Your anxiety and depression won't last for ever. They will only last as long as it takes you to find the method for recovery that works for you.
You live in fear of when it's going to hit. So apart from the discomfort of the bad feelings when they come, you fear the fear even before the bad feelings come.
And fear is your mortal enemy, it is what keeps your nerves in a state of over sensitisation that is responsible for your anxiety and the feeling of depletion that can come out of anxiety.
There are people who reach a stage in their recovery when they feel no fear - neither before the bad feelings come nor when they come. They know that by not responding to the shock of first fear with second fear they are depriving their nervous systems of the fear hormones that keep their nerves over sensitised. They know that if they stop flooding their nervous system with fear it will begin to lose its sensitivity. When finally all that sensitisation yields you will cease to experience anxiety and depletion.
So how do you stop fearing your bad feelings and so recover? You agree to accept the bad feelings for the moment. That's right, you accept them without any resistance, you learn to co-exist with them for the time being.
You stop fighting the symptoms because fighting only causes more tension and stress - and you need less not more of those. So no more fighting your symptoms: you surrender to them, run up the white flag (only for the duration). You stop testing to see if it's there today because it doesn't matter. In fact it's more helpful if you do feel the bad feelings so you can practice Acceptance.
Acceptance will bring you recovery because you cannot both accept and fear something. Once you frame your mind to accept then you stop feeding your nerves with fear and slowly, little by little, your nerves return to normal. And so do you.
But this is no five-minute fix. You're not going to feel better in a day or two. But with practice and persistence the Acceptance method will help you slay the dragon and you will recover.
You know how to carry on as normal when bad feelings come, put a brave face on it, do the hard thing. After all, if you didn't know it before then you know it now: this illness will not disable you, anxiety alone cannot kill you or make you lose your mind.
Acceptance brings understanding, reassurance and the certain hope that this illness will not blight your life for ever. I hope that it brings the blessings of respite and early recovery to all.
