There’s this moment when the world dissolves around you. When sky and ground melt into a single canvas of blinding white. An arctic whiteout.

No shadows. No definition. No fucking reference points at all. Nothing.

I experienced this during my recent white whale expedition to Svalbard. That day, lost in the whiteout, was one of the most difficult and dark I’ve ever had. Not just physically demanding, but mentally crushing in a way that still haunts me when I close my eyes.

“It’s this white world… there’s nothing to focus on, nothing to take your attention away.”

Sound familiar? It should.

Because anxiety and depression create the same damn whiteout. Inside your head. That mental state where all markers of progress vanish. Where the normal boundaries between thoughts and reality blur into a single, overwhelming void.

I remember standing there in actual white, but I’ve stood in the mental version too. That space where your brain can’t distinguish between real threats and imagined ones. Where the absence of clear reference points makes everything—absolutely everything—feel like quicksand.

The darkness sweeps in. Not gentle, philosophical darkness. The gut-churning kind that whispers terrible things.

“If I drop to the back and just go slower, and I just ski off into the whiteness. Nobody would care.”

That’s depression talking. That’s the voice that rises when all external anchors disappear, when your mind turns savage against itself in the absence of evidence to the contrary.

And the only way through? “Hang on for dear life.”

Here’s what nobody tells us about mental health struggles: sometimes moving forward isn’t about healing or fixing or curing. Sometimes it’s just about surviving until the colors start to return.

Because they will return.

“The white turned soft pink.” The moment out white our in the Arctic slowly faded away.

That first hint of color, that first moment when the crushing sameness break, isn’t the end of the journey. But it’s proof the whiteout isn’t permanent. It’s evidence your brain is lying when it tells you this emptiness is all there is.

Mental health isn’t a straight line. It’s a series of whiteouts and color returns. Of moments lost in the void and moments anchored in reality.

The take-home isn’t some magical cure. It’s simpler and harder: keep fucking moving. Even when you can’t see where you’re going. Even when the voice in your head says stopping would be easier.

Keep moving until the white turns pink.

Because it will. It always does.

The whiteout doesn’t last forever. But while you’re in it, surround yourself with people who understand what it means to be lost in white. People who won’t bullshit you with toxic positivity, but who’ll walk beside you, keeping you tethered until your own colors return.

That’s the brutal truth about anxiety and depression. Not that they’ll never touch you, but that you can survive their whiteouts. Again and again. As many times as necessary.

Keep moving. The pink is coming.