There is a fungus that infects ants.
I’ll tell you up front that this is a real thing in biology: Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, sometimes called the “zombie-ant fungus.” It hijacks an ant’s nervous system, drives the ant up a plant stem, makes it bite down into the vegetation in what scientists call the “death grip,” and then erupts from the ant’s head as a spore-bearing stalk. The ant did all of this thinking it was acting on its own behalf.
There’s also a parasitic worm that breeds in water. It infects crickets and grasshoppers, and when it’s ready to reproduce, it makes them jump into a body of water and drown, because the worm needs the water to live. The cricket leaps in. From the cricket’s point of view, it’s just doing what it suddenly desperately wants to do.
I think about these creatures a lot when I sit across from someone in the middle of a depressive episode or an anxiety spiral.
Because what depression and anxiety do is not so different.
They are not, exactly, you. They are not your judgment, your intelligence, your reading of the room. But they take over the parts of your brain that would normally do those things, and they speak in your voice. They use your memory. They use your insight. They use everything they can borrow from you to produce a recipe, a framework, that keeps them alive, even though that recipe is rarely good for you.
Depression’s recipe is: don’t move, don’t try, don’t reach out, nothing will work anyway. It convinces you that staying still and small is the most rational thing available, because moving costs energy and the energy will be wasted. The parasite stays well-fed while you stay in bed.
Anxiety’s recipe is the opposite shape but the same logic: brace, scan, check again, prepare for the next thing, never trust the calm. It convinces you that vigilance is keeping you safe, when in fact vigilance is what’s exhausting you to the point that you can’t actually meet whatever’s coming.
Both recipes feel like yours. That’s the cruelest part. The parasite uses your own voice. It uses your own face in the mirror. It tells you who you are.
This is also why I’m careful, in session, never to call someone’s depression or anxiety them. I’ll sometimes catch a client saying, “I am so anxious. I’m just an anxious person.” And I’ll quietly hand them a different sentence. Anxiety is loud in you right now. Or, the depression is doing a lot of talking today. Not because I’m being precious about language, but because the work cannot start until you can see that the thing speaking and the person it’s speaking through are not the same.
That move, in clinical terms, is called externalization. It comes from narrative therapy, and it’s one of the oldest and most reliable tools we have. The problem is the problem; the person is not the problem. Once you can see the parasite as a parasite, you can finally notice the recipe it’s been feeding you.
And here is the part that surprises people:
You don’t have to fight the parasite to get free of it. You don’t have to be stronger than it. You don’t have to outwit it. You only have to recognize it.
Recognition is the entire first move. The pause where you go: Wait. Is this me speaking, or is this my depression speaking? Is this my actual read on the situation, or is this anxiety editing the situation for me? That tiny pause is where your agency lives. It’s also where therapy, real therapy, begins.
The parasite is allowed to be in the room. You don’t have to evict it before you do anything else. You only have to stop letting it cook for you.
So if you’re reading this on a heavy day, and people do read essays like this on heavy days, I want you to consider one thing before you close the tab.
The voice in your head right now telling you what’s true and what you deserve and what’s possible: ask whose voice that actually is. Notice whether it sounds like the version of you that helps your friends, or whether it sounds like the version of you that’s been hijacked.
Things, as I sometimes say in session, are not always as they seem.
Especially when the cook isn’t you.