May 17, 2020:
My earliest symptoms were disrupted appetites for food and sleep.
My mother, single parent, didn't understand depression. She believed as many do that "depression" means "sadness", so that, given no overt indication of sadness in my behavior, depression never crossed her transom.
She believed that my disrupted appetite for food was her fault. That it meant: she's a bad parent. In her anxiety she feared that my lankiness would somehow lead The Authorities, whoever they exactly were, to take me away. She lived in fear, as so many adults do who were abused as children. So she pleaded with me to eat more, and threatened, and berated, with the result that mealtimes were so stressful that I deliberately tried to eat as little as possible in order to get it over with and get away from the table with maximum dispatch.
The outcome was a lifetime of poor nutritional choices. In her anxiety to put calories down my gob she'd say, "Thirsty? Don't drink that water. Have a soda." Or, "Snacking? Don't eat that celery. Have a party-sized bag of potato chips. Have an entire box of cookies. Have six cupcakes." In adulthood this is now precisely my diet during severe depressive episodes.