In December 2009, during my junior year at Barnard College, I called a friend in the middle of the night to come down to my suite. I no longer remember what I said and I’m not even sure if I was crying. I wanted her to get me because I was scared. I was scared of what would happen to me and what I would do to myself if someone did not come to get me.

As I write, I have lost my appetite after hearing of the death of Anthony Bourdain, a man whose shows have filled me with a sense of adventure and made me feel as though I really was eating the balls of some animal in a far-away land. The first reaction in such cases is to say #RIP and then follow up with some push to get treatment. Because if only the person was in treatment this wouldn’t have happened right?

I would hazard a guess that depression like many other illnesses sometimes defies treatment. I was seeing a therapist at a sliding scale clinic at the time I called my friend. I was exiting in-patient treatment when my friends came to get me and all I wanted to do was go back to my hospital room and take the shame away. Treatment is only part of the issue.

The thing with people with depression is that some of us are so good at hiding. I had an expert family practitioner look at me in my power-woman sheath dress and leopard print heels and say “I can’t believe you’re depressed.” If I didn’t know me, or know of people like me, I wouldn’t either. I was so good at hiding it. I was the best patient. I verbalized all my insights, reported all my progress and seemingly spoke openly about all my fears.

What scares me about depression is the feeling it gives me of being all alone. It has made me feel alone in the presence of other people. It can sometimes become scary when I’m actually physically alone. Now that I think about it, I do a lot to not feel physically alone even when I am. I watch YouTube videos to fall asleep some nights, I read incessantly and am often trying to just keep myself occupied. I am nowhere near the state I was in that December night, but still I know there’s nothing I can take for granted. Because depression reappears sometimes.

Depression is a liar. It tells you that your most treasured friends don’t value you. It tries to trick you into believing that you’ve never had any luck in life. It creeps up on you just when you’re about to feel deliriously happy. Depression’s power surge at the most inopportune of moments is probably why people’s loved ones feel so lost when the disease seemingly wins out.

I say seemingly because I’d like to think that for people who suffer from depression and take their own lives, suicide is not the only metric by which their lives are judged. Suicide happens in a moment and it doesn’t deserve to have more importance than all of the other moments in a person’s life. People who die by suicide deserve to be remembered for all their acts of kindness, their selflessness and the love that surrounded them. They deserve to be remembered for the very life depression tricked them into believing they didn’t have.