So I guess what I’ve been getting at these last three episodes, is that I’m grieving. I’m going through all the stages - denial, anger, bargaining. Depression. Getting to acceptance, I think so, yeah. 

But what am I grieving? I have a chosen family that I love. I have blood family that gets complicated but I still also very much, very much love. I have a sweet puppy that threw up on my bed twice today but I still freaking love her more than anything. I have a home that protects me and fills me with joy and peace. I have an art that I’m happily obsessed with. 

My needs are pretty well met. Then why is it so easy to feel sad all the time? 

Time. I grieve the passage of time. 

When I was a kid I remember lying awake in bed at night, crocodile tears rolling down my cheeks, thinking how only 10 years from now my sister would turn 18 and get married to some strange loser and never see us again and then who’s supposed to sleep in the top bunk? Who’s supposed to tell fairy stories and play pirates with me in the backyard? And then in 10 years I’d be about to graduate twelfth grade myself, and then what? No more art class with Ms. Livers on Tuesdays? What about field day? 

It’s so silly, and yet, I seriously don’t think I ever grew out of that. I yearn for growth, for improvement, for bettering myself yeah – I don’t want to stagnate – I do indeed want the things that I don’t like about myself and my life to leave now and never come back. I never once wrote “Don’t Change” in anyone’s yearbook and I always felt a little, ick, about the idea for myself. Like “Don’t change?” gross. I hope to God I’m not still me in ten years. 

And yet. 

I just don’t want the good shit to change. You know? When I really really fall in love with something, love something just the way it is don’t fucking touch it, can’t we just all collectively recognize that this is exactly perfect just the way it is and there is nothing to improve, nothing to make different that would be better, just don’t fucking move! Leave it alone it was perfect and anything new will just! wreck! it! 

And things are constantly, constantly, for any reason, for every reason — changing on me. Good things that I love that I want to keep that I can’t freaking keep, not in the same way. A good friend of mine said this probably over a year ago, and of course stuck with me:

I can just see this moment zoomed out, like a time capsule. I can see how this isn’t going to be forever and how I’m so glad I’m in it right now. 

I wish, I wish I could take that as positively as she. I wish I could take all that love energy and inject it into the right now with all of its joyful intensity and none of its depressed dread. And maybe I can soon if I just, if I just keep thinking all this out loud like this. Maybe. 

Like I know it will all be OK. My family is still my family, even if we aren’t all living close to each other anymore and I’m missing so many minutes of growth and life in my nieces and nephews and my sisters and my brothers and my mom and my dad that I wish I weren’t missing and I’m so pissed, every day, that I am. 

And yet my life as it is is still so free and full. How can you be so empty and so full at once? Is this just what life is? 

I knew I was setting out to write about depression today, but, God, I’m depressed. I’m so full of joy and gratitude for what I have in this moment right now, and I’m full of hope for what is to come, but seriously how do we deal? How does anyone deal with knowing that it’s all gonna end? 

I take comfort in books. 

I think there was a pivotal time in my adolescence when, I couldn’t cope with what was happening around me, and so I disappeared into novels. I read so much. A lot of it was garbage. Great garbage that is definitely worth a revisit in the near future. But all of it was escape:

Attend someone else’s school where things suck because they don’t fit in and suffer for it until they find out there’s actually a cooler also totally real world hiding beneath the crappy one that gives them identity and awesome powers and clear purpose!

Adventure out of the sad, confusing, upsetting real world and into a completely alternative and so much better one where every day is warm, exciting, fun, and infinite!

Except, even book series with sequels with prequels with spin-offs…they do all eventually end, too. And yeah, I’m a dork and have spells of book mourning, too. But maybe that’s…the light at the end of the tunnel? Reminding myself that, current stories have to end for others to begin. And, sure, what if I don’t like anything but this current thing that I’m reading? It always felt like that at the time but in retrospect is verifiably false.

I couldn’t have read The Mysterious Benedict Society or met the Baudelaire children or voyaged with Odysseus or studied with Circe or caused chaos with Puck or laughed with Billy Collins or learned from Mary Norris or Edith Hamilton or Richard Godwin…there are always emptying spaces, there are always full ones, and I’m trying to remember the word abundance, abundance, abundance. Because maybe we only really really run out when our stories are just, finished. Full. Complete. When there is nothing left to improve upon, nothing to change which would make it better. When it’s just…perfect. 

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