Sometimes hope feels like a poem that I can't finish.
Maybe if I could craft the perfect sentence, hope would rest like a gorgeous butterfly on my lap.
That's definitely a huge amount of the impetus behind my urge to write. I am looking for hope. I am trying to find my way out of a house that has fallen down on me. I am the house and I have fallen in on myself. And no amount of rearranging the rubble ever saves me. But I collapse like this often. And I know this: one day soon I will wake up uncollapsed and hope will come easy again.
Living with Seasonal Affective Disorder can sometimes feel like trying to survive long enough to become someone else. Because sometimes the change back to "not depressed" feels as sudden as turning on a light switch. It can leave you feeling that your depression was made up. That the last 2 or 4 or 6 months were all in your head ...and they were but not in an unreal way. If depression has shown me anything, it is just how real all that stuff in your head is. You have to learn to both believe in how you experience the world but also not totally trust it. Because depression is a liar. But it is also a way of being. You can sit next to it, but you can't listen too long.
We all contain multitudes and some version of ourselves are more trustworthy than others. Accepting this has helped me reconcile my different realities.
