A good few years ago, I was overwhelmed by a great, deep sadness. The cause of such sadness isn’t relevant to the newsletter and it was more a combination of living rather than a single event. I remember being depressed for the majority of my adult life. And when you’re depressed for long enough you take it upon yourself to disguise it. You say hopeful shit, like ‘the storms don’t get easier but you get better at weathering them’ but the reality is, the storms sometimes get worse. I don’t know how vast the spectrum of depression is but I know there are variants. I don’t know if everybody who suffers from it suffers the same. I am willing to risk it and bet they don’t. Willing to say that it depends on where we are standing when the wind hits us. I have been depressed and desperate for any form of attention and then got angry when I got it. Never satisfied. Imagine holding the glass under the running water but it never gets full. Imagine drinking a river and remaining thirsty. Depression is endlessly demanding. At least mine is. The consequence of wanting to be left alone is that you develop this mask you can tuck all your sadness behind. You start saying you are okay even when you aren’t. You start smiling to stop the questions. There are also times you say no because you don’t know where to begin. So before I begin the story about the deep sad, I want to tell you a few things. Number one, you don’t have to hide how you truly feel. Not now and not ever. There will likely never be a right time to tell the people you love you are hurting but if they love you, it will always be the right time for them to support you. Number two, begin wherever your words fall. Even if the first words don’t make sense, just let the words fall, let them form, let them exist outside of your body. Open the window and let the air in. Number three, I only had two things to say but I wrote a few so I am just going to share a line I wrote this week that sums up my sadness in the most stupid of ways. ‘My feelings are combat rolling through the desert but the grains of sand have been replaced with bricks of lego’. To summarise, don’t suffer in silence. Speak up. Don’t compress. Don’t hide. You deserve to be heard but you don’t deserve the hurting, no matter what your brain tells you.

To be continued…

wild opinion but I don’t think Harry has ever topped this.