Out of the Soup and into the Swamp!!!

Viv Schnabel

Since we last talked: New job. New home. New city, new partner, new hobbies, new goals (if I decide they’re goals; I take my time deciding, these days).

New—and this took many seasons, was not, in fact, so abrupt as it may appear to you now—new name.

Viv; nice to meet you.

Behind many of these changes is a small human accident, the sort of accident that happens to other people, not to you (I have you covered, karmically, by taking this one): on a random day in January of this year, I fell while rock climbing and hit my head.

When I hit my head, I got a concussion, and depression along with it. This was, the Internet and to a lesser extent doctors told me, not uncommon. Consider it your quarterly reminder that the thing that determines our entire experience of the world and everything in it, including ourselves and all of the people we love, is a real, not-invincible lump of meat in a not-too-sturdy bowl.¹

So: taking one for the cosmic team, my meat got hurt. My shit got rocked. And when my concussion healed, my depression didn’t.

This is what happened, and how I dealt with it—am dealing with it—and what I’ve learned.

A disclaimer that will be longer than I want it to be: I’ve read my fair share of mental health memoirs and essays and poetry and autofiction, often in the hopes that they’ll save me from my own woes. In my experience, they actually read almost exclusively like one long vent. The implicit theses of this kind of writing are twofold: 1) it is a matter of moral urgency to know about the bad things happening to people in the world, and 2) the healing force of such writing resides in its ability to procure empathy, and empathy is, again, a moral and often political good.²

I get the impulse, and I see the long history and utility of the above two premises. Also: it just plain feels good to write about your shit life, to make someone else hold it. If what helps you keep living with your pain is putting it into a narrative form and telling yourself that that narrative will fix someone else’s, or even some of the world’s, problems, how could I even begin to deny you that?

But I have a lot of qualms with that brand of writing. It often ends up implicitly positing the sharing of the pain itself as the solution to the pain; its intense focus on subjective experience and lack of research legwork can preclude communion, and be horribly depressing to read; in its care not to posit solutions or gesture towards a way forward (out of, I’m guessing, a fear of the critique of those ideas), it is more conducive to paralysis than action, and in fact, I think, preemptively forgives its author for not taking action by romanticizing the pain.

On a more concerning note, it’s at least partially responsible for the absurd and dangerous argument that an author’s pain, up to and including suicidality, is “worth it” because of the works of literature they have given the world about said pain. I think Michael Clune is a genius, and I’m glad that his debut novel Pan exists, but I would rather another human being never need have suffered a panic attack than that beautiful exploration of panic attacks ever have been written. I would rather Sylvia Plath, David Foster Wallace, Virginia Woolf, John Berryman, and Ernest Hemingway never have written a single word than died by suicide. And I have built my entire life around the study of literature.³

This “worth-it” story is one of the many that we tell ourselves to make peace with the inevitability of suffering. (Other flavors: “pain is what makes joy meaningful,” “pain is what connects us to other people,” “suffering is a test from God.”) This particular story, though, is one I’d like us to stop telling, or at least tell a little bit less, in favor of some other ones.

Hopefully some alternative narratives will come through in the incredibly partial and apparently uber-specific lists and tips and recommendations that I offer in the coming pages. Narratives like: reach for help before it gets scary bad. Do not expect yourself to get through this alone. Slow the fuck down and be disappointing and let that disappointment and resulting self-forgiveness make you more generous towards other people.

I will no doubt risk (as I often do) sounding over-optimistic and silly and naive and surface-level in my solutions and nuggets of wisdom.

But: the surface is also a level. Depression pretends to paint a more accurate picture of reality by refuting the surface—turning every moment into an occasion for deep (isolating) reflection. Depression loves long, swooping, black-gray spirals of existential inquiry—loves to deconstruct, to scoff at faith and schema and suggestion and multiple perspectives. It claims—in my head, at least—to be all-encompassing, pervasive, almost godlike. How could one ever hope to do it justice in, say, bullet points? Wherefore Emojis? How dare one exclamation point?

Let’s take a chance, hazard a guess: that the way out is to resist depression’s promise that profundity is always what is called for, is always the key to the most accurate picture of the world. Let’s go open some tiny, very partial doorways into this infinite-feeling disease.

So: viva la maxim! Que vivan los lists! Here are some ideas, starting with one of my biggest kernels of wisdom.

1) No one can save you, but everyone can help you.

My entire life—the fact of my still being alive—is a testament to the love and generosity and cleverness of the human race. I could, and want to, live my life as a walking love letter to my friends. There’s a reason that inpatient programs, PHPs, and IOPs all center around group therapy.⁴ We help each other out of the scary place.

When I first fell into a serious depression, I (oddly, and very specifically) found myself thinking that if I had been living in a co-op house full of women—who nurtured and cooked for and kept an eye on one another—they would never have let my pain get as extreme as it did.

Let’s ignore my hashtag mommy issues momentarily to admit to ourselves that that’s also true of humanity generally: we were never meant to survive alone, and on a fundamental and instinctual level, people know that. We are wired to help one another.⁵ If you’ve surrounded yourself with halfway decent people, none of them are going to let you remain in extreme pain for long.

There was a time early on in my depression when I knew that I needed to be kept company around the clock for my own safety, and the second I reached out to my friends, they showed up. They let me sleep over, they read to me, they cooked for me (shoutout to my friend El’s insane vegan shepherd’s pie, which was one cubic foot of dense heaven topped with a ground-parsley smiley face, and yes, after they left, I ate it in big cold chunks for a week because I was too depressed to microwave it), they arrived at all hours of the night on a dime. They accompanied me on grocery runs and scary doctor visits. They watched movies with me and let me fall asleep on them halfway through.

Long story short: they rocked, far beyond the call of duty, and they were glad to do it. All it took was some bravery and humility in asking for their help.

If you have no idea where to start, here’s the actual text I sent to around 10 people in my life—feel free to copy-paste:

Hey! My depression and panic have gotten really, really bad all of a sudden and I’m finding it really hard to be alone without getting into some scary places mentally. I’m talking to my doctor on Monday about upping my meds and whether she thinks I need to go inpatient, but until then (and around that) I’m trying to assemble a group of friends who might be willing to spend a few hours/a night with me so that I’m minimizing the time I spend alone with my thoughts. Would you by any chance be up for that? It can be chill—just working side by side. I won’t take it personally at all if that doesn’t sound like sthg you have capacity for. But trying to sort this out on my own has NOT been working lol and it is, I think, high time that I lean on my friends. Know that when I am in a better place I will absolutely return the favor!!! And I love you! And thank you for being my friend.

I know it can feel embarrassing, but also, and sorry to be blunt: every single person in your life would rather you be massively inconvenient and soppy and tedious than be dead. Do them the favor of trusting them.

Your depressed brain might insist that, even if they tried, your friends wouldn’t understand—that the pain is far too big to be eased by anything other than, like, a divine bolt of lightning. Which is, in my experience, quite wrong, and brings me to:

2) Many little things! Any little thing.

There will not be one fell swoop where everything is fixed and absolved and disappears into heavenly glitter never to plague you again. BUT: every possible thing you can do helps—often way more than your depressed brain is capable of anticipating. I can’t count the number of times that I did something that I thought would make me feel a little teensy bit better—going for a walk, calling a friend, taking a shower—and it made me feel way, way, way better, sometimes even back to normal.

Here are some things I’ve found helpful, categorized by type:

I | NERVOUS SYSTEM REGULATION

Are you HALT (Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired)? 90% of the time, when I am starting to feel Very Bad Mentally, I am also tired or hungry, and taking a nap or having a snack works absolute wonders for my brain. One of the fun and admittedly slightly embarrassing aspects of depression is how the most deep, existential questions can evaporate into thin air once your physical and emotional needs are met. Sometimes it really ain’t that deep.⁶

Put an orange in the freezer, and grab it when you are feeling an overpowering or unpleasant feeling and need some relief.

I cannot overstate this: the freezer orange is one of the single most effective tools in my mental health toolkit. It comes from Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), a modality developed in the 80s by Marsha M. Linehan to more effectively treat people with BPD experiencing chronic suicidality and emotional dysregulation. The theory is that intense emotions activate your sympathetic nervous system (adrenaline and cortisol are pumping, heart rate is up), and a sudden change in temperature activates your parasympathetic nervous system,⁷ dropping your heart rate and allowing you to think more clearly.

When you remove said orange from the freezer, you might hold it against your sternum in the middle of your chest (“icing your vagus nerve” in the wellness parlance of our day—I HAVE NOT RESEARCHED THIS), or roll it between your hands, or put it on the back of your neck.

I love the freezer orange. I cherish the freezer orange. I want the freezer orange to have lesbian babies with me. In my experience, it has eased even very acute feelings that make it feel like the world is crumbling into a void of pure darkness and evil, like panic and existential despair.

It doesn’t even have to be an orange. It could be a humble bag of frozen peas, or a frosty washcloth, or that pint of soup you forgot about that is crusting over with feathery tendrils of ice and is definitely inedible by now.⁸

II | EXERCISE

Even if I tell you that multiple studies have shown that exercise is as effective as antidepressants at relieving symptoms, your body is screaming ABSOLUTELY NOT, WISE GUY. Right? When you’re in the thick of it, anything other than laying on the couch and continuing to breathe can feel nigh impossible.

This, dear reader, is when our boat docks at one of my most cherished locations: Compromise City. (Population: all life forms.)

• This is relative based on your current level of mobility. Some ideas:
• Take the stairs.
• If you get to places on public transit, get off one stop early and walk the rest of the way.
• If you drive a car, park a little further away from your destination than you normally would, and walk the rest of the way.
• Do a senior workout video. (They rock, particularly because they start veeeeery slowly and easily, and always include optional modifications to take the exercise up or down a level.)
  • Here’s a fifteen-minute one that is 2000s-y and lo-fi in a very pleasing way. The whole channel is great and has all kinds of different workouts.
  • This one’s from a mother and daughter duo whom I find very relaxing.
  • Here’s a seated one! Meredith rocks.
  • This channel isn’t specifically for seniors but is great for beginners and has a huge variety and fun tunes.
• This person makes dance workouts that are exactly one song long.
• Call a friend and walk around the neighborhood while you do it.
• Is there a sport you love? Make plans with a friend to do it weekly.
• Put on a song you adore and dance to it—or go line dancing (my current obsession).

III | DELIGHTS

Spice up your life! This spring, I was feeling Bad and put up a story on my Instagram asking people to email me reasons to keep going. Total strangers emailed me—and friends whom I’d had no idea had struggled with depression and suicidality. One person wrote:

do as much cool shit as you possibly can, get yourself little treats, dress extra nice, watch your favorite tv show to fall asleep, eat ice cream for dinner, take a bath first thing in the morning, indulge indulge indulge in whatever you want. When life sucks you have to work extra hard to have fun in order to balance it out

You know what delights you, but depression might be making it hard to remember. (And, again, to accurately estimate how much joy those things will bring you.) Novelty is also huge for reminding your brain that you don’t know everything, that some of the conclusions you’ve drawn about the world and life may be premature. In that spirit, here are some delights that have helped me that you could try:

• Did you know that there’s a perfume that smells exactly like chocolate and for three dollars you can order a sample of it and spray it in your body whenever you want, for fun, for no reason at all?
  • Also this one smells like strawberry mochi and this one smells like marzipan.
  • Hilde Soliani, who makes the latter, has all kinds of freaky interesting shit out there. Smell like salted strawberries! Salt and pepper! Bread!
  • Three other super-interesting perfume houses to confuse and intrigue you:
    • Zoologist (each perfume is named after an animal, but is, mercifully, vegan)
    • D.S. & Durga (home of my current daily perfume, Coriander, but also whipping up perfect little oddities like “Steamed Rainbow” and “Concrete After Lightning”)
    • Clue (described as “Midwestern Magical Realism,” playing with scents like mushroom and dandelion and crushed porcelain⁹)
• Go get ice cream with tiny chocolate chips. The social connection aspect of this is a key feature, so don’t go to the supermarket and buy a tub. I’m talking old-fashioned, countertop, awkward-little-exchange-with-the-teenage-scooper, one-scoop, dripping-down-the-cone, as-much-of-a-project-as-it-is-a-treat ice cream. And mini chocolate chips because they make me believe in God. Whenever I walk around the block eating ice cream I feel like I’ve entered a universe where my sole job is to look contentedly and curiously at the world and passersby around me, and I’m perfect at it. You too can capture this feeling in your sugary little hands.
• If you purchase a coffee scrub and rub it under your armpits in the shower you can pretend that you’re in that scene in Portrait of a Lady on Fire where they rub hallucinatory drugs into their armpits and it’s very yonic and sexy and luxurious. I was gifted this one and it’s great.
• Find as many covers as you can of a song that you’re obsessed with. This is maximum-level satisfying. I recently did it with Joan Baez’s “Silver Dagger” and wow. Put them in a little playlist so you can listen to them all in a row on a walk and think, heh, nice.
• Learn a new skill! This is great because it a) absorbs you in a project, which is super fun and purpose-giving and relieving, b) affords you a tiny bit of mastery, which is HUGE for self-confidence and, c) reminds your brain that it doesn’t know how everything is going to shake out and is not a perfect predictor of the future. Things I have learned since being diagnosed with depression:
  • How to play guitar (a tiny bit)
  • How to make nature monoprints with gelli plates HOW COOL IS THAT. I’M PRINTING LEAVES AND SHIT.
  • So many line dances
  • How to use a sewing machine and make a rudimentary tote bag
  • How to make vegan ricotta and why someone would want or need a cheesecloth
  • Tataki zome, the Japanese practice of printing flowers and leaves onto cloth by hammering them
  • How to do a breaststroke! I took classes at my community pool, which I recommend separately and wholeheartedly.

