Mainly I offer you empathy. I've been in and out of states like yours, but was lucky enough for them not to last as long as your has. Something always came along and managed to interrupt the inertia . . . . something I felt I just had to do. I'm so sorry for what you are feeling. I know how helpless you can feel . . . like you're in quicksand.

Being on your own too much doesn't help either. If you could find some worthy endeavor to commit to. You sound smart enough to realize that this isn't going to get easier, the more time that goes by. I used to just let depressions kind of run their course. And they would. After some weeks of doing nothing, I just get sick of doing nothing and spring back. But when it's gone on months, you can get really trapped down there.

If you or I were trapped down a deep well we fell into, emergency responders would show up and teams of people would exert round-the-clock effort to rescue us and retreive us out of there. If we went walking and got lost in some deep woods, same thing. A whole town might turn out to comb the area systematically to locate us. But you can get equally lost in your own head, and there you are - lost, trapped . . . but no one's looking for you. Sometimes. I've thought about how it would be for a man in space doing work outside the spacecraft who gets untethered from the space vehicle and floats away. He would be so utterly lost. I used to fear getting lost like that. But not so much now. I'm with someone who needs me.

But mainly I want to say that it can be unbelievably hard to alter the way you've gotten used to spending your days. People who have never been clinically depressed have no idea.