you're not lazy. you're depressed.

I spent years as a teenager and then as a full grown adult wanting to be more, wanting to heal, wanting to change, wanting to grow, wanting to achieve more, but just being too depressed too. Starting to heal, starting to do better, starting, and then stopping all over again, because I hadn't dealt with the mental illness that was plaguing me. My name is Ethan Joule, and welcome back to "Feel Your Feelings." I want to start today with something I think a lot of you have never heard named out loud. There's a particular kind of pain that doesn't get talked about in mental health conversations very much, and it's not just the sadness, it's not the exhaustion, it's not the numbness, it's something that lives beneath all of that. It's the gap. The gap between who you are, and who you want to be. It's the gap between what you can do, what you can manage, what you can get out of bed and face, and who you know you're capable of being. You have dreams. Real ones, a life that you want, something that you can picture right in front of you. It's clearly there, things that you want to build. Places that you want to go a version of yourself that feels more alive, more connected, more you, and you can see it. It's right there, maybe you've even been there before. And you just can't get to it, because depression, or anxiety, or trauma, or whatever shape your mental illness takes. It's standing between you and everything you've ever wanted. And that gap is the most quietly devastating thing about living with mental illness. And today, we're going to talk about it. First, I want to name this experience as specifically as I can, because I think a lot of people living with this feeling have never had any words for it. And when you don't have words for something, it's really hard to process it. I preach this all the time. You have to be aware of something before you can start working on it. What I'm talking about is the gap between ambition and illness. Ambition isn't just for high overachievers. It's not just for type A personalities. Ambition is just the human desire to grow. And we all have it. We want to be more tomorrow than we were today. We want to connect to create, to contribute, to experience the world. That's not some extra thing that only the top 1% of people have. That's a feature that everyone has, that you have, that I have. But the problem is when that collides with things like depression, you know, real clinical depression, the kind that makes getting out of bed feel like climbing a mountain. That depression doesn't erase that desire. It doesn't get rid of it. It doesn't turn you into someone who no longer wants things. It just makes those things unreachable. So you're left in this impossible place where you still want, you still dream, you still have that voice inside of you that knows what your life could look like, but your body won't cooperate. Your mind won't cooperate. Your nervous system is so taxed just keeping you functional that there's nothing left for anything else. And this is the part that makes this much worse. You watch everyone around you doing the things that you desperately want. You watch them travel. You watch them achieve things in their career or in relationships that you desperately want. You see them building things, making new friends. And something in you lights up with recognition of, I want that. And then it's immediately followed by something that feels like grief because you want it and you can't have it right now. Not because you don't deserve it, but because you're struggling with something much deeper, something much deeper that many people will never understand. And that's why we have to talk about this feeling directly like this because it is very difficult to understand. Most people know that those who struggle with depression have trouble getting out of bed, but what a lot of people don't know is how badly they would love to just hop out of bed in the morning. When I was the most depressed, I wanted to get better so bad. I didn't just watch the days go by laying in bed thinking, well, this is how it just is going to be. I'm depressed. No. I desperately wanted what everyone else seemingly had. I desperately wanted to get up in the morning and be excited for the day. I wanted to get up and know what I was going to achieve. Know that I was going to see people know that I was going to be a light. I wanted it so badly. Depression doesn't erase the desire to be more. It doesn't erase the desire to grow. It just makes it feel impossible. Because it would be easier if depression just turned everything off. You know, if it made you stop caring, stop wanting, stop dreaming, it honestly would be easier. But for most people, it doesn't work that way. The wanting stays. The dreams stay. The self-awareness stays. Sometimes, even painfully so. You still know exactly who you want to be, but you just can't access it. And what that creates is a very specific kind of suffering. It's the suffering of someone who can see the door, but can't quite reach the handle. Who knows the answers, but can't get the words out. Who wants to move, but can't seem to get their legs to work. And this creates this narrative that you are not enough. Because we're told we need to achieve. And when we have an illness that makes it nearly impossible, of course it feels like we're not enough. And that is an indescribable type of grief. And most people never give themselves that permission to grieve what they've lost to mental illness. When mental illness takes time from you weeks, months, even years, there is real loss there. It's not metaphorical loss. It's a real loss. The friendships that didn't form because you physically couldn't show up. The opportunities that pass because you weren't well enough to take them, the version of yourself at 22 or 25 or 30 that you imagined in the distance between that and where you are. That is grief. And that deserves to be treated like grief. It is hard to want to be more. It is painful to want to be more, but have a mental struggle that stops you from getting there. And it's a lonely feeling because everyone else starts achieving and you are just trying to get going. I think people with depression carry an enormous amount of shame. Like I wasted my 20s. I should be further along. Everyone else is building a life and I've been stuck. But you can't shame yourself for this. You can't shame yourself for wanting more and not being able to do it because you're struggling. Shame says that you did something wrong. Grief acknowledges that something real was lost and that that loss is worth mourning. That's an important part of healing or mental health is being able to grieve the things that we've lost because you didn't waste your time. You didn't do anything wrong. You were surviving. And surviving when everything, including your own brain, is working against you is an incredible task. It is not laziness dressed up in a soft language. Survival under conditions that mental illness causes is genuine hard work, even when it's invisible. And