It’s a tremendous struggle to write someone who’s lost their own narrative. How do you even express someone so difficult to define? Depression in young adult fiction is often oversimplified, to such an extent that nuance is lost and it becomes impossible to relate to. BAD HAPPENS; the protagonist is sad about it. The average reader will grow impatient rather than sympathetic.

Depression isn’t just sadness. Depression is feeling nothing much at all about the things that once made you feel EVERYTHING. The pursuits you’d once so invested yourself in seem to lose all meaning, even victories feel hollow. You lose your own narrative and fall into this passive state, repeating what doesn’t work or becoming secondary to the drive of a more goal-oriented character.

As one of the most prevalent mental illnesses, I find depression personally important to write about... but, it’s also just so damned hard to address, because it really is the anathema of engaging, interesting fiction. Real depresi depression is not compelling, real depression is something anyone will do their best to avoid, deny, and escape from. The quick and messy route is to play up the angst angle, throw your protagonist into a moral gray to struggle with. They can persevere for high ground or they can get a little edgy, either is fine—anything but dare to linger on the unpleasant. The alternative seems to be couching everything in metaphor. Your protagonist becomes physically lost in a maze of choices, or an Artax and Atreyu mired in the swamps of sadness. The emotional weight is there (sometimes), and it can be cleverly done—but, some part of me is reluctant to be clever or dishonest about this at all.

Sometimes, a big part of me just wants to write something terrible, some moments that just really, really fucking suck. Something that isn’t simplified until it’s meaningless, or wrapped in the safety-padding of allegory, or skewed by survivorship bias. But who THE FUCK would ever want to read it! The only