Yes!! I haven't had struggles with substance addiction, but I see SO much overlap in what you described as how much extra work and problem solving and self-leadership addicts have to foster and constantly practice to survive, let alone thrive, in what I've had to do to try to heal my depression and other maladies. It's like, I can't even begin to describe how much work it's been to someone who hasn't had to deal with that kind of a problem.
I was given an irrevocable 100 hour a week job called "try to survive while depressed" when I was 17, and thrown in the deep end with no guide, no mentors, and no reasons why. Every day of my life is a battle to keep my head above water. For years I barely managed and somehow am still here, but it is relentlessly difficult. Some days you think you're starting to get things figured out, on a roll, and then your positive wellbeing evaporates into thin air from the time it takes you to walk from your car to your apartment door. What is this life? You start to lose all hope of even figuring out any rhyme or reason or pattern in your depression, and just try to get through the day.
When it gets to be like that, I have found MUCH solace in the mantra of the substance abuse recovery world, "One day at a time." It's like an alien tongue to someone who's never dealt with the kind of waking death spirit companion depression comes to be. How could anything be so bad that you can only focus on a single day at a time, or that doing so would help in any kind of way? Thank your everything that that phrase gives you no feeling or hope. It's the last refuge of the damned.
I went through a similar struggle to how I read your story. I had a cushy job that paid more than ever, my manager was great, and the work was easy, but I was struggling with depression. I ended up quitting and crashing on a friend's couch for a while, and despite making that change to be able to pursue more meaningful work, my depression didn't abate. I ended up crashing and burning in a pretty significant way, and it was rough.
The point I wanted to make in sharing this story is that I wish I had taken the depression more seriously by itself and hadn't assumed that it was solely or maybe even largely caused by my job situation. Both from my experience with mental illness and from the scientific literature I've read, sometimes the big external issues are masks or plausible excuses for your body & mind to go into a depression because it makes sense that you have a big change outside, and so you get a big change inside. Sometimes those external changes do definitely cause big psychological struggles, but other times the depression kind of comes out because your psychological defenses feel comfortable enough that you will avoid addressing the root of the problem, and only address the external circumstances which you are able to reasonably enough blame your depression on. It's like a release valve in some way, but whose function is to avoid real psychological change at all costs, because the status quo is the safest place to be for our psyches.
I'm not a scientist and you might describe this as some kind of "just so" explanation or too much into psychoanalysis, and that's certainly a possibility. But with this stuff I've found that often times our psyches are very cagey and difficult to really understand in a straightforward way. If my explaining this pattern I've observed in my own history is beneficial to you or anyone else reading this, or at the very least interesting, that's good enough for me.
I was given an irrevocable 100 hour a week job called "try to survive while depressed" when I was 17, and thrown in the deep end with no guide, no mentors, and no reasons why. Every day of my life is a battle to keep my head above water. For years I barely managed and somehow am still here, but it is relentlessly difficult. Some days you think you're starting to get things figured out, on a roll, and then your positive wellbeing evaporates into thin air from the time it takes you to walk from your car to your apartment door. What is this life? You start to lose all hope of even figuring out any rhyme or reason or pattern in your depression, and just try to get through the day.
When it gets to be like that, I have found MUCH solace in the mantra of the substance abuse recovery world, "One day at a time." It's like an alien tongue to someone who's never dealt with the kind of waking death spirit companion depression comes to be. How could anything be so bad that you can only focus on a single day at a time, or that doing so would help in any kind of way? Thank your everything that that phrase gives you no feeling or hope. It's the last refuge of the damned.