Well it is 12 days until Christmas, if you can believe that! I have always loved Christmas, in fact I wrote an article for Memoir Mixtapes about my lifelong sense of joy and wonder surrounding the Christmas season a few years ago. However, I don't believe that any of us have been immune to the unrelenting challenges these last few years have brought us, least of all myself, and that can make holiday seasons particularly hard.
I hope that this lack lustre has stopped its tour at my door alone, leaving the rest of you to seize hope by the holly stems and to make your Christmas preparations in peace.
This Christmas, however, has come to our home with relatively empty pockets and I am left looking at the bones of winter wondering how I restore the season. My usual glee at buying presents and decorating the tree has been lost to unbridled exhaustion and a spiritual lull.
I suppose that joyful feeling we call the Christmas Spirit, when boiled down, is a sense of optimism. Hope. Hope in a Dark Place. Glowing Fires in the hearth, Lights on the tree in the window and over the front door, shining defiantly against the cold winter evenings. That resillience is something that is eaten away by conditions like depression, something we as a society trivialise far too readily. Perhaps we do so because it is so prevailent, because so many suffer from it, it has become common, and therefore 'surely can't be as debilitating as people make it out to be'. Depression however is in fact a powerful adversary, hence the volume of people who are daily having to fight against it.
I worry that my work far too often speaks with the voice of depression, but perhaps it is a voice that needs to be heard and understood a great deal more, if we don't see something that is dangerous in nature as a real threat, then we leave ourselves vulnerable to it. I joked with someone recently that I hoped I would not become a Doomsday Poet, though the title had a ring to it, I genuinely write to express what I believe is symptomatic pain of the human condition, and hope that in seeing those experiences shared, my writing produces in the very least a sense of solidarity in my readers. Hope doesn't always shine forth with a glowing face, and I am coming to realise that.
So it is with hope, however small and dull she may be, that I am beginning a new project, setting a new plate spinning, and seeking to replenish my Christmas Spirit with a new venture. I shant make announcements just yet as this is in the works, but the seed of it is here, in this rambly blog post about Hope and Depression.
I shall return with more news.
Take care, my friends, wishing you blessings upon blessings for the bridge from year to year.
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