When You Find Your Dream Job but Still Struggle With Depression

Lately, I’ve been struggling with depression. And honestly, it’s been so surprising to me that at first I didn’t even recognize it as depression. Because I’m doing my dream job, living in a place I love and building strong friendships here.

Everything about my life is about as good as I could imagine, yet I still find myself depressed. I still find myself struggling to motivate to do my work. I spend days knowing what I need to do, but not doing it. Struggling to take care of myself, because I find it hard to care about anything. Honestly, it’s been confusing. How could I be so depressed when things are finally going well?

Today, at a conference someone said something that made me realize why this depression was so confusing. He said, “When you meet me, I’m Dr. Edwin Lee II. I have a PhD, and I’m working this awesome job where I get to help people. But you don’t see what it took to get here. You don’t see the nights I spent crying in the lab, the time I almost dropped out of grad school, the assignments I never turned in. When you meet other people, you don’t see their struggle, you only see their success.”

Finally, it made sense to me. I always imagined that people who were depressed weren’t working jobs like mine. They weren’t doing things they were passionate about, making exciting discoveries. I imagined that some of them weren’t able to work, or if they were working it was in boring jobs that worsened their depression. But of course that isn’t true. Especially with the COVID-19 pandemic, depression rates are higher than they have been in years. Some people with depression aren’t working or are in treatment, but others are working in every job imaginable. Some people with depression are extremely successful in their work.

But it also makes sense why I could’ve thought that. As a society we still don’t talk about mental health in the workplace enough, so it’s easy to imagine that the other people there have good mental health. If we don’t have close relationships with our superiors, we wouldn’t know if they’re struggling, so it seems like they’re not.

At first, this realization was a terrifying. For a long time I had hoped that changing my life would solve my depression. Even though I knew that more money wouldn’t make me feel better, I still believed things like a better job might. And it did help, in many ways, but obviously it didn’t “cure” it.

But then I found this reassuring. If the most successful people I know are struggling with mental illness or have previously, it means that mental illness doesn’t have to ruin your life. It means that even if I’m struggling with mental illness, I can still succeed in my job. And it means that if some day I no longer struggle with mental illness, I can still succeed in my job.