Today, I kept thinking of posts to write for my blog while feeling really depressed, hoping I could come up with something less heavy than what I was feeling. I tried the same thing yesterday and my grounded in the present writing brought with it 2000 words of trauma from the past. That isn’t the destination I even intended, thats just where I ended up. That’s the thing about the black hole of depression, it likes to cloud everything, and betrays your attempts to try and escape the dense void it has created. Sometimes, even, its pull increases with every attempt you make to get out, like the harder you fight, the more it tightens its grip.

Depression really has no boundaries whatsoever does it? Here I was trying to improve my current proximity to the void of depression by being grounded in writing about something less heavy, and suddenly, it’s like my brain says, ‘It looks like you’re trying to remain grounded— would you like some extra depression with that?’ Like a depressed and deranged Clippy that has become the autopilot of the void, ensuring I stay in its spaghettification trajectory and correcting any deviations from its path

You can’t positivity yourself out of depression, if anything, trying to find the positive is an incredibly delicate scary task. Knowing that deranged Clippy pops up even when you access “good times” or when something good happens to you. Would you want it ruining everything that is precious to you? Would you like it to show you how that good thing you hold so dear is actually rooted in depression, trauma, and hopelessness? Depression will find a way to bring with your positive moments, some long-lost feeling of deep loss over an issue it has suddenly decided is connected in a way you didn’t foresee. And that’s where I’m at — trying to hold onto something good, while constantly bracing for the gut punch of sadness I didn’t even know was there. 

A good example of this happened today, I ordered a new Epomaker keyboard, and it arrived today. I’m actually typing with it right now, it’s thoccy, colourful and so satisfying. It’s making typing far more interesting and engaging. I got pretty excited about it, and set it all up, and had fun playing with the different light settings (I love the setting that sets off a rainbow of lights around the key you just pressed). I tried to hold onto this moment of happiness, but it wasn’t long before deranged Clippy popped up again, reminding me why I bought the keyboard in the first place.

Corrupted Clippy reminded me that I bought the keyboard because typing has been causing me severe rib pain. Hypermobile joints, costochondritis, and intercostal muscle strains have already stolen so many activities from me, and now there’s a lot of pressure on this keyboard to help. If it doesn’t work, I might have to give up typing altogether for how much it is affecting me. My momentary excitement was ruined by corrupted Clippy deciding that I needed a heavy dose of trauma and apprehension with it. 

Depression colours your world with its dark oily tarry stains that for a time, no matter what you do, wont come out. If only there was a Vanish or a Cilit “Bang and the dirt is gone!” For these hard to remove stains. It infiltrates every area of your life, food, sleep, relationships, or even something as small and exciting as a fancy colourful keyboard. I couldn’t choose to write about anything lighter, because due to these unremovable stains, the void, and deranged clippy, there is nothing lighter. I couldn’t even choose despite trying really hard, to stay basking in the actual colourful lights of my keyboard. 

As I’m finding it dangerous to access good things, in case Corrupted Clippy comes along to ruin it, you might think there’s some safety in sitting with the ‘bad things,’ because things can’t get worse, right? Unfortunately, that’s not true. Things can and do get worse. Malware Clippy accesses the bad things and amplifies them, turning them into Trojan horses that corrupt every corner of my brain.

These Trojan horses expose every feeling I’ve swallowed, every thought I’ve shoved to the side, demanding to be processed. It’s almost as if depression really is a black hole — not only does it pull everything in, trapping emotions in its endless gravity, but it can also eject them forcefully, hurling them back at me in a relentless flood.

It’s like my emotions have been running as background tasks, and now that my brain is overwhelmed with malware, those tasks demand to be closed out to enable it to keep functioning. The cruel irony is that depression makes it impossible to process anything properly. The flood of feelings is overwhelming, and instead of finding clarity, I end up drowning in everything I’ve suppressed. It’s a cycle I’ve lived through so many times — pushing things down to survive, only to have them come roaring back when I’m at my lowest.

Basically, EVERYTHING is shit right now, and EVERYTHING is hopeless. That’s not me being negative, that’s me being realistic. Forcing myself to be positive never worked. It always felt fake (because it is), like adding another layer of hopelessness on top of what was already there. But when I started saying, ‘No, EVERYTHING is shit right now,’ something shifted. It wasn’t about giving up — it was about giving myself permission to feel what I was actually feeling, without the pressure to spin it into some fake, toxic positivity inspired story of strength and courage. And funnily enough, that’s when I found a different kind of hope.

I often think of hope as a little bird in your soul that sings and never stops at all. Quite like the Emily Dickinson poem “Hope is the Thing With Feathers”. During periods of depression, you cannot hear this bird sing it’s song of hope, you can not feel the feeling of it singing. Given it’s lack of song, you’d be forgiven in thinking that the bird flew away, or worse died. Through struggling with mental illness for most of my 41 years on this dystopian rock in space, I’ve learnt time and time again, that the bird is always alive, and you do not need to hear or feel it’s song to know it. 

I think of hope whilst in the void of depression the way an algorithm might calculate an outcome. The sum of probabilities, based on all of my past experiences, tells me that even though I feel HOPELESS now, it won’t stay this way forever. Mathematically, it’s inevitable that I’ll hear the bird sing again. What I feel is cold and logical and it’s not the fluffy feathery bird song it usually is, but at the same time, there is a beauty in this calculated data. Every time I run the calculation, the result is the same: the bird is alive, and it’s singing. I don’t need to hear or feel it to know it is. The patterns, the probabilities — they give me something I can hold onto, even when my emotions can’t. It’s calculable faith.

This isn’t blind faith or wishful thinking. It’s the kind of faith that comes from running the numbers over and over and finding that the answer NEVER changes. It’s steady and quiet, like the bird itself, singing even when I can’t hear it. Depression corrupts time itself, trapping me in a version of now where everything feels unreachable. It’s not about waiting for a single moment of hope — it’s about waiting for a different time, a shift where the version of me that can feel and hear the bird exists again.

So in my own way, saying “Everything is shit and pointless right now” is actually full of calculable positivity. It’s not the kind of positivity you can shout from the rooftops or that would look aesthetically pleasing on Instagram, but it’s always there, steady and unshakable. It’s the ultimate safety net — this idea that no matter how lost I feel, the probabilities haven’t changed. There’s a point, even if all I can think of is “What is the point?” — to live for the time when I can hear and feel the bird sing again.

I leave you with a pretty perfect song for my mood and it’s beautiful :-