Era: Lockdown Depression 2020
The period from approximately April 2020 to September 2020 represents Steven’s first documented sustained depression, one he did not name as such until after he had emerged from it. The September 13, 2020 journal entry is the first retrospective account. By then, six months had passed since his last journal entry.
The shape of it
Steven describes the depression as operating under a veil of denial: “j’ai eu tendance à vivre dans un déni assez prononcé qui m’a donné l’illusion que j’avais un contrôle total de la déroulée des événements.” He believed himself to be in control. He was not.
He had quit Ipso, the country had locked down, and the electric Paris life he had landed in, job, apartment, and social scene, was suddenly paused. He had no job, dwindling savings, no structure, and a Paris locked down around him. The pandemic, he wrote, was also “maybe a good thing for the world and maybe for the earth.” The detachment from personal consequences reads, in retrospect, as dissociation.
What happened during those six months
The journal does not capture the interior of this period because he was not writing. What is available:
- Continued ketamine use (micro-doses, including at work when he had work)
- Going out during any allowed periods (“une consommation de drogues dans un spectre hédoniste et nihiliste explosif”)
- A period in the after-party scene with afters lasting three to four days
- Social time with Mateo, a Paris peer, including a documented evening in approximately April 2020: “Mateo et moi étions dans le salon en train de boire un verre de vin, prendre une trace de K et refaire le monde.” That evening ended with a KERNEL PANIC. Steven found a New Year’s Eve 2014 photo while searching his phone and wrote it down with sweating hands. The photo’s contents and meaning are not documented.
- Eventually: a breaking point
The breaking point and resolution
In September 2020, he “atteint un seuil”, an accumulation of things bad enough that “les étoiles se sont alignées et j’ai gagné assez de force pour enfin taper du poing sur la table.” He consulted a doctor and was prescribed Séroplex (escitalopram) in an emergency situation. He also stopped smoking cigarettes the same Sunday. “Autant faire une bonne grosse table rase.”
He kept a journal intensively for the following week (September 13–23, 2020), documenting the Séroplex side effects (nausea, tremors, anxiety, somnolence), his cravings for sugar and weed, the insomnia, the social re-emergence. By September 23 he writes: “IT’S WORKING, I’M WORKING.”
Ordo ab chao
The September 16 entry is headed “ORDO AB CHAO.” He summarizes the descent not as failure but as construction: “j’ai quand même, assuré et construit des building blocks (mainly sociaux) qui me seront je suppose plus qu’utile par la suite.” He had hit bottom and chosen to come back up. He writes that he had to make himself understand things.
Projects during recovery
In the final days of September 2020, he was working on: smolRSS, ModernTabbar, CovidTracker (iOS). He had recently joined the Covid Tracker team after following the founder on Twitter and proposing to build the iOS app.
Pattern significance
This depression is the first clear instance of the full cycle: euphoric arrival → self-sabotage of the plateau → descent → rock bottom → prescribed medication → intensive journaling → rapid recovery declaration → relapse of pattern. The September 2020 recovery was real but incomplete; the same cycle recurred in 2022–2023, and again in the period preceding January 2026.