What Would Captain Janeway Do?: On Depression, My Lost Year, and Star Trek: Voyager

How rewatching ‘Star Trek: Voyager’ shed new light on a lost year of my life.

Scrolling through Netflix one night back in November, I pressed Play on S1E1 of Star Trek: Voyager and sat back to join Captain Kathryn Janeway as her ship is pulled across the galaxy to face a seventy-five-year journey home. I first watched the cult sci-fi series ten years ago in my flat in Spitalfields, feeding box set discs into my DVD player one after another.

As I’ve lived in London for fourteen years and had fourteen different addresses in that time, I organize my memories according to geography. But the year I first watched Voyager is a lost year for me, because I spent it in a cloud of depression. The rewatching, ten years later, has brought back emotions and experiences I’d thought were gone.

This story of a utopian future, where all of humanity and its allies have pulled together in the great United Federation of Planets, seems to have become a memory keeper for me, storing some of the things my brain didn’t hold onto in that difficult year. As a result, I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of memory. Can we ever truly forget something we used to know? “There’s nothing sadder than a missed opportunity” is an expression I use often, but until I rewatched the show I didn’t realize I got it from Voyager.

The return of a memory can be an almost physical experience, like squinting against the sun or struggling to make something out at a great distance. In the Star Trek universe, there’s always a logical explanation to lost memories—like in S7E10, “Shattered,” when Voyager slips out of temporal cohesion and Chakotay saves the day by collaborating with a Janeway from the past. Afterward, Chakotay cites the Temporal Prime Directive as the reason he can’t tell the Captain what happened. “Strange,” Janeway says. “A piece of your life you don’t know anything about.”

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All of Star Trek is in essence an exploration of a single question: What does it mean to be human? Voyager has always been my favorite among the Star Trek franchises because of the darkness at the heart of the storyline. Not only is Captain Janeway in a vulnerable situation, alone and far from home with her crew, she also has to live with the knowledge that it’s her fault. While an accident led Voyager astray, Janeway chose to protect the interests of the native Ocampa over the needs of her own crew and stranded them in the Delta Quadrant.

It’s this undertone that makes Captain Janeway, embodied by the peerless Kate Mulgrew, so compelling to watch: More than any other Star Trek show, Voyager shows us that doing the right thing comes with a cost. In the depths of my depression, Captain Janeway showed me that you can carry a weight of sadness in your heart, but still live your life.

As Voyager played while I pottered about the house this winter, I started seeing the show as a master class in solving problems. I found myself stopping in the middle of folding laundry or cutting vegetables to watch the Captain in awe. Janeway knows herself so well, and she never doubts her own ability. “You know, I’m really easy to get on with, most of the time,” she says to Kazon Maje Culluh in “State of Flux” (S1E11), full of sass and cool anger, terrifying despite her mumsy updo. “But I don’t like bullies, and I don’t like threats, and I don’t like you.”

I remember feeling such satisfaction as I watched that scene ten years ago in the bedroom of my tiny East London flat. At the time I was working shitty hours in my shitty job, and the story I’d been telling myself about “taking a break from ambition” was unraveling fast. I knew I was depressed. But why? Nothing about my situation seemed to justify feeling the way I did; I believed I hadn’t earned my depression. True, as a child I’d often felt unsettled, prone to worry and melancholy—but nothing had happened to me that hadn’t happened to a million other middle-class white girls. The only explanation I could think of was that I’d left the comfort and familiarity of the educational system and found myself unprepared.

What would Captain Janeway do? As I watched my heroine solve her seemingly impossible problems all those years ago, I would often experience a moment of inspiration: I need to get out of bed, I need to get a new job, and I need to get the fuck on with my life. But I couldn’t figure out how to get from where I was to where I wanted to be. I would stay in bed for days—avoiding sunlight, watching sci-fi on a loop, eating cheesy pasta and Maltesers chocolates. Depression is strange and terrible like that: It lays you low just when you need, more than ever, to be able to persevere.

