It was in a pub, not long after I’d come back from my trip, that a friend said it over a beer. He’s the kind of man whose life is a blur of meetings and markets, a high-profile job in finance that seems to devour his days—tie loosened, phone face-down but still buzzing. And with the air of someone who’s seen too much, but only at a distance, he said: “I’d take depression over anxiety any day.”
As if suffering were something you could choose, like picking one pint over another. As if the bartender would shrug, pull the tap, and hand it over with a head of foam.
Eight months earlier, I had made my own kind of choice. Or at least I told myself I had. I was tired of the spirals, the endless rehearsals of disaster, the 4 a.m. summons of the heart that left me pacing the floorboards like a criminal awaiting trial. I told myself I’d quit anxiety, resign from its office, abandon the paperwork, the hearings, the appeals. Enough. I would live—finally live.
So I booked a one-way flight to Europe.
I drifted south, through cities that blurred together like carbon copies—Paris, Naples, Belgrade. Eventually I came to Athens. I imagined myself in smoky kafeneia, drinking thick Greek coffee, watching life with the detachment of a clerk whose stamp has worn smooth from repetition. No appointments. No summons. Just the hum of Mediterranean life and the silent testimony of stones older than memory.
And for a while, it worked. Anxiety shed itself like a uniform after long service. I could breathe. I could sleep.
But then came the stillness. And from the stillness, depression.
Not sadness. Not melancholy. Not the cinematic version of sorrow softened by music. This was something else—cold, impersonal, nearly bureaucratic. A form stamped “Permanent” without your consent.
It was like waking underwater. Like walking corridor after corridor, only to find each one narrower than the last.
A slow sinking.
A narrowing of reality until it became a tunnel.
No sound, no taste, no desire, no point.
Those who say they’d “take depression over anxiety” have never stood before the tribunal of the real thing. They’ve never known the depression that strips away selfhood until you are no longer participant but witness, trapped behind a pane of glass you cannot break. Where the mind slips—not violently, but with the quiet inevitability of a process you can’t halt.
I became a ghost in my own proceedings. Not absent, not present, just consigned to some shadow ledger. I knew I was meant to care—about food, beauty, talk, the slow march of time—but it was procedural, like remembering the rules of a game whose pieces had been lost.
Anxiety, for all its torments, is at least motion. It rattles, alarms, scrambles. It is exhausting, yes—but it is life struggling to persist. Depression is when the racket ceases, when the gears fall still, and silence arrives. And the silence is not peace. It is vacancy.
And in vacancy, there is no choice. No preference. No bargaining.
So as the pub closed around us and the glasses were gathered up, I sat there thinking about what he’d said. I didn’t argue. But I knew. I knew he’d never been there—never really been there—because if he had, he wouldn’t speak so lightly of it.
He would have known that when the anxiety is gone, what’s left behind isn’t always relief. Sometimes, it’s the darkness waiting patiently for you to stop moving.
Michael Cohen is a Sydney-based Australian writer and journalist who has worked across media, sales, and consulting. He has written for outlets including the Daily Mail, The Sun, The Telegraph, and Huffington Post. His work often explores the intersections of politics, history, and culture, with a focus on the deeper ironies that shape human affairs. Readers can connect with Michael here on Linked In.