A Love Letter to My Beautiful, Depressed Self

Photo by allison christine on Unsplash

Hey, love.

Listen. Sometimes depression is just a thing you have. Sometimes it ain’t going anywhere.

You can do all the work and troubleshooting, putting in effort and doing what you should with nutrition, exercise, sleep habits, gratitude, mindfulness, therapy, medication, and so on, and still… you know, have depression. Still have a depressive day, week, year, life.

It can be exhausting perpetually viewing yourself as standing on this hamster wheel where it seems like if you’d only run fast enough, you’d reach, what, normalcy? Basic functionality? See, the “basic” stuff other people seem to do easily — things like putting together a home-cooked meal, doing laundry, taking care of hygiene — can feel pretty difficult sometimes. Even just getting out of bed can be that way, let alone badass activist shit like community organizing or reading theory. (I see that pile of books. Don’t worry, you’ll get to it.) Challenges stack, too. Life, in all its roaring beauty, makes itself known: going to an exploitative day job, doing schoolwork, caring for loved ones, dating and seeing if there’s a partner out there for you, navigating medical conditions, working through trauma, chasing personal goals, being creative, finding meaning in all this. I mean, damn.