3) Here are some more things I recommend, split up by verb (how sensual):

Listen

• My favorite podcast, Worlds Beyond Number. It’s D&D done by folks from the Dropout universe (if you’re not familiar, it’s basically excellent, earnest, fun lovin’ improv). The sound design is perfect, the characters are so cool and confront genuine moral questions, the descriptions are lush and surprising, and there are so many moving moments! I’ve learned real things about life and humanity by engaging in this fantasy world—and that says it all, I believe.
• People whose voices you find comforting talking about any subject. Some of my favorites: Emily Nagoski (the audiobook of Come As You Are), Alie Ward (Ologies podcast), John Green (the audiobook of The Anthropocene Reviewed), George Saunders.
• Albums and playlists¹⁰:
  • If you want to feel like the hero of an 80s sports movie and also Madonna is there
  • If you are a plant
  • If you want to dance without breaking a sweat
  • If you want an electrifying melange of Libyan reggae, Egyptian jazz, Lebanese folk, and Algerian soundtrack music
• Truly mesmerizing and not-soulless piano
• Two meditations from Tara Brach (Buddhist perspective), whose talks are laden with parables that I find very instructive and comforting in a sort of sermon-y way: transforming fear and seeing joy alongside sorrow.
• Depresh Mode, a podcast that I was initially drawn to because it includes interviews with some of my favorite comedians, but is also genuinely soothing and optimistic in a not-cloying way. Here’s an episode with Hanif Abdurraqib! Here’s 13 reasons for hope in mental health.
• This song.

Read

• This essay by Heather Havrilesky is the best one I’ve ever read about depression. It offers such a compelling answer to “what’s-the-point-of-it-all” existentialism that I transcribed three pages of it by hand and keep them posted on my bedroom wall.¹¹
• Zero at the Bone by Christian Wiman—highly lyric, highly citational meditations on despair and faith and why we as a species keep dragging ourselves along through it all.
• Moosewood Cookbook and its sequel, Enchanted Broccoli Forest, by Mollie Katzen. These are hand-written and -illustrated vegetarian cookbooks from the late seventies, and they have weird fun seventies-y recipes aplenty: chilled cherry-plum soup, stuffed cantaloupe, devilled egg pie, tofu-nut balls.
• Fiction-wise, let’s do this by mood:
  • If you need something sprawling, distracting, multigenerational, full of magical realism: Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. I truly believe that that trio of books is among the best in all of human history.
  • If you need something sprawling and engrossing but are more of a jock: Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. My depressed friend Shruti and I are obsessed with it. It’s very queer!
  • If you want something shorter, offering life-affirming alternatives to our capitalist technodystopia, but also strange and funny and sweet: Robin Sloan’s Sourdough.
  • I’m personally addicted to a genre I call “funny-smart femme undergrad observes things.” If you also think you’ll like that: Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s Catalina.
  • If you regularly fall into existential despair about the end of the world, as I do: Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven! It offers a strangely beautiful, to-me comforting vision of a post-apocalyptic world.
  • LOSE YOURSELF IN PURE FANTASY: The Starving Saints by Caitlin Starling. Two words that are pure kryptonite for me: sapphic cannibalism.