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What’s the opposite of depression? If you’re being clinical, it’s “mania,” or if you’re being literal, it’s “vitality.” The psychologist Peter Kramer has said the opposite of depression is “resilience.” In Voyager, it’s Janeway’s resilience that keeps her crew alive. Over and over she saves them from doom, often with diplomacy or cunning, sometimes with brute force.

But there are times when even the formidable Captain Janeway finds herself unable to act. In S5E1, “Night,” when Voyager faces a two-year stretch through an empty expanse, Janeway seemingly experiences her own brush with depression. The Captain is near tears, full of sadness and fury, primarily directed at herself. “Guilt has been her constant companion,” remarks Tuvok. Inaction turns out to be her Achilles’ heel.

An alien attack is what eventually saves Janeway—it gives her something to do—but for most of us, recovering from depression is a far longer and harder process full of false starts and setbacks. What would Captain Janeway do? I asked myself all through that long, dark winter, as I watched the Starship Voyager press toward home. My own lowest point came one day in spring, when I was walking down the street and burst into tears. It terrified me because it seemed to come out of nowhere: Was this what it felt like to lose your mind? That was the day I accepted that I needed to start taking action to save myself.

I started taking St. John’s Wort after I realized I was depressed—that got me out of bed. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy helped me begin to understand that my negative thoughts weren’t necessarily the truth, but my mind playing tricks on me. I had an instinct that turned out to be right: I believed that getting a new job would make a big difference. When the pain of doing nothing finally became greater than the fear of failing, I applied—not for my ideal job, but for a few different positions I thought would be decent stepping stones.

With a new job came hope that I would be able to change my situation. I left a relationship that had run its course, and moved into a shared house. I picked up a pocket camera and started carrying it everywhere, as I figured that paying attention to the world instead of myself would be a good distraction. I made some new friends and started going out more, even when I didn’t want to at first. I discovered that two rum and sodas, and some early-millennium dance music in a gritty East London pub, could make me feel better every time.

If all of this sounds simplistic, rest assured it didn’t feel that way. Climbing out of depression is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Ten years and eight houses on from that teary day on the street, I’m still living in London, and I’ve worked out a bit more about what I want—work that challenges me; a partner who holds my attention. I no longer expect to succeed on my first try. Depression was part of my mental landscape for so long, so I’m slightly baffled every time I realize it’s no longer a part of my day-to-day existence. Relief floods me when I remember how it used to feel. I know I was lucky: The things I did to try and get better happened to work.

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We always knew Star Trek: Voyager would end with the crew getting home, but when they finally do, it’s not how you expect. Captain Janeway breaks every rule to get them back: In S7E25, “Endgame,” an older and more pragmatic Admiral Janeway travels back from the future.

The Admiral knows the journey home will cost them more than she’s willing to pay, and she’s there to set things right. She doesn’t tell the younger, more idealistic Captain everything she knows—“because I remembered how stubborn and self-righteous I used to be, and I figured you might try and do something stupid.” But then Admiral Janeway decides to “revive a few old habits” and join the Captain, her younger self, in one last mission—this time doing the right thing and getting home.

As much as rewatching Voyager has shed new light on that lost year of my life, some things still remain a mystery. I may never fully understand how I made it here from that 2006 version of me sitting in that tiny flat watching Voyager, too miserable to take out the trash. I always pictured depression as a deep ravine, sometimes close enough to risk slipping into, other times at a distance. These days, I can just about make out that ravine, but it’s so far away that it feels like a different life. With the memories I thought were lost has come a new sympathy for the girl I used to be; I wish I could tell her not to be so hard on herself, but unlike Janeway’s, my experience of time moves in just one direction.

Hard as that winter was, I am glad to have recovered some of my memories of it. I know more about myself now, and I know I will never take my happiness, or resilience, for granted. “I’m glad I got to know you again,” Admiral Janeway tells her younger self at the series conclusion, as they set out to bring their crew home. “A lot has happened to me since I was you.”