Feeling Like You Can’t Cope? This Might Help.
By: Cris Beasley
Tags: Self, Life Lessons, Loneliness, Mental Health, Psychology

Despair is a heart so broken you no longer have any tears left to cry. It has a lot to say. It insists the fear or sadness will swallow us up whole and never let us go.

(No, it won’t swallow you up. Yes, it will let you go.)

Despair creeps in when our hopes have been dashed a few times too many for our nervous systems to handle. From 16 Years of Alcohol, the protagonist Frankie says –

“Hope is a strange thing, a currency for people who know they’re losing. The more familiar you are with hope, the less beautiful it becomes.”

Despair drains your energy. Despair says that hope is lost. It says you’re alone.

I’m so tired of this.

I’ll always feel this miserable.

I’ll never get out of this situation.

Try these on instead.

It’s possible that I’ll feel better tomorrow.

I’ll be ok even if don’t feel better.

This feeling will pass.

As much as I wish I could feel the positive emotions all the time — joy, love, belonging, etc. — I would be missing out on all the information contained in the negative ones — sadness, disconnection, shame, grief, fear, and so forth.

It’s in these moments we learn the most about ourselves and others.

Trust is built while you’re in the valley, not on top of the mountain.

Formative change happens here. Bonds are made or broken. These are the opportunities to strip off a piece of our armor when we most want to protect ourselves.

As cliche as it sounds, it's in these moments that you find out who your real friends are. When do you ask for help, who comes? Who offers help without you even asking? Pay attention to the answers to these questions, as they usually surprise us. People we never would’ve thought show up. People we expect to love us and care for us… don’t.

Who picks a fight with you when you’re at your lowest?

This is the secret gift in despair. You find out who you are. You find out who others are as well.

The Despair / Anger card from Becoming Dragon deck

I don’t want to claim to know the most about these subjects — not by a long shot. Brene Brown has been my guiding light. I hope you’ll read her four New York Times Best-Sellers on navigating vulnerability, letting your emotions be seen, and rising up when life inevitably knocks you down.

Know that there be dragons inside all of us. None of us ever completely get our shit together, no matter how it may appear from the outside — and that’s ok. We’re all doing the best we can, and finally, finally, I feel like that’s pretty damn good.

Yah. So that’s why this is all worth it.

Journal prompts for working through despair

Where in your body do you feel despair? What kinds of physical sensations arise?

What’s your earliest memory of despair? See if you can go back to early childhood to a specific instance of despair. How old? Who was there? What happened to cause the situation? What happened after?

Did you tell anyone? If not, why?

How was despair held in your family? Was there space for sitting with the feelings which arose? Were you allowed to cry? What happened when you cried? Did they make you feel in some way wrong for crying?