In June, three days into my summer internship, I decided to start strength training for the first time in my life. It was a Thursday morning when I marched into the gym nearest to my office and filled out the forms for a membership.

Signing up at the gym was not easy. It was not a glorious moment of self-congratulatory fist-pumping. I didn’t do it because anyone else encouraged me to. What really happened is that in the spring, I had hit something resembling rock bottom with my depression. I'd begun to fear that I would become one of those depressed people who can’t keep a job, that I would lose my position as an intern at Health as quickly as I had started it.

I had tried so many other tactics to deal with my depression but not this one. So I gave it a shot.

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I wasn't diagnosed with major depression (one of many types of the disease) until eighth grade, but the earliest signs of the illness surfaced when I was five. I absolutely hated going to school and cried a lot—usually during the day, and always after school—all the way through 7th grade.

In adolescence I was very shy, and I was preoccupied with being thin. At age 13, a doctor finally gave me a depression diagnosis. I was prescribed medication, which I’ve taken ever since. After that, things seemed to get better. I had always been at the top of my class, and in 8th grade I landed a cute and popular boyfriend, which made school much more tolerable. People in the upper echelons of middle school looked me in the eye, and not just when they needed a math partner. But I was still depressed.

Depression comes and goes, and it doesn’t matter what else is happening around you. I have been deeply depressed during both difficult times, like my parents’ protracted divorce when I was in high school, and at times when my life was objectively great, with academic, professional, and social success. But one of the only constants in my depression was the advice I got from other people: Why don’t you try exercising?