I seem to be having some remission or at least shift in my mental health issues, and looking back from here it strikes me how often my depression and anxiety expressed/expresses itself as "I don't know what to do or how to do it."

Sometimes I don't think this was even a cognitive inability to identify the steps, but a sense of some indefinable resource I needed and didn't have and didn't know how to get.

But sometimes it really was not knowing, and here's the thing. A healthy person who doesn't know what to do can move forward on the basis of trial and error, but when trial requires more energy and confidence than you have readily available and error can send you into a tailspin and severely wreck you, the situation looks a lot bleaker.