I must admit, I was feeling pretty hopeless this week. Depression is an ugly beast that always feels like its fangs are leeching joy from my person. An intravenous morose poison into my brain stem that flows throughout my whole body. If I can’t stop the flow, I’ll bleed out on the carpet. A lifeless husk with dim eyes who remains alive nonetheless. I no longer wish to be a zombie, I wasted years that way, so how to combat that awful beast?

One solution prescribed to me was to have a routine. They say Routine is the killer of Creativity but the enemy of Time. Something I learned just today in fact, and I always wondered why routines don’t work for me. Rituals however, defined as a ceremony or act performed with purpose and intention, that I can get behind. Every day where I now live, cannons go off at noon on the dot. It’s a symbolic gesture to honor the dead. A ritual rather than a routine. When I first ran away from home and met my roommate turned confidant, every single day she offered me tea. I fucking hate tea. I kept declining but she kept insisting so eventually I would say yes, politely excuse myself, and then pour it down the sink in my bathroom. I would return with an empty cup having thanked her for her delicious offering of friendship. Eventually the guilt got to me. I attribute her relentlessness as the reason that I now have my early afternoon ritual of tea time. I even have it without sugar. And every day, it is something I look forward to, a marking of an indeterminate time which I associate with a crossing into my second wind of the day.

A psychic prescribed me meditation. I have no trouble sitting still but that will inevitably lead to sleep. My sister has a collection of the weird and awkward angles I have put myself in while dozing so I don’t necessarily need to be comfortable in order to lose consciousness. Some years ago, I had a close acquaintance show me the art of paper cranes. Being half Japanese, she took the time to methodically show me the ritual as well as the art and I still have the ones I made back then, and the ones she made for me. She also passed along the myth of making 1,000 paper cranes leads to a wish being granted. I realized I cannot focus on anything else while I fold the paper, otherwise they come out all wonky and bent out of shape. So, in a bid to continue my quest for meditation (even if only for 5 minutes) and perhaps having a wish granted, I now make paper cranes. Every time I make one I think of her and her heritage and the blessing she passed on to me. I’ve been collecting them ever since and while I’m nowhere near 1,000 I hope to someday string them all together and hang them from my ceiling in my craft room. A collection of blessings and wishes and love over the span of years to come. And a reminder, that I have Hope.

Love, Bug

Hope is the feeling you have that the feeling you have isn’t permanent. -Jean Kerr