I have now had depression for almost three years. It started in August 2013, when I became more conscious of all the isolation I was experiencing in college. A difficult senior year that followed means that I have some contradictory feelings about my alma matter.

I assumed it would be easier for me to socialize in graduate school since the other students would be more like me. But after two years in Berkeley, my depression has worsened and it has been enormously challenging for me to focus on work. I never realized that, during their first summer, graduate students were supposed to spend days alone without talking to anyone. Does anyone remember that line from The Martian movie when one man, wondering about how the astronaut survives on Mars alone, ponders: “What does that do to a man?” Every day, I need to decide: if people are going to ask me how I feel, do I lie and say “fine”, do I say “no” and change the subject, or do I take an intermediate stance like “I’m feeling a 6 out of 10 today” and adding in some jokes. Since it’s funnier, I default to the third. Perhaps I should start using Donald Trump jokes — I can usually think of a way to incorporate him in conversations.

This isn’t completely new to me. Technically my depression began in seventh grade, but it was more sporadic back then. During seventh grade, I became conscious of my bottom-of-the-pack social standing by seeing seemingly all other students having their own group of friends. At that time, there were only two other deaf students in my cohort, and both were far more popular than me (but they also had better hearing). I tried to fight my way up the hierarchy by studying what the other students did: their clothing styles, their facial expressions, their style of jokes, or anything that I thought would help me advance socially. Unfortunately, I was not successful, and eleven years later, I am still trying to figure out the secrets.

I thought that new graduate students would be able to find a group and be supervised by more experienced students or postdocs to get a fast start on research. At the very least, they would have some cohort of students of the same year (or plus/minus one year) with matching research interests, where if not outright working together, they could talk and bounce off ideas. Given how hard it has been for me to be involved in that, though, I wonder how students get that in the first place. It’s true that it has gotten noticeably better this semester, so hopefully I have stuff to look up to. Even so, I do not know why I was admitted to the PhD program at all, and I also believe it was a mistake for me to attend Berkeley (just like it was a mistake to attend Williams).

There’s a lot of stuff that people say about the Berkeley graduate school experience, whether it’s in person during visit days or on a Berkeley website. I know some of it is for advertising (e.g., to exaggerate, “graduate students love Berkeley!”) which is fine with me. Any school would need to do that. From personal experience, however, some of the material online is misleading if not completely wrong.

I know depressed graduate students aren’t exactly a scarce resource. I’m trying to fight my way out of it, but it’s not that easy. Some people may disagree with this, but I think it’s harder to do good, research-quality work while depressed. The faculty may not have had this experience since they were the stars in graduate school and, presumably, non-depressed, but not everyone is like that. I know there are people who enjoy graduate school. Yet it feels weird for me to be physically nearby but feel so distant simultaneously. How are they enjoying their experience so much?

I get a lot of emails that relate to trying to improve the graduate school experience. Examples include graduate student surveys for enhancing the well-being of students and invitations to student events/parties. The main thing I want to do, however, is get good research done in a research group. That’s going to help me more than going to a random student event. In addition, attending these events usually means I need to ask a sign language interpreter to come with me, and I feel very awkward trying to socialize with the interpreter.

I have thought about temporarily leaving graduate school to recover, but this would not be a guaranteed solution. I obviously don’t have a group of friends to start a company, so it’s probably best to work at a large, well-established company. Then again, the same concern arises: what if I can’t figure out how to mesh with my group there (people do work in groups, right?). The same concern arises, and the people in industry might also be older and have more diverging interests. If I come back to graduate school, I’ll continue to feel like I am behind in research for taking time off.

I am well aware that I could come under criticism for this blog post. I read more foreign policy books and there are lots of people in this world suffering. Just look at the horrible, gut-wrenching crisis in Syria, where people are under assault by the government, young men feel compelled to join gangs, and young women have to resort to prostitution for money. Even in the United States, there are so many people struggling financially, and as Berkeley can attest, there are too many homeless people in this country. Why do I have the right to feel depressed, especially when so many people would like to be a Berkeley graduate student?

By that logic, though, anyone who has a job in the United States can’t complain, because there’s always someone in the world who would want that position. I also do not think my desires are that out of line. If other students worked alone, then I would not necessarily feel as bad as I do now. Just to be clear, I know I could have done some stuff better over the past few years, such as working even harder. Some of the blame is always going to lie with me. Though there is some business incentive to only prioritize a few students, however, I would like to think that the department wants to put its students in positions where they are most likely to succeed.

It is a good thing I won’t be in Berkeley this summer. Given how much I detested last summer, I don’t want to think about how much worse I’d feel if I stayed in Berkeley. Fortunately, things improved for me last semester, and so my goal for the summer is to continue that trend, and hopefully, to prevent the depression from dragging on for a fourth year.