I've Never Told Anyone This. So I'm Telling the Internet.

I don't do this. I don't write things like this. I'm a 34 year old man from Birmingham, England, and I was raised in a house where you got on with it. You didn't talk about how you felt. You just got on with it.

I've been getting on with it for about twelve years now.

I don't know exactly when the depression started. I think it was always there, quiet, underneath everything. I just got good at not looking at it. Work helped. Staying busy helped. Having a reason to be somewhere helped.

Then I got made redundant. And suddenly I had nowhere to be. And the quiet got very loud.

My mate sent me a link to this site. He didn't say much, just: "thought of you." Which is the most a man like him would ever say. I appreciated it.

I read some of the stuff on here for about an hour before I bought anything. I kept waiting to feel like it wasn't for me. Like it was too soft or too American or too much. It wasn't. It was just honest. And I haven't had a lot of honest lately.

I'm not going to tell you it changed my life. I've only been at this a few weeks. But I will tell you that I called my mate back and said something real for the first time in probably years. And he said something real back. And we didn't make it weird.

That's something. That's actually a lot.

→ Read the guide that helped: The Man Nobody Worried About