A friend of mine write the song “It’s Gonna Get Better,” a few years before she passed away in January of this year. And in a sense, that’s what so many people tell those who are particularly struggling. It makes for a better line than, “What if this is as good as it gets?” or “You’re right, you probably are fucked.” But to many in crisis or near that point, those words can feel hollow unless sung by Fleetwood Mac and with the accompanying Bill Clinton associations (“don’t stop thinking about tomorrow… it’ll be better than before, yesterday’s gone…”). When sadness turns to heartbreak (or as per my earlier writing, “sadness squared” or “sadness to the nth power), the things that we know are no longer the same as the things that we believe, and that disconnect can at times be a confusing one to make sense of. Part of therapy, or self-development more informally, is reducing that disconnect between knowing and believing, because with believing comes the faith in better days to come.
Knowing comes from the mind, which is the first to go when depression hits (and it can hit hard). It is cerebral, and not from the heart. It is the rational part of us that makes us erroneously think that we can talk ourselves out of the depression that consumes us, that makes us beat ourselves up for failing to intellectualize out of depression. It is the first battle that we lose, and we do not know what to make of that loss as we shrink into identifying as the Salieri’s of the world.
Believing is to be more advanced in one’s grieving or trauma processing. It is actually understanding the possibility of a difference between today and tomorrow, between tomorrow and week or month from now. As my friend sang, “It’s just a few days of pain and that’s all.” That is believing, understanding that that is potentially all through which she, we, must grit our teeth and bear the pain. But in the moment, when heartbreak becomes all-consuming, belief becomes hard to come by. It is when some turn to faith, which Springsteen calls out to in hopes that it be rewarded. Faith is a belief in the absence of evidence, either supportive or contrary, but its religious connotations pose obvious challenges to a number of non-religious people. Faith does not work for us all, and so we are left with the dichotomy between understanding and belief, treading a line in processing events, understanding the potential for progress to be slow, but to know that eventually, somehow, we do eventually heal if we give ourselves the time on this earth to. Not all of us do. Some inject, take pills, drink, jump, because they have not crossed over to the land of belief. Patience is a virtue not easily embraced, but in this case allows us the time to thrive in this important transition in healing, in accepting, in moving on even if our loved ones cannot. It is what allows us to understand and believe that it’s gonna get better.
Knowing comes from the mind, which is the first to go when depression hits (and it can hit hard). It is cerebral, and not from the heart. It is the rational part of us that makes us erroneously think that we can talk ourselves out of the depression that consumes us, that makes us beat ourselves up for failing to intellectualize out of depression. It is the first battle that we lose, and we do not know what to make of that loss as we shrink into identifying as the Salieri’s of the world.
Believing is to be more advanced in one’s grieving or trauma processing. It is actually understanding the possibility of a difference between today and tomorrow, between tomorrow and week or month from now. As my friend sang, “It’s just a few days of pain and that’s all.” That is believing, understanding that that is potentially all through which she, we, must grit our teeth and bear the pain. But in the moment, when heartbreak becomes all-consuming, belief becomes hard to come by. It is when some turn to faith, which Springsteen calls out to in hopes that it be rewarded. Faith is a belief in the absence of evidence, either supportive or contrary, but its religious connotations pose obvious challenges to a number of non-religious people. Faith does not work for us all, and so we are left with the dichotomy between understanding and belief, treading a line in processing events, understanding the potential for progress to be slow, but to know that eventually, somehow, we do eventually heal if we give ourselves the time on this earth to. Not all of us do. Some inject, take pills, drink, jump, because they have not crossed over to the land of belief. Patience is a virtue not easily embraced, but in this case allows us the time to thrive in this important transition in healing, in accepting, in moving on even if our loved ones cannot. It is what allows us to understand and believe that it’s gonna get better.
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