The Great Depression Of You

Let’s talk about the great depression.

Not the one when the stock market crashed. I’m talking about the great depression of you.

The time when you are violently and abruptly thrown from the life you know into something blank. Not into a deep abyss with dark, looming shadows that swallow light and hope. You don’t get the satisfaction of an intense ending like the beginning.

You are thrown into a place where grey has a taste. A place where you live in body dysfunctions: the incoherence of ringing in your ears, the empty lump in your throat, the swollen pressure of an injury. You don’t care to live, but you don’t want to die. You want to exist without the sense of time. You want to live in nothing.

Sometimes it’s an accumulation of multiple throws, taking you in pieces. Starting at the feet. Then the legs. Then the chest. Until your head is left floating with no support.

Sometimes it’s that one blast, the shot from the cannon that punches you straight to the bottom. No warning and landing like a crater.

Every morning is a battle to get out of bed with more casualties to your strength at the thought of going outside. Bad days you lose and and engulf yourself in the white flag. Good days you somehow manage to do what you have to do. All the while your heart is gone, somewhere else.

With him. With her. With the new horizon now beyond your grasp or the one you think you’ll never have.

The only energy you have left is channeled into the internal begging that someone doesn’t notice you. That they all remain strangers. And the smallest thing doesn’t trigger you down a line of irrational realities, falling like dominoes and fueling the next falsehood.

Please, please, please. Just let me make it back home.

Back under the covers where I can shut the world out. Back to safety.

But let me tell you something: everyone has a great depression.

It might come early or late in life. It might be obvious or hidden. Or never known.

But everyone has one. Everyone.

It’s how you grow, how you change. It’s how you learn to survive.

It’s how you become resilient. It’s how you become you.

You are given an opportunity to be completely raw and honest with yourself. You have the chance to mold the bare bones and shape a new norm.

It gives you strength to know that whatever else bad may happen, you know you will never be that crushed again. It will be the time you look back on and know since you made it out of that, you can make it out of anything.

It’s the moment you realize you are so much more than the things you cannot control, and it empowers you over the things you can.

It will not be easy. It will not be a coin flip, turning to a new side with one quick movement. It will be trial and lots of error before you find solid earth to climb up and out of that ditch.

Don’t. Give. Up.

Each step will bring you closer to an upward trend until it’s no longer a trend. It is a fact. You are there, at the top, looking down at your footprints that once seemed impossible to start.

It doesn’t define you. You define it. You own it.

Surrender to the process. It’s the only way. The fear of the unknown going forward is real, but stunting your growth and self-worth by being stagnant is a greater risk.

Let it break you. Let it turn you upside down. Let it release you.

Let the great depression becomes the great succession. The next you is ready to reign.