Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don't believe it. Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future. Be brave; be strong; take your pills. Exercise because it's good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds. Eat when food itself disgusts you. Reason with yourself when you have lost your reason.

The quote frames depression as an illness that distorts perception, memory, and self-worth, making ordinary acts—walking, eating, taking medication—feel impossibly heavy. Solomon’s imperative verbs (“Listen,” “Believe,” “Seek out,” “Exercise,” “Eat”) stress that recovery often begins not with inspiration but with disciplined, sometimes mechanical persistence. Trusting “the people who love you” substitutes external reality-testing for the depressed mind’s unreliability. “Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future” suggests borrowing hope from one’s past self and from others until hope becomes internally available again. The closing line—“Reason with yourself when you have lost your reason”—captures the paradox of using deliberate structure to outlast a state that undermines deliberation.