I meant it as just depression, not a bunch of separate problems that’ve been held in. I apologize if the wording was bothersome.

My stresses increase in the final weeks because they’re suddenly not helping out and they’re acting odd and not talking about what’s wrong, and then it ends and everything becomes abundantly obvious that things weren’t okay. My partners have always been really good at pretending things are okay. I think it’s because of traumatic childhoods where pretending everything is fine was a survival strategy.