic, life changing moment, but gradually, steadily, in a way that was almost hard to notice at first.

The baseline moved, slowly at the beginning, then more noticeably over time, until one day I realized I wasn’t living in the same place anymore, that the intensity had changed, the frequency had changed, the duration had changed, that I still had difficult days and difficult stretches, but they didn’t consume everything the way they used to. It’s not that the problem disappeared, it’s that my relationship to it changed in a way that made my life livable again.

And none of that came from finding a perfect solution or a single thing that fixed everything, it came from removing the patterns that were quietly keeping me stuck and accepting the level of care my life actually requires, even when I didn’t like what that meant.

If any of this feels familiar, there’s a decent chance you’re built in a similar way, and if that’s true, the goal isn’t to become easier or less sensitive or more like everyone else, the goal is to become more intentional about how you live, because for some of us, the difference between a life that works and a life that doesn’t isn’t luck or motivation or willpower.

It's maintenance.

- Scott

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