One of the many weird things about depression is that it retcons your life. Not only are you lying in bed feeling like a piece of shit and that everything is awful, but you start projecting those feelings back along your own time stream - you start low-key believing you've always felt this way, that nothing good has ever happened, or if it has it happened a long time ago.
On January 1st of last year I decided to start keeping a tally of good days and bad days, because I stopped trusting my brain to report on that accurately. I expected to come and look at the tally when I was depressed and go "oh, I had a good day only a few days ago. this hasn't always been like this."
What I didn't expect was that the process of asking myself whether a day had been good or bad would radically shift my perspective on what a bad day was and what a good day was. On the very first day, when I'd achieved nothing and had felt sad and slow all day, I went to put a notch in the Bad Day column before stopping myself:
wait, i thought. has today actually been bad? not bad enough to write it off. i played rummikub online with my partner. i drank some water. i had a long bath. no, today wasn't a bad day.
And so I put a notch in the Good Day column and went to bed. The next day I did the same thing, and the next day, and the next day. Just the process of going over my day every day meant that I found at least one good thing that happened every day. I had a good meal. I went to the pub and was around people, albeit quietly. I went for a walk. I saw a duck. There were days where truly awful, terrible things happened, but even on those days there was always something - even if the something was a simple as We Were There For Each Other or We Reminisced.
On December 31st I put the final tally down. Not a single day had been so bad that I could justify writing it off as a bad day. The bad day column was completely empty.
I'm still depressed, occasionally deeply, but I think I have more perspective. Depression is a physical feeling, and an emotional feeling, but even without trying *something* comes along every day that makes me glad I'm here despite that feeling.