What Depression Really Asks of Us
A solitary raven flies across a pale sky with wings outstretched—symbolizing descent, transformation, and the soul’s journey through darkness. This image accompanies a blog post on reclaiming depression as a sacred and initiatory process.
Content Note:
This piece includes discussion of depression, grief, and suicidal ideation. Nothing graphic is shared, and the intention is not to romanticize or pathologize these experiences, but to honor them as part of a deeper transformational process. If you’re in a tender or vulnerable place, please trust your pacing. Take what resonates and leave the rest.
Depression has been a constant companion in my life, though I didn’t truly begin to notice its cyclical nature until my 30s. Back then, when the heaviness came, the fatigue, the flatness, the sense that everything I once cared about had receded into gray, I would panic. I’d judge myself. I’d think, What’s wrong with me? And most of all, How do I make this stop?
We live in a culture that doesn’t know how to sit with the slow. With the low. With the non-functional. The second we stop being productive, we’re told something is wrong. We’re medicated, managed, pathologized, and pushed to return to “normal” as quickly as possible.
But what if these states aren’t wrong? What if they’re sacred?
Over time, I began to understand something I hadn’t been taught: that these periods of collapse weren’t malfunctions. They were portals. They were the soul’s way of saying, Something is ending. Something deeper wants to be known.
In this piece, I’m using the word “depression” because that’s what our culture calls it. But I’m not convinced that’s the right word anymore. Depression is just one way descent shows up. Illness, burnout, trauma, grief, transition. All of these are invitations into the underworld. Some descents are sudden. Some are slow. Some are conscious. Some drag us down screaming.
What unites them isn’t the label. It’s the gesture of descent: the spiral inward, the surrender of control, the unraveling of who we thought we had to be.
We need new language for this. What if instead of saying, “I’m depressed,” we said, “I’m descending”?
Imagine what that might shift—not just for how we hold ourselves, but how we hold each other.
When I say “descent,” I’m not talking about an unconscious collapse into shadow material or an archetypal spiral we analyze from a distance. I’m talking about a lived, conscious, felt process. One that the body often initiates before the mind can catch up.
This isn’t about diving into the unconscious in a Jungian sense, though that may happen. This is about being claimed by something deeper than our social conditioning. Something that refuses to let us keep pretending.
Depression, illness, heartbreak, burnout. These are not just personal issues., they are political disruptions. In a world that worships speed, light, progress, and performance, descent is a sacred refusal.
Descent pushes back against ableism. Against hustle culture. Against the spiritual bypassing that tells us to vibrate higher or manifest our way out of discomfort. Descent says: I’m not ascending today. I’m not fixing this. I’m in process.
And yes, it’s terrifying. Especially when we’ve been trained to fear anything we can’t name or control. But descent isn’t dysfunction. It’s a deeper kind of knowing. It’s the psyche saying, I can’t keep living this way. It’s the body saying, You’re not listening. So I’m going to stop you.
And often, the descent doesn’t come with answers. It comes with silence. With unraveling. With time. It’s not a hero’s journey. It’s not a storyline. It’s a slow undoing.
This isn’t shadow work. This isn’t integration. This is something else.
Alchemy, in Jungian terms, is the slow transmutation of the psyche, turning the raw material of the soul into gold. But real alchemy burns. It dissolves. It destroys.
Depression, for me, is an alchemical crucible. It brings everything to the surface that I can no longer carry. And the descent is never graceful. It’s terrifying. It strips me bare. It unravels what I thought was stable.
But always, something essential is born on the other side. Not because I forced my way out of it, but because I allowed the fire to do its work.
What no one tells you is that this kind of transformation doesn’t just clear out the “bad” parts. It can burn away parts you thought were you. Roles. Relationships. Identities you clung to. Careers you thought were part of your soul’s calling. Patterns that once kept you safe but now smother you.
And here’s the catch: you don’t get to choose what goes.
This is what I often tell clients, especially those who come to therapy hoping to “get rid of” the parts they don’t like. You might come in with an agenda about what needs to change, but transformation doesn’t work that way. The part of you you want to leave may be the very part keeping you afloat. And the part you love? The part that’s socially rewarded? That might be what has to go.
The descent unmakes you, but not on your terms. It has its own logic. Its own intelligence. Its own timing.
And in that undoing, your relationship to life shifts. You no longer say yes to the things you used to tolerate. Your work might change. Your boundaries shift. Your capacity for bullshit disappears.
And it’s disorienting. There’s grief in it. But there’s also freedom.
When I descend, something always dies. Not metaphorically. Literally. But the hardest part is that I never know what it is while I'm in it. That’s not how descent works. You don’t get to know. You’re not supposed to know.
I’ve learned that clarity only comes after. When I start to surface again and realize that something I once tolerated now makes me sick. That a relationship I once sustained now collapses without my over-giving. That a role I used to find comfort in now feels like a costume I can’t bear to wear.
Descent strips away the parts of us we’ve outgrown. Whether we’re ready or not.
