Just wondering why Nickie can't do those things?
You express your situation as two different people. One strategy for finding some peace is to unite the two sides into one person. That means you need to give yourself permission to do all the behaviors you enjoy as the one person (and as a bonus, you get to stop doing the things you don't enjoy which you may have been doing to convince others the personality you're presenting is real.) You can do that without transitioning. When I did that, I found a place where I could always see *myself*, however faintly, in the mirror. I wasn't happy to stop there, but you might be.
But your question was how did I handle the depression when I was living the two-person model of life and had to switch away from the one I liked to the one I didn't? Same way you seem to be doing -- I handled it by being unhappy. I changed it up, going from mildly dissatisfied to full-on self-pitying funk -- it's the classic way.