Watch

• My Neighbor Totoro, which I’m sure you’ve already seen, but the recommendation still stands. It has a feature that few other movies do—namely, nothing truly bad happens in it. The illustrations are vibrant and tranquil and green, green, green; good for the aching soul.
• As many dog videos as you can possibly find. I don’t have to tell you that Instagram is a hellscape, BUT it might be useful to tell you that I save reels that tickle and delight me to a folder called “happy” and that it has saved me many a time. Unlike many of the other tips collected here, that one’s easy to do in public!
• Halloween Wars and Cake Boss. Two alternatives to The Great British Baking Show, which may for you, as it has for me, exhausted its mental-health-saving potential. The former includes pumpkin carving (!) and is spooky-silly, and the latter is pure nostalgia and incredibly hilarious.
• Over The Garden Wall. Very autumnal but holds its weight in any season. The perfect length, in my opinion.
• Make Some Noise, which I hinted at loving earlier—side-achingly funny improv.

Eat

Okay. Here’s another hard truth: every body is different, but you will probably feel way better if you eat plants and whole grains than if you eat small gobs of sugar all day.

When I was super depressed, all I wanted to eat was small gobs of sugar, which I think is pretty natural—my body was exhausted and wanted an easy, quick hit of energy. But it threw me through the wringer of sugar highs and crashes and never kept me full for long, meaning that I boomeranged the Sisyphisean task of feeding myself back to myself even faster.

Here are some things that helped me feed my body when I was operating on zero energy—and, frankly, sometimes zero appetite:

• Premade dosa batter that you can ladle right out into a hot pan. My friend Adi unwittingly changed my life by dropping this off, among many other staples from an Indian grocery store, one day when I was immobile.
• Roast a big sheet pan of vegetables of your choice. If you season them well and use plenty of olive oil, they will taste good even on their own.
• Make rice or farro or barley or freekeh in a rice cooker. Dump and leave it! Eat it alongside the veggies, and maybe a protein, and your body will thank you.
• Pantry-staple stew (I added vegan sausage). Say what you will about Allison Roman, but this is delicious, super hearty, and quite easy.
• I scanned a few of my favorite easy veggie-y recipes here:
  • Easy delicious tomato soup
  • Freezable breakfast burritos
  • Stir-fried tofu skin & tomato
  • Truly addictive spinach with sesame sauce
  • Very veggie-packed stew
  • Red cabbage pasta (you would think this would never come in handy but on multiple occasions I have been craving red cabbage, badly, and yes I’m mentally ill but this meets those cravings with an alacrity and wisdom unmatched by, god forbid, a “thai peanut noodle salad” where a white lady insists you throw handfuls of the stuff in raw).

Play

I know less about this than my hashtag gamer friends, but I do know that on a night when I was absolutely positively certain that I could not go on, and was so dissociated that I got lost on my way to my girlfriend’s house, which was not an unfamiliar location by that point, and was starving but nauseous and weepy and vacant and not even the boba I was carrying to her could afford me a modicum of pleasure, she sat me down and guided me to play Monument Valley, and I played the game the entire way through in one sitting and felt awe and excitement and curiosity and was able to eat a whole plate of stir-fry afterwards (this is perhaps unrelated).

The point is: distraction isn’t always a bad thing. I used to feel really guilty about trying to distract myself from my depressed thoughts and feelings, because they felt so real—the world is dying! it is entirely the fault of the human race! the most vulnerable are suffering while the rich base policies around not giving a fuck about other people! etc., ad infinitum.

However: you have to like the world to want to protect it, and you can’t make much of a difference while sitting on the couch staring at the wall and talking to no one and wanting to die, and seeing the ten thousand sorrows without their attendant ten thousand joys is not clarity, it’s another form of delusion.

I’m still working on this, but for me the solution starts by reminding myself that I can better address the things that bring me despair when I’m in a more regulated state, preferably even with other people, and that the world will survive without a depressed twentysomething worrying about it for an hour, that it’ll still be there after I’m done taking care of myself. And then I give myself a break from the spiral!