Sometimes, it’s relationships that go. The ones that depended on the old version of me: the one who over-functioned, who did most of the emotional labor, who held it all together. When I stop playing that role, the relationship can’t sustain itself. And as much as I know I’m not meant to go back, it still hurts. There’s grief. There’s disorientation. There’s loss.
Sometimes, what dies is a career. A calling. An identity you worked so hard to build.
When I became a therapist, I felt like I had arrived. I had sacrificed, trained, and shaped myself to fit into that role. It felt like home for a long time. I believed I would do it for the rest of my life. And yet, here I am, a decade later, unrecognizable to that version of me—standing in a liminal place, knowing that role no longer fits, but still grieving what it meant to me.
This is what ego death really looks like. Not some flashy moment of spiritual transcendence, but the slow unraveling of the roles and identities we believed defined us. You reach for the sweater that once fit like a second skin, and suddenly it’s too tight, or itchy, or just wrong. You’ve changed shape. And you can’t make yourself fit back into something you’ve outgrown.
And yes, it’s ego death, but not in the way the spiritual world often glorifies. We are meant to have egos. The goal is not to kill the ego, but to refine it. To mature it. These deaths clear out the false identities we were trained to cling to. Identities built on social norms, performance, and survival strategies.
What’s left is a more resilient, more differentiated ego. One that can withstand projection. One that no longer needs external validation to know who it is. One that can hold boundaries, speak truth, and stay grounded in the face of change.
So yes, something dies in the descent. But something else is born. And though the grief is real, so is the freedom.
There are moments in the descent when the pain becomes so dense, so compressive, so all-consuming that I feel a longing to be swallowed by the earth. That’s the image that always comes to me. A deep, cellular yearning to disappear. To be absorbed. To be annihilated.
And still, I don’t want to die. Not literally. I’ve never had a plan. I’ve never moved toward action. But I’ve known the ache of not wanting to exist like this. And in those moments, it’s hard to make the distinction. Because I don’t yet know what this is. I just know I can’t keep going the way I’ve been going.
That’s what suicidal ideation often is. Not a desire to end life, but a desire to end a version of the self. The way things have been. The shape we’re stuck in. The unbearable pressure of holding it all together when our soul has already begun to unravel.
But we live in a culture that pathologizes any mention of these feelings. It either panics or silences them. And for those of us who carry professional identities—therapists, healers, helpers—the shame is compounded. I used to believe it meant I had failed. That I couldn’t possibly be feeling this and still be okay. Still be competent. Still be trustworthy.
That shame almost broke me more than the pain itself.
What saved me wasn’t advice. Or intervention. Or cheerleading.
It was witnessing.
I’m lucky to have a person or two in my life I can speak this to in real time. Not in hindsight. Not as a polished story of survival. But while it’s happening. They don’t try to fix me. They don’t freak out. They sit with me. They stay. And in doing so, they remind me that I can survive the moment.
That’s what we need more of, soul accompaniment and sanctuary.
Because this is real suffering. It is painful. It is hard. And it’s not to be glorified, but it is to be honored. It’s a threshold. A breakdown of what no longer holds. A sacred signal that something in us is begging to die…not to destroy us, but to free us.
When we treat these moments like emergencies, we rob them of their meaning. We reinforce the idea that they’re wrong. But what if they’re not? What if they are a soul’s scream against unbearable conditions, both internal and external?
What if the desire to die is sometimes a desire to stop colluding with a culture that refuses to make space for our pain?
I don’t have all the answers. But I do know this: the ability to speak the truth of our descent, to say “I’m in it” and be met with stillness instead of fear, can be life-saving.
We don’t need quick fixes.
We need people who can stay.
Most of modern psychology treats depression as a list of symptoms to be managed or alleviated. And sometimes that helps. But if that’s the only lens we bring, we miss the invitation hidden in the pain.
And more than that. The framework itself is built on oppressive foundations.
The medical model of mental health didn’t emerge in a vacuum. It was shaped by white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, ableism, homophobia, and transphobia. It was designed to bring people back to “functioning”. And functioning, in this case, meant productivity, assimilation, compliance. Not aliveness. Not authenticity.
When someone can’t keep up. When they collapse, withdraw, numb out, rage, grieve—it’s seen as a pathology. A personal failure. Rather than a soul-level response to an insane world.
This is the problem. We ask how to fix people without ever asking why the system is making us sick.
Descent work asks a different question:
What if you’re not sick?
What if your soul is refusing to play along?
When we listen to that refusal, rather than silence it, we access something far more radical than “coping.” We access a path of remembering. A path of becoming.
Jung spoke of integrating the shadow, bringing the unconscious into consciousness, the darkness into the light. And while that’s part of the work, I’ve found that not all darkness wants to be “resolved.” Some of it just wants to be held.
“Dark Work,” as I’ve come to call it, isn’t about fixing or integrating. It’s about making room. For rage. For grief. For the parts that don't want to be polished or understood. Just expressed.
And that’s the distinction: integration still carries the subtle aim of coherence. Of fitting everything together. Of moving toward wholeness in a way that’s often linear or sanitized. But descent work isn’t linear. It doesn’t aim to make the darkness palatable. It asks us to be with the mess. To tend to what is wild, raw, and still in process.
Dark work says: Some things aren’t meant to be folded into your light. Some things are meant to stay wild and holy on their own terms.
This isn’t just personal.
We are in a collective descent.
The structures that once upheld a false sense of normalcy are crumbling—political systems, economic frameworks, spiritual paradigms, ecological balance. We are watching the collapse happen in real time, and many of us are feeling it in our bodies before we even understand it with our minds.
And yet, mainstream culture still urges us to get back to work. Get back to baseline. Get back to functioning. But what if functioning, as we’ve known it, has always meant dissociating from our deeper knowing? What if this grief, this exhaustion, this despair you’re carrying isn’t just yours?
We are all carrying symptoms of a world that has severed us from the very things that make us human: our bodies, our souls, our connection to the earth and each other.
Capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, colonialism. These systems were not designed to support thriving. They were designed to extract, to dominate, to control. And one of the most effective ways they do that is by disconnecting us from our own bodies. Because a body that listens, a body that feels, a body that refuses to override its own needs…that body cannot be controlled.
When we are disconnected from our body, we stop listening to it.
And when we stop listening to it, we become manipulable.
We override our instincts.
We sacrifice our well-being.
We forget how to say no.
That’s how empire works.
It convinces us that our exhaustion is personal failure.
That our depression is a chemical imbalance.
That our burnout is a scheduling problem.
When in reality, these are soul-level responses to a culture built on disconnection.
I used to override my body constantly, especially for “good” things. Even when I was planning something fun or restorative, if my body said, I’m tired, I’d push through. I’d make myself go. And I’d often enjoy it in the moment. But later, my body would ache. My energy would crash. I’d pay for it.
Now, I don’t ask for reasons.
If my body doesn’t want to go, I don’t go.
That’s descent. That’s reclamation. That’s deprogramming.
And this disconnection didn’t start with us.
It started long before.
Our ancestors were severed from their own bodies to survive.
Whether they were people of the land who were displaced, enslaved, colonized, or whether they were immigrants who assimilated into whiteness to escape persecution—the disconnection was a survival strategy. The grief was too dangerous. The rage was too threatening. The descent was too risky.
But now, many of us, particularly those with a measure of safety and access, are being given a sacred opportunity to descend in ways our ancestors couldn’t.
To feel what they couldn’t.
To grieve what they had to swallow.
To rage for what was taken.
To die to the identities that were crafted in service of survival and assimilation.
This is soul work. This is ancestral repair. This is rebellion.
So if you are feeling depressed, disoriented, numb, angry, exhausted, grieving, anxious, ask yourself: Is this just mine? Or am I metabolizing something larger than me?
I often say to myself:
I open as a vessel to the grief that moves through me—my own, and the grief of the collective. I trust my body to hold it, to move it, to alchemize it. I don’t need to understand it. I only need to stay present.
Because when we descend, we don’t descend alone.
We carry lineages with us. We carry histories.
And by choosing to feel what was once forbidden, we change the trajectory of what comes next.
This is not easy work. But it is rewarding.
Let us stop calling this illness.
Let us start calling it remembrance.
I know some of you reading this are nodding your heads. Yes, yes, yes.
And some of you might be thinking, why would I ever choose this? It sounds brutal. It sounds like losing everything.
And you’re not wrong.
This work is not glamorous. It’s not romantic. It’s not meant to be commodified.
It’s grief. It’s undoing. It’s being stripped of everything you thought made you safe or valuable or worthy.
But here’s the thing:
We’re going to descend whether we want to or not.
We live on a planet that is built on cycles. Of death and rebirth, decay and regeneration. We forget that. We’ve been trained to rise, to ascend, to progress without pause. But the Earth remembers. And our bodies do, too.
This is not about choosing descent.
It’s about choosing to relate to it differently.
It’s about recognizing descent as part of your sacred knowing.
Not as something to resist, but as something to turn toward.
Something to walk with.
Something that reveals, in time, who you are beneath the noise.
When you walk this path with awareness, to witness it—it changes you.
It doesn’t make the pain go away. But it does make you more true.
More tender.
More resilient.
More rooted in the real.
Descent strips away what you thought gave you worth.
And in its place, it offers something quieter. Something more enduring.
The truth of your being. The shape of your soul. The rhythm of the Earth, pulsing in your bones.
This isn’t about healing so you can get back to who you were.
It’s about remembering who you’ve always been and becoming something more true.
So if you’re in the depths, if you’re heavy, or hollow, or undone, know this:
You are not lost.
You are being returned.
To something ancient.
To something alive.
To something sacred.
Welcome to the descent.
May it remake you.
In sacred rememberance,
Alexandra Winteraven🖤
P.S. If you enjoyed this post and know of someone who may too, please share.
