This world will break your heart. 

Over and over again, if you are paying attention, if you are showing up authentically, if you have any amount of hope or faith or love for this planet and its people, you will break. You will not always be fully healed before it starts again. You will not always be healed at all. Because it is big and hurting and so full of pain. 

I am amazed at the human capacity to digest suffering without disintegrating. I am amazed at the ability to disintegrate and then rebuild. But I don't want to be amazed. I want my loved ones to be safe. I want all of their loved ones to be safe. Everyone, everywhere is someone's loved one. And I want better for all of us.

Being alive is harder some seasons than others. For example, this season has felt like one marked by the constant feedback that while I have lots of people that love me, not very many of them are satisfying relationships that actually meet my needs. In so many ways, I did this to myself. I was born a mediator by both nature and nurture, but while I'm trying to help so many people get along and be heard, very few people return the favor. I have a whole list of friends who I no longer go to for advice because I just don't like their methods. 

I was raised in a "speak the truth in love" environment so everyone from my growing up feels like they can comment on how you're living. I had a friend not that long ago try to hold me accountable about a job and a dream that I didn't think they had any business having an opinion about because they weren't around for the critical years and didn't help me pick up the pieces afterwards. They spoke the truth in love, but it felt like taking instead of giving. They took me back to a traumatic place and left me with a heap of their own intellectualism. After that conversation, I resolved to stop talking about that experience with anyone who wasn't THERE. Because I have never met someone who understood that experience from a distance and I am tired of being bulldozed by people's loving truths on the matter.

Another thought that was pervasive in my growing up is that everyone should get an equal say on all topics. And I just don't think that way anymore. For example, if you don't know the difference between race and ethnicity, I don't want to listen to you pontificate on race issues from a false position of authority. It's a waste of both of our time. And that's an unpopular opinion. But not everyone's knowledge is equal and not everyone's experience is relevant all of the time. We'll all take turns sitting down. 

Most of my life, I took turns sitting, listening when I was told to, when I had to, when I had exhausted all of my other options. It's only now in the 3rd decade that I think about what it means to sit down because you want to. I think we are told that we should have something to say so it can be hard to admit when we don't. But I have less and less to say about how other people live their lives and I have become less and less patient with people who mean well be don't do well when trying to build our friendship.

January and February are over. Now the real year can begin. March being my birthday month and the month where my SAD lessens its grip coalesce in such a way that it feels like my own personal New Year. So here I am.

Each year, I learn a little bit more about what depression means to me and become a little more committed to simply saying "no I can't do that because I'm depressed" when it's a bit more than I can handle. There are a lot of things that I have done out of obligation. And sometimes obligation is love. Sometimes it is guilt. Sometimes it is both or neither. Since I like to think of myself as a sincere person, I am trying harder to examine "why am I doing this" and "if I can really give that". 

I do a lot of things to appear normal which is to say to appear not anxious or depressed. Sometimes my only motivation for saying yes to a social engagement is because it sounds like something that someone not suffering from SAD would do. 

Lately, I've been feeling like the worst parts of my parents sometimes take over my thought process. And it's been hard to face those things essentially alone. It's been humbling and not in the quiet dignified sort of way. I feel small and so incapable of giving people the love they deserve. And I wonder if this means that I will never be as known and loved as I want to be and if it's ok to worry about myself like that when I'm so clearly failing people important to me.

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.

Tuesdays are difficult days. 

I could not tell you why. But I know that the days on which I find myself scraping the bottom of my proverbial barrel, trying to make something out of nothing are always Tuesdays. I am the nothing. And being present is something.

I realize too late that I have become a gaping hole. A yawning yearning that opens and opens but never closes, full.

I realize so very late that I am trying to love myself vicariously through you. A vacuous invasion that asks and asks but never responds, answered.

I realize this. It is late in the day, late in the year, late in life. But perhaps it is not too, too late. 

Too late for it not to hurt, yes. But not too late to do something different. 

When the wise people said, "love yourself", I was angry at the simplicity. I thought that they did not understand how hard it would be to choose myself when no one else was choosing me. I had the infinite depths of want and desperation and need staring, unblinking from my consciousness. 

I realize, a little late, that the wise people give simple sounding advice when there is no other way. A loving labor that strains and strains but never tires, ended. 

I realize now that the little love I gave myself was too meager a ration. A gnawing knowing that nothing and no one could fill or feed, complete.

I am unskilled at this new effort of loving myself. A strenuous mountain moving of practice and practice and practice, again.

"Deserve" is not a word that I use. Not about me. Not about anyone else. And I guess there are a lot of reasons for that. But at the top of the list is that 1. it makes me uncomfortable and 2. I don't see the point. What is the point of thinking about what people deserve? Bad things happen to good people and good things happen to malicious people all of the time. No one gets what they deserve. Injustice has been a life long companion of humanity.

And if you were to try to pin me with a direct question about what I deserve, I would squirm and evade. Because I am not special. I've done good things and been given bad results. I've also been rewarded for my selfishness and cowardice. It seldom adds up. 

If I were to advise someone else, I'd say that there is still value in asking people to treat you the way you deserve, with dignity and respect. But ask me point blank how I deserve to be treated and my mind goes blank like new fallen snow or a dreary overcast sky. 

I deserve what all humans deserve. We deserve softness and rest. We deserve justice and health. We deserve the full range of human emotions from anger to joy and back again. We deserve happiness deep as glacial lakes.We deserve comfort for our suffering and grief. We deserve love like spring rains. We deserve to be. We deserve to be alive.