About a year ago I started using a mood tracker app. I hoped it might help me detect patterns in my moods that could help me change my habits towards promoting better mental health. In reality, I’m not sure it confirmed anything other than “bad days make me sad.”

But I do think looking at the big picture of the last year is an interesting illustration (quite literally) of what living with depression is like.

I’m not terribly interested in contextualizing particular peaks or valleys, but I do think this does a good job of demonstrating what I mean when I say depression shifts your whole emotional spectrum.

Obviously this graphic paints a fairly bleak picture of my life, but I think what’s truly disturbing is not how much time I spend at “bad” or “awful” but how little time I spend above “okay.” I reported my mood as “great” precisely once in an entire year.

I’m not sure I’m going to keep using this app. Looking at the big picture is just making me even more depressed.