I saw a meme once, “Strolling in to therapy like: …So I just want to preface this whole next section by reminding everyone I am fine.”
Okay so I think generally we (i.e. all humans) have accepted the fact that happiness isn’t something we achieve one day that never leaves us and for the rest of our lives we remain happy no matter what shitty things happen to us. And dependent on an infinite amount of uncontrollable variables, happiness isn’t statically formulaic. So for my own mental wellbeing I like to think about what I can do to influence, what I call, my emotional climate. “Climate” being the mental and emotional state I find myself in for extended periods of time. How can I use the attributes of my extended happiness to make my inevitable sadness less sad? (yes, you heard me right and yes I realize how fucking emo that sounds). The answer to that I think starts with truly understanding yourself and your emotional climate. That, at least for me, is incredibly difficult.
Understanding Your Emotional Climate
On days that I am happy, I can’t truly remember how it felt when I was sad. But on days when I am sad I forget that happiness could be around the corner. I convince myself that this sadness is my new and constant reality.
At this point, I can confidently say my emotional climate has been straight up ass. That doesn’t mean I haven’t had truly happy days. But in the last six months I have developed character altering anxiety. If you asked Maia from a year ago to describe Maia today, she would be disgusted. I can hear myself calling her pathetic and weak, I can see myself hating her. Maia at this point is just sitting here wondering if this is the person she is now, or if at some point she will emerge from the fog & go back to normal.
What Have I Learned from Previous Climates?
If at some point I emerge from the fog, it will take me minutes to forget every horrible, crushing, disheartening feeling that I’ve felt almost every day for the last couple of months. I will forget that type of sadness is possible. I will remember my depression just as the dictionary denotation, I won’t be able to recall how it actually made me FEEL in my mind and body and heart. I will remember the weakness I felt, but it will be as an outsider looking at someone she doesn’t know, making a judgement of someone whose feelings she doesn’t recall ever experiencing. That is the resilience of humans.
Peaks & valleys. I am merely in a valley and I will come to a peak. & what do we know of humans at the peak? They are full of the purest hope. The blind optimism that keeps you believing maybe this time you won’t stumble into another valley.
When you are in your valley, you are meeting rock-bottom and wondering if it could possibly be a sink hole. Because what do we know of humans in the valley? They are full of the purest despair. When you truly reach the depths of discontent, hope is less tangible than the pieces of your life crumbling around you. You no longer remember hope & the light at the end of the tunnel that it brings. You can’t trust it and by the time you’ve reached the valley, you have learned the painful truth of believing in things that you cannot trust.
& The Point Is??
When you reach your valley, take time every day to document, to write down, to record the darkest moments, in detail describe how you feel. Be so real that when you look back on those words while standing on your peak it still brings you to tears. So real that your newly mended heart doesn’t forget that it was once broken, and remembering makes it strain at its freshly mended cracks.
Do this not so that when you are happy you can remind yourself that sadness is coming, do it so that you can remember how you came to be on top of the peak you will stand on. So that when you reach your next valley you can remember that there WAS a time when you felt the same sadness, despair, hopelessness- it is nothing new. No, she is an old companion that you will leave and find again. I believe that it is in remembering your valleys that you will recognize each journey to your peak.