you are allowed to grieve what depression has taken from you. The experiences, the time, the ease, the lightness that other people seem to just naturally have. You are allowed to feel that loss without shaming yourself for hurting and for surviving. It was a loss accounted. You can grieve it and keep moving towards healing. My entire life, I've wanted to do more, but I've been too depressed too. I want to succeed and travel and make more friends and prove my life, build something, become someone actually live. But for years I couldn't because I was just trying to stay alive. And nobody talks about how much that hurts, the gap between who you are and who you know you could be. The life that you can see, but you can't reach. That is one of the loneliest feelings in the world because you're not lazy. You're not wasting your potential. You're not unmotivated. You are fighting a battle that most people can't even see. Most people can't even understand. And you are still here. You're still fighting. You're still trying to heal. And that is not nothing. That is everything. So what can we actually do now that we have found this gap between who we are and who we want to be now that we know how difficult mental illness can make living our lives and trying to be somebody that we want to be. What can we do? And I want to be careful here because I don't want this episode to turn into a list of productivity tips for depressed people. That's not what this is. And if you've spent any time searching for help with this online, you've probably encountered a lot of well-meaning advice that essentially boils down to try harder. That's not what I want to offer. What I do want to talk about is the way that you hold tension between your ambition and your current reality is what's destroying you. The first thing that helped me is decoupling your worth from your output. This is easier said than done because we live in a culture that values hustle and hard work above everything else. We equate productivity with value. Your worth as a person as a human being is not defined by what you build or create or achieve. It is not contingent on what you produce. You are allowed to exist without justifying your existence with productivity. You are not a machine. You do not have to do well to be loved. You do not have to achieve in order to mean something. You mean something exactly how you are. And by trying to force yourself into productivity, you are doing yourself a disservice. If you are struggling with any kind of mental health issue, that is what you should be focusing on. So go slow. Be kind to yourself. Yes, it's okay to want to achieve, but it's not okay to define your worth as a person as how productive you are. So that moves me to my next point. It is very, very hard. to do big things, to achieve the things that you want when you're struggling with mental illness, because many mental illnesses, what they do, is they attempt to take all of your focus. They try to take you away from your life and convince you that something's wrong with you, that you deserve to suffer, that you don't deserve to achieve anything. And it's very, very hard to do the things that you want to do, to be the person that you want to be when you have a little voice in the back of your head telling you that. So I urge you to temporarily shift your attention away from these goals that you have and focus it on healing your mental health, on finding coping mechanisms that work with you and establishing a routine that helps you whenever you're feeling bad. I spent a really long time learning the things that helped me. I still struggle with mental illness to this very day, but it's much more manageable because I've developed a routine that I can fall right back into. I have habits that are easier to keep doing, even when I'm feeling depressed. So start really, really small. Start one day at a time and find little things that help you feel better. The small things count. I know how hollow that can sound when you're aiming for something much bigger, but the depression brain tends to operate in all or nothing terms. Okay, if you can't do the big thing, nothing counts. And that is a lie. That is an absolute lie that keeps you from recognizing the real movement that is happening. Getting out of bed was something, eating a meal was something, sending that one text was something. These are real acts of forward motion under genuinely difficult conditions. So start small. Start pushing yourself a little bit at a time and recognize that you are doing the hard work and that you are helping yourself and you're doing a real genuine good thing. There's a fear that you've waited too long. That the window is closing. That everyone else has already gotten so far ahead that catching up is impossible. That the best years for building the life you wanted are already behind you. I want to sit with that fear for a second. Because I think it deserves more than a quick dismissal. That fear is real. It has real shape and it comes from a real place. From watching time pass, while you were just trying to stay upright. It comes from the genuine feeling of wanting and not being able to. But here's what I need you to hear. The window is not closing. You have time. You have time to heal. You have time to move towards the life that you want. You have time. The life you want, full of connection and purpose and growth and experience and joy, does not have an age limit attached to it. You can keep working towards it one day at a time. And it's okay if the progress is slow. It's still progress. The whole point of life is to learn and to grow one step at a time. There's no timeline on that. So start small. Start taking care of you. Start healing your mental health and moving towards the things that you want. Get professional help if it feels necessary. Reach out to people. There's no shame in this. So many of us struggle. You are not alone. And that life you want is still there. So start ridiculously small. Every day that you stay in it. Every day that you stay and you choose to keep fighting, you give yourself another chance to work towards that future. And you are not disqualified. You are not too late. You are still here. And still being here is the only requirement. You are doing much better than you think. And I promise you that you can heal one day at a time. That's going to wrap it up for today's episode. Thank you so much for being here. If you need help feeling your feelings, you should check out my music on all platforms under the name of Ethan Joule. I almost guarantee it'll make you cry. Also, please drop me a comment and let me know what you thought about today's episode. I would love to hear your thoughts or just hear how you are doing. If you like this podcast, one of the best ways to support me is by getting merch. I'll put a link in the description. So thank you so much for being here. Thank you for understanding that the gap between who you are and who you want to be does not define you. And as always, thank you for feeling your feelings. I'll see you next time.