As some of you know, I have clinical depression. I treat it with medication and go to therapy, but there’s no magic pill, just as there are no magic words that will ever completely banish my depression. I manage it, and some days are better than others. Today’s not a great day.

Writing helps. This poem showed up and reminded me that I need people in my life, though my instinct is to withdraw and isolate.

Tale of the Sad Girl and the Sad Boy

I’m so sad, she said.
Me too, he replied. Let’s be sad together.
No, that’s a bad idea.
Why is that a bad idea?
Two sad people make exponentially more
sadness…it isn’t just taking your sadness
and mine and combining them–it multiplies and multiples
until you stop counting the tears and start measuring
sadness in lifetimes, entire generations lost
to the darkness with no hope of it ever lifting.

Oh, he said.

Yeah, she said.

And so they parted, with regrets,
but knowing they’d probably made the right decision.