(CW - please take care reading this piece. It touches on depression, suicidality and the search for hope.)
These past couple months, as the late summer heat dried out the last of spring's green; finally fading into the damp, albeit gloomy relief of autumn rain - my words, my voice too... and how I might describe hope - have suffered the drought.
It is strange to stand in so many places and speak to the importance of the voices of lived and living experience. To speak of hope and change and tireless advocacy as these resources within oneself deplete. I am no stranger to the ebb and flow of hope and meaning and a sense of life. I have lived through days of grasping at the barest threads of these things - desperately trying to weave them into some semblance of a rope with which to pull myself up. But sometimes, despite your best efforts, all your hands can manage to make takes shape as a noose. At that point it no longer seems absurd; it makes the most - and sometimes feels like the only - sense there might be left.
It is not for lack of trying, lack of skill, lack of fighting as hard as you can. Even if no one else does, I believe you when you say this (because I know this place too.) There is only so much - for so long - that a human soul can bear.
I know depression, I know its landscape well; I have traversed it many times before. This never makes it any easier to find oneself lost in its hollows yet again. It is not (and has never been) about a lack of "resilience." It is about the things we should never have had to be this resilient for in the first place.
Some of this struggle is inborn - it is part of me and how I fit in the world. Some of this struggle (especially for those who occupy much more marginalized identities than myself) is about the systems of oppression, the challenges of our time, and the inequity of the world in which we live. When we appreciate this perspective we can clearly see that healing is not solely an individual effort. Although that may be one of the few things we have some semblance of control over, healing is a collective effort. We can emphasize the criticality of building individual strength all we want, but the thing is, people are already strong in more ways than we can often appreciate. Collective and community based healing is as much (and really more) about dismantling the dysfunction and disease of the oppressive systems that reduce people to struggle and sell back the solution as an individual issue.
However, at least in my experiences, we are not there yet. There are people and places and moments that have arrived at that understanding, but the mental healthcare system as a whole (at least in British Columbia) has not. Maintaining hope, a sense of what is yours to work on and what is not, is challenging.
I suppose I am fascinated by hope right now - fascinated by the seeming contradictory search for it - which speaks of possibility - while having no sense of hope's existence beyond logical understanding that it could be out there, even if we cannot feel it. I am fascinated with the experience of seeing hope in the very act of continuing on without a sense of there being a point. I know for myself that the going on despite it all is a precarious place to be and I hesitate to marvel at it, because we cannot take that for granted. It is not a given that people can go on forever, nor should it be acceptable to expect that of people without providing adequate and meaningful support. Still, I have learned the most about hope from those who have hardest time feeling it, including myself. Perhaps it is like light and dark, that you truly cannot understand one without the other. I don't know if that's true for hope as well - that you must experience the deepest loss of it, to truly have a sense of it, and that is why I write this now.
I don't know how to begin writing about hope when it has been such an elusive experience these past couple of months. How can I possess something without feeling it? Is hope only real if it is something you can feel? These are questions I don't expect to answer, still I am asking them... if only to say it out loud with the thought that maybe wondering is enough for now - a reason to go on in itself.
Each word a raindrop, I will try to write, to find my voice again, and remember how to use it (but most of all why.) I may have to break my writing into smaller pieces - bite-sized reflections on hope as I do my best to seek it out, but I will try... It's all we can do. Like summoning rain in late summer's drought - eventually the season's will turn (or so I hope...)
- S.
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