So, yes, my game recs:

• Q-less. This one is analog (sorry not sorry; you know the person writing this essay). It’s like solo bananagrams, or tiny wicked-hard Scrabble. You can also play with friends!
• Wizard 101. The nostalgic game from your (or at least my) childhood is still available to download, and real people still play it, and it’s just as much fun as an adult.
• Monument Valley. The one that saved me. Free to download on an evil little smartphone near you. Sound on for this one!
• Witchy Life Story (this name is a crime, but we press on). You are a queer, choose-your-own-gender witch trying to help a village prepare for its autumn harvest festival. You mix spells and tend a garden and it’s visually stunning and very very slow-paced.
• Hello Kitty Island Adventure. I have not played this, nor do I own a Nintendo Switch, which is where I think you play this, and as I write that I realize the audacity of including a “gaming” section in my “depression essay” despite having “little to no actual gaming experience,” but anyway my girlfriend loves it and her taste is immaculate, so.

Apps

(Sorry this one isn’t a verb. Again, practice being disappointing, my beleaguered ducklings.)

• You already have a Notes app or equivalent on your phone, and I want you to:
  • Post an Instagram story or other community-board-esque way of reaching many people in your life asking them to tap “yes” if you can cold-call them when you’re feeling down.
  • Make a list of those people and their phone numbers in your Notes app.
  • Pin it to the top of your Notes app so it’s very easy to get to the next time you’re going through it.
• Finch
  • You take care of a small bird by completing real-world tasks of your choosing (i.e., brush teeth, meditate, name three things I’m grateful for, make a fart noise with my mouth on my girlfriend’s exposed midriff, etc.).
  • You can connect with your friends and send each other virtual hugs and collect special outfits and furniture for your bird by going on adventures.
• How We Feel
  • A very soothing, aesthetically pleasing way of logging your feelings. I log mine twice a day. Helpful for tracking patterns in your emotions over time!
• Opal
  • Very good screentime app. I highly recommend you use it to give yourself a hard time limit on social media and/or block your access to social media at night.

Miscellaneous ideas

1. Hang out with old people and listen to their stories. Engage in political activism with them (many of them are very good at this, because they have a lot of time and a lot of passion). Visit museums and look at the long arc of human history, and the small particulars of certain places at certain times. Volunteer at a lesbian archive; I did this when I still lived in Boston and it fucking rocked.
2. Try talking about your sadness in another language. Does it change character in Spanish? Is it as convincing?
3. Depression narrows your view so much. It gives you horse blinders for joy. More than that: it colors everything in its image, giving you Taylor’s Version of everything, if Taylor was depression personified. That’s not all there is. It’s simply not true. SO: try making a list of other things that exist in the world. They don’t have to be happy things. They just have to be things outside of your little corner of life. For instance:
   • Somewhere a hockey team is practicing, and the rink smells like sweat and nacho cheese.
   • Somewhere someone is thrilled with the blueberry plant in their home garden, and a little afraid of the vast quantity of blueberries now in their possession, and is plopping blueberries into little containers to give to their neighbors.
   • Somewhere a teenager is discovering, slowly, that they might be trans.
   • Someone’s dying their hair with box dye.
   • A budding writer is writing fanfiction about a movie you’ve never watched and will never watch.
   • And so on and so forth.

Where we are now

And by “we” I mean me, but also by proxy mean people who consider and sometimes follow the above advice.

I moved in with my sister in Gainesville, Florida and am taking a leave of absence from my PhD program to work at a bookstore. I’m long-distance from my girlfriend and have left so many of my friends behind, but I’m slowly building something here. I hang out with a retired crazy-smart rail-thin poet, and a married lesbian couple only a little older than me but maternal in their higher-paycheck-y home and dogs, and my sister, who has turned into (has always been) a really cool person, and a trans filmmaker who loves lifting weights, and my queer billiards team (this is a thing that is possible to do in the world). It’s worth being alive just to witness how beautiful they all are, to try to tell you about it.

The depression has loosened its grip on me; or perhaps, more accurately, I’ve learned to loosen my grip on it—to not freak out when a wave of it strikes me but instead listen to the pain it’s trying to show me, and gather the resources I need to feel it and so release it. I am often happy, very often stable-feeling, even more often privy to the wide range of human emotions that come with living a full life and not being dissociated.

Most days, I want to be alive, or am at least confident that I can make it work. I’m working to forget old rubrics of what my life should or could look like, and I’m proud of myself for that. I’m adapting. I’m searching for more and more and more reasons to keep going, and they arrive by the plateful every day.

If you read this far, thank you. I ended up being long-winded even though I didn’t want to be, but I think that’s the writer in me more than the depressive. That’s all for now. I love you! I believe in you! Thank you!