when the melancholy comes.

she's Nature's intelligence.

My whole life, I’ve been very prone to really hardcore “mood swings”.

I collected a bunch of diagnoses for them as a child and into my early twenties (none of which materially helped me in any way, none of which I claim as labels or facets of identity anymore), and now, as a kind-of sort-of Grown-Up, I’m noticing how drastically my relationship to depression has shifted.

It’s the kind of thing that only really makes itself known in hindsight, isn’t it.

Profound melancholy, deep depression, addiction, I know all of them very deeply. But the story they now tell in my body is wildly different to how it used to be.

My hope is that as I sit here and fumble around the attempt to articulate this shift with any sort of clarity is that it makes you feel seen, and at the very least, not alone. That maybe it offers you some new language or frameworks to relate to the darker or more challenging aspects of your own emotional landscape.

Aside from all that though, honestly it just feels wonderful to be witnessed.

It feels wonderful to override my capitalist programming that says I am only worthy of taking up any space or saying anything at all when it’s from a place of productivity or extraversion.

May we be seen and held in our deep curling inwards, just as we are in our unfurling outwards.

Love you. Thanks for being here friend ❤️

ah, sweet melancholy. [art by Mike Adams 🖤]

[trigger warning on this essay for frank discussion about emotional and mental health & suicidal ideation. Check in with your body, if reading about stuff like this is going to cause you undue distress or even harm today, that’s cool, save this one for another time. Take care of yourself comrade 🫂]

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I used to be absolutely terrified of my depression.

[disclaimer going in here: this whole thing is obviously written from my perspective, about my experience, and what I myself have learned and integrated as a result. if at any point you feel tempted to add dogma or prescriptivism to what I’m saying, lovingly, don’t. our experiences of our emotional landscapes are as diverse as we are, how good! this is mine. yours will be different. that’s how it’s supposed to be 💕]

I was diagnosed with clinical depression when I was 7, bipolar II when I was 14, and chronic fatigue when I was 15. I want to be clear here, these labels now mean next to nothing to me, I’ll get into that in a sec, but I’m adding them here as context. Shorthand, almost. A way to characterise what I’m talking about going in here, even if I’m allergic to the language and the worldview it belongs to.

Now, with my big adult brain and my big adult worldview that I have very intentionally built through many years of learning and unlearning, I don’t see any of these facets of me as something to diagnose, they’re just a part of who I am and how my constitution works, and these diagnoses feel like the result of being born into a world that refuses to see us as anything other than commodities or machines, and doesn’t really know what to do with our nuance and our humanity.

I know many of us are this way. Maybe you are too. A highly sensitive person with a very sensitive spirit and a very expressive body, living in a paradigm that refuses to attune itself to you, and instead won’t stop unrelentingly trying to force you into submission.

A lot of this is really tricky to talk about without going on some pretty full-on rants about capitalism, colonialism, and the way it rips us out of our bodies so effectively. I really want to stay on topic here. But all of this really is connected.

You know as well as I do that the world we live in us fundamentally anti-human. Being a Full Human (especially a Full Queer Human, a Full Human of the Global Majority, a Full Femme Human, A Full Neurodivergent Human, or any other Full Human with a Marginalised Identity) is very dangerous inside of capitalism.

It disrupts the mythology that we exist for profit and productivity, and that any drives or impulses we have that aren’t related to profit or productivity are problems that need correcting.

Inside of this context, being someone who is very prone to deep and all-consuming melancholy was terrifying.