Mara had the kind of depression that didn’t always look like depression. She answered emails. She bought groceries. She laughed at jokes. She could play a ninety-minute concert and talk cheerfully to people afterward. Then she would go home and become someone else. Night was the problem. At one in the morning her body would be tired but her mind would begin opening filing cabinets. An embarrassing conversation from 2009. Money. Her mother. A bad review. The possibility of developing an incurable disease. Whether she’d offended the bass player at rehearsal. Whether everybody secretly disliked her. Whether the fact that she was worrying about everybody secretly disliking her was itself evidence that she was becoming impossible to like.

At two-thirty she would still be awake. Her doctor prescribed sleeping pills. They worked. This was almost immediately another problem. The first night she took one, she slept for seven hours. Seven!! She woke amazed by the solution. But soon the pill itself joined the nightly committee. Should I take it? Do I actually need it? What if I don’t take it? What if I can’t sleep without it anymore? Am I addicted? What exactly qualifies as addicted? The medication that quieted her mind had become another thing for her mind to make noise about.

She wrote a song. She called it Little White Moon. The first verse was about something small waiting beside the bed. The second was about making a deal with darkness. In the chorus she sang about surrendering consciousness to a stranger who promised to return it in the morning. She never mentioned medication. People loved it. After concerts they approached her and explained what her song was about.

“It’s about trust,” one woman said.

“I thought it was about your relationship with your mother,” said another.

A music journalist described Mara as “an unusually sensitive observer of the hidden dependencies governing modern relationships.” Mara read that sentence three times.

“Sure,” she said.

She wrote another song about waking at four in the morning and immediately calculating how much sleep remained before sunrise. Critics called it a meditation on mortality. She wrote one about standing in the kitchen eating crackers because she couldn’t sleep. A blogger called it “a devastating portrait of late capitalism.” She began to wonder if she could write a song called I Am Currently Having Trouble Sleeping Because I Am Worried About Sleeping Pills and someone would explain that it concerned climate change. The strangest part was that people admired precisely what embarrassed her. They called her vulnerable. She felt frightened. They called her perceptive. She felt obsessive. They called her sensitive. She thought she was barely keeping herself together.