Passion. Desire. Hopes. Dreams. Wanting. Whatever you call it, these are the feelings, the emotions that keep us here. These are the moments we live for. Whether we want a future of surprises or planning out every single moment of our lives, that basic need to have, to do, to feel, is something that pushes us forward. When we don’t have that anymore, we’re no longer tethered to this world.

Find me in a moment of desperate depression – of severe sadness where I can’t see a reason to fight for the next day, where the tears keep flowing or have been so much there are no more, where my sobs are as loud as a baby’s cry until I can only continue in absolute silence. Find me in that moment, and you’ll see someone who doesn’t have a desire for anything. Except darkness. And then find me in a moment where I’ve latched onto something that I’ve become borderline fanatical. My friends have seen it – whether it was needing to better than everyone at school or neurotically making sure that a student run event was how I envisioned it to be. Find me in that moment, and you’ll see someone crazed with passion. Holding a light so bright it burns myself.

When there’s no desire, there’s no life. When there’s only desire, there’s no living. I can go from one extreme to another – not because I’m manic depressive, but because I believed that delivering my entire focus on something else and ignoring the sadness and doubt inside of me was better. But it wasn’t a cure, it was a band aid.

I know what it’s like to have no hope. And sometimes I wish I had a life-threatening physical illness or lived in a war-torn country to justify feeling that way. Feeling like there’s no hope makes me feel selfish, which makes me feel guilty, which makes me feel angry at myself, which makes me sad, and so the cycle starts again. But I wouldn’t tell someone else going through this that they should feel guilty or any of these things. Their feelings aren’t mine to say that they should or shouldn’t be anything, and I would say that maybe it is like being in a battlefield.

When I’m in that state, my mind is in battle – my mind is the one that’s pushing and pulling, punching and kicking. And then I’m down. I feel the strength of the depression and people tell me that it’s okay, it’s going to be okay, but it’s a distant voice. What is right there, what I live in that moment is the darkness. Because I don’t believe it will go away, and even if it does, I do believe that it will come back. That I will feel this way again and again. And I have no desire for anything else in this world, even if it can be good because I can fully feel the bad, and the bad outweighs the good. And in those moments, I have no desire to live.

But then if I can get myself out of the darkness, I push too far. I don’t want to think about it, acknowledge it, or nourish it with any type of thought. So I find something to latch onto. Total focus. An escape. And I’m in it. It’s all I’ll think about just to avoid the depression. Nothing else really matters and I beat myself up and potentially catch others who (figuratively, to be clear) end up the collateral damage in my battle to get away from the darkness. It takes me over, and suddenly I need it. I’m a slave to it, because I can’t choose otherwise.

Let’s not forget that if I fail at whatever pursuit I’ve latched onto, I fall tenfold. And sure, being obsessed with a project can also mean coming up with an awesome result. But when it’s over – and it will be over – I have to go back. I would have to either find another preoccupation or face the depression once more.  Unfortunately, leaving that deep focus pulls me out of something that I’ve been so absorbed into that I slip and am traumatized by the sadness that seems to always find me. Then the damage my passion can place on my relationships makes it even worse. The shame.

Cornering myself in the dark makes me miserable. Leeching onto a pursuit with no recognition of what I need to face only brings me back to that place. So what am I supposed to do? I’m not supposed to do anything. I choose the middle ground. Or, at least I try to. There’s a grey area in all of this that I want to admit to myself exists. It’s a grey area that I hope won’t engulf me in sadness or smother me with longing but never actually grasping. It’s a place where I hope I can choose to stay away from what makes me sad and not just gravitate towards self-sabotage. It’s a place where I hope I can choose to do what I want and not feel like I can’t survive without it. Then hopefully, I can live.