Dealing with Depression

Depression can be finicky, and hard to deal with head-on. But in between the paralysis caused by depressive feelings and thought patterns, and the self-judgment brought on by not "living up" to your own expectations of yourself, there just might be a sweet spot wherein you can use the fabric of your life as-it-is to build self-efficacy. What does this look like? It looks like recognizing and honoring the things you do from day to day that are hard for people with mood disorders. It looks like building on small, manageable routines to get where you need to go. And it looks like revisiting your expectations on a regular basis to align them with reality. Change might be slow, but it is possible!

Kindness

By Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever. Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive. Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say it is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend.