I was terrified of meds.
There was no way to know what changing my brain chemistry would do to the repertoire of techniques I'd developed to keep my depression moderately at bay. My fear was that meds would make circumstances worse, either directly by fucking with my neurons in a destructive way, or indirectly, by forcing me to undergo a lengthy period of trial and error finding workable new practices. Either way, that change would be bad.
So I soldiered-on in a half-asleep mode which looking back seems almost bovine. Where I built a career I didn't care about while failing to accomplish the things that mattered, because those demand genuine emotional stamina, while mere employment requires only time.
Oftentimes people in the business world are impressed with what they interpret from the outside as a successful career. If I'm being honest I just shrug. I made enough money to keep an increasingly large roof over my books and guitars. But I wrote no books of my own, and I seldom played the guitars, so that as far as I'm concerned I was breathing but not actually alive.
My friend says of her meds, "It is really nice to have some hope that I can actually live my life instead of just being alive."
I should have done it years and years before. Instead it required the exhaustion of my little library of self-management practices coinciding with redoubled onset in late middle age to kick my ass into gear.