The cost of a depressive episode on a rural business owner.

Before I became a business owner and a mum, a depressive episode looked a certain way for me; it looked a lot different than it does these days. I would hide, usually not leaving the house, struggling to get myself out of bed most days. The world would keep moving without me for a while, and I would wait it out under the covers until I could mentally and physically face it again. 

That option simply does not exist anymore.

Now there are kids who need to be gotten up and fed and entertained and taken places. There are deadlines that don’t move just because I am struggling. There are meetings I’ve probably already rescheduled once, phone calls that need returning, orders that need to be managed and people who are showing up expecting the same from me. 

So I get up, I put on the mask, and I get through it. 

That is the part people avoid talking about - the particular exhaustion of performing okayness when all you want to do is sleep, or lie in bed staring at the ceiling, waiting for it to lift. The mask takes everything, and the longer you wear it, the less you have left for anything else. 

The hardest moments for me are the ones that require me to think on the spot.

During the depressive episode, my brain doesn’t work the way it normally does. The sharpness goes; I can’t access what I know quickly enough. And so I’ll let a phone call go through to voicemail, not because I’m avoiding anyone, but because I need the chance to compose myself, to prepare, to have some version of a script ready before I speak. I call back when I have had a moment to gather myself into something that resembles the person they’re expecting. 

It works, mostly. But it costs something every single time. 

The isolation of it is magnified in this life, in a small town. Everyone knows your business, usually in a literal sense. There is no anonymity, no ability to quietly struggle without it potentially becoming something people notice. And so you get very good at the facade. You learn to hold it together in public, and save the falling apart for private, at home, where people already know you’re struggling.

My family will always notice when I am struggling. After more than thirteen years of me struggling with my mental health, they have developed a good sense of when I’m going through a rough patch. There is no hiding it from them, and honestly, I’m not sure I would want to - they’re part of how I get through it. 

What I don’t know is how well the facade holds for everyone else. I try, I show up, I perform the version of myself that the business and the community need. But I’m uncertain how convincing it is. Maybe people notice more than I think, maybe they’re being kind and not saying so, maybe the mask is better than I give it credit for. 

What I do know is that maintaining that mask costs more than it should have to. 

Then there is the identity piece, which is the one I find hardest to talk about.

When you run a rural business, your worth and your productivity are almost impossible to separate. The business needs you; there is a team that needs you, clients that need you. Your value is expressed daily in what you output, what you manage, what you hold together. In a depressive episode, that capacity to do any of that stays exactly where it was.

You’re not just struggling. You’re failing to meet a standard you’ve set for yourself, in a life where that standard is how you’ve always known you were enough.

That is a particular kind of pain. 

I don’t have a clean resolution to offer you here. I’m not writing from the other side of it with a list of things that fixed it. I’m writing because I think rural business owners, especially those of us who are also parents, community members, and the person other people are counting on, need to hear this said plainly. 

The version of resilience rural communities celebrate, the get-on-with-it, don’t-complain, keep-moving version, is not always the healthy kind. Sometimes it is the kind that quietly costs people everything over a very long time. 

We need to be more honest about that.

Not because it’s comfortable. But because rural business owners are some of the most capable, hardworking people I know, and they deserve support that matches the load they carry, not just admiration for how well they carry it.