When you’re lonely, you don’t become cripplingly hopeless and withdraw from life? You just contact some friends or easily make new friends and have a good time and carry on with life?
When you’re driving your car and everything is fine until you come to a stoplight, you don’t suddenly become depressed at the stoplight like I do?
When you wake up every morning, you don’t have crippling existential dread? You just get up and go about your day cheerfully, without analyzing the futile meaninglessness of the big picture?
I got anxiety instead of depression. My mom had severe depression, so I spent most of my years growing up anxious that I too would be depressed. I would describe it more as terror than listnessness.
So I don’t get hopeless and stop, I get a bit energized and overreact in a way I sometimes later regret. I sometimes get “analysis paralysis” and have worked over the years to recognize when that is happening and to get over it. And during the stretches I took medications, they were different from what a person diagnosed with depression would be prescribed.