he room was perhaps eight feet wide and ten feet long, with average-height ceilings. There were no doors, but a small window on the far wall, just above head height, peaked out. Everything solid was composed of — rather than painted — white, the shade of rainless clouds in summer. Aside from me, the room was empty. I sat against one wall, hands resting on my knees, facing the window. Every so often, I got to my feet and strolled the perimeter, dragging my finger along the walls. I stopped at the window, craning my neck upwards, trying to glimpse the outside.

Of course, I was not physically in such a room. But within the confines of my mind, I visited often. I closed my eyes and watched myself — a smaller-than-life representation — sit there. The me inside the room was not particularly emotive, just a little wistful and melancholy. The outside me cried. I was depressed.

***

Around the country, there is a growing movement to address, or at least bring awareness to, the prevalence of mental health disorders among people my age. The issue is real. Generation Z, those born between 1997 and 2012, is 86 percent more likely to experience depression compared to previous generations. The suicide rate has increased almost 40 percent since 2000, making it our second leading cause of death. Other generations are the baby boomers or millennials — we’re “the anxious generation.”

Reducing stigma, addressing environmental causes, and increasing access to treatment are important goals in tackling the country’s mental health crisis. And yet, these goals are a general solution to a hyper-individual struggle. “It’s okay to not be okay,”, “you are not alone” — this messaging might work in the aggregate, helping to prevent or limit depression’s effects. And yet, it doesn’t address emotion: the most crucial, personal dimension of depression. They don’t speak to each of the millions of young Americans feeling depression. They didn’t get me out of my white room.

What did? Treatment — in my case, weekly therapy — started to. If depression is the tormenting, paradoxical, simultaneous collision of intense sadness and incredible numbness, then therapy helped with the former. But there remained the numbness, the raw inability to construct any intense emotion, especially happiness. I no longer cried when I saw myself in the white room, but I was there all the same.

What allows each of us to reshape the metaphors in our minds? What reorients how we imagine our emotions? What allows feeling to return? No one speaks to these questions, the questions of the anxious generation and myself, more beautifully and more powerfully than Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet.”

***

“Letters to a Young Poet” is a series of 10 letters written between 1903 and 1908 from Rilke, the famous German poet and philosopher, to Franz Kappus, an Austrian military officer and aspiring poet. Kappus was 19 years old when he wrote Rilke in perhaps one of the first ‘cold emails.’ Rilke’s letters are brief but beautiful, conceptualizing depression, anxiety, and purposelessness in ways I’d never considered prior to buying the book on a whim the summer after my senior year of high school.

Kappus’s letters to Rilke, long believed lost, were discovered in the last decade, and recent editions — including mine — feature them. I remember being struck by the similarities between me and Kappus. I, too, was a young writer. I, too, found my loneliness “utterly inexplicable.” I, too, felt “my most beautiful hopes” slipping “out of my hands like water.” So while the poet replies to Kappus, Rilke speaks to me.

I finished “Letters to a Young Poet” in a week that summer. It brought me out of my depression by challenging the basic assumptions I had about it. I didn’t break out of my white box, but reimagined it.

“If what’s near you is far, then how enormous your whole extent is, reaching all the way up to the stars” Rilke writes in Letter Four, and my extents seemed to shift as I read. I’d always thought the emotional distance that depression created between me and the people I loved — a distance at once infinite and confined, endless whiteness crystallized into solid walls — was an irrevocable reality of the illness. The sheer fact overwhelmed me; I couldn’t imagine distance to be anything other than terrifying. To reconceptualize distance under the idea of ‘what might be’, rather than ‘what was,’ took away the constricting feeling. The white room’s walls ceased to exist, and the space became boundless once more.

The room’s confinement was its only alienating feature: the absence of color or texture unnerved me. “What we need, after all, is only: solitude, a vast inner solitude. Wandering within oneself, meeting no one for hours on end — that is what we need to attain. Being alone the way we were as children,” Rilke writes in Letter Six. These words attacked the most frightening part of my depression: that I no longer felt safe within myself. Being alone wasn’t recuperation, but caused active pain. And Rilke’s advice was contrary to what everyone, including my therapist, told me. What could be worse for an isolating condition than isolation? And yet, by relishing solitude rather than fighting it, I forced myself to become comfortable alone again. The whiteness faded, colors and contours returned.

With my extents and my colors returned, the frozen, detached quality of the room was the final reminder of my depression. Once more, Rilke offered an imaginative antidote. “These are also the reasons why the sadness passes: this new thing inside us, this added presence, has entered our heart, gone into its innermost chamber, and is no longer even there — it is already in our blood. Meanwhile we never found out what it was,” he writes in Letter Eight.

I wrestled with this idea for a long time. It was important for me to believe my depression was unique, a state imposed on me by outside circumstances. Accepting that such a state came from within me meant acknowledging it could come again simply by continuing to live. When I allowed myself the knowledge that I would feel sadness again, it reanimated my emotions, and something in my mind unpaused.

Of course, depression is not a white room for everyone. My mom, when I finally felt comfortable talking about mental health with her, told me about the ocean. When her mental health was bad, she struggled to keep her head above the surface. When it was good, she didn’t leave the ocean — she just remembered how to swim. One of my closest friends, whose major mental health struggles coincided with my own, thought of a bathtub — drowning, but only in a foot of water. When his depression was manageable, he remembered this fact. When it wasn’t, he was underwater.

Rilke speaks to our visceral imagination, reshaping our consciousness. “So much has to happen, has to go right, a whole constellation of circumstances has to be in place, for anyone to actually advise, much less help, another person,” Rilke writes at the outset of his letters. One of the most difficult parts of depression is understanding this fact. I believed it would take something external to lift me out of my state — the right words from my therapist, one fewer assignment to complete. I was wrong. The external can be helpful, but as a stimulus to internal feeling rather than a solution in itself.

The most powerful and disarming feature of “Letters to a Young Poet” is Rilke’s powerful affirmation of feeling, charting a course through turmoil with words alone. Even when the author assumes an instructive tone, it rarely feels like advice. It’s an emotional reminder, like a song from childhood, that evokes a former life. I recall a memory, a past kind of being, from within, and the white room dissolves. My mom’s arms start moving, her legs start kicking. My friend’s nose breaks the plane of the bathwater and he remembers how to breathe again.

***

A few weeks ago, I realized “Letters to a Young Poet” wasn’t the first time I encountered Rilke. Looking for a photo my mom shared with me, I came across a series of messages I’d sent to her in mid-April. They were a cry for help: I was overwhelmed, stressed, emotionally wrought, and just wanted all the feeling to go away.

In response, my mom sent a link to a Rilke poem. Untitled, the work is known simply by its first line: “My life is not this steeply sloping hour.” I find myself reflecting upon that line more and more in the time since I reshaped the white room. I’ve loaned my copy of “Letters to a Young Poet” to friends old and new, and in their responses to the text, I’ve realized just how many young people grapple with their mental health. We truly are the anxious generation.

We need something to remember that there is more to our lives than the steeply sloping hours in which we hurry. We need Rilke.

—Magazine writer Wyatt J. Meyer can be reached at [email protected].