The scholarship opportunity was explained to me thus: a group of applicants would, via a long day of interviews, compete to win a limited number of scholarships. If I didn’t win one, I wouldn’t be able to afford to go, and my journalist dream would essentially die.

My friend Kelly agreed to fly to L.A. with me for my interview. She said she wanted a little vacation, but I suspect she was also afraid that if not under constant supervision, in my despondent fugue I would try to hop my rental car over the guardrail of the Santa Monica freeway.

L.A. was not, perhaps, the most natural environment for a clinically depressed Texan and a tough Irish-Catholic girl from Philly. One night, Kelly and I went out to a bar in Venice. Two guys came over and, rather than hitting on us, chided us for drinking vodka tonics—didn’t we know vodka sodas had fewer calories? (“Men know about calories?” we asked one another later.)

One night, we went to a small get-together at the house of my second cousin, a rocket scientist who gives driving directions like a person who understands trigonometry. On the way back I got us lost in the tangle of highway numbers. Kelly and I ended up far from where we needed to be, and we had no way of knowing how to get back.

I started crying, and the crying morphed into a sort of hollow wailing, which turned into banging on the steering wheel and screaming, “Oh…my…God!” For me, getting lost was yet another sign that I couldn’t survive in the world now that I had been abandoned by my boyfriend, job, and friends—except of course for Kelly, who sat in the passenger’s seat, staring blankly at me in abject terror. We found our hotel after hours of driving around L.A.’s side-street maze. I lay down, exhausted, and cried myself to sleep, a process that repeated itself nearly every night during our time in L.A.

The night before the USC interview, I woke up in a panic. It occurred to me that the rest of my life hinged on performing well the following day. I didn’t have time to be depressed. If I failed to convince the university higher-ups that I was worthy of a full scholarship, I thought, I would be stuck in this hole forever, moping around D.C. jobless, friendless, and alone.