Charlie Brown as a "Symbol of My Soul"

"This is my depressed stance. When you're depressed, it makes a lot of
difference how you stand. The worst thing you can do is straighten up and hold
your head high because then you'll start to feel better. If you're going to get
any joy out of being depressed, you've got to stand like this."

"Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, 'Where have I gone wrong?' Then a voice says to me, 'This is going to take more than one night.'. "-Charlie Brown

Sometimes I get the 'death moans' and everything seems black. My failures seem great and my goals look more like a wall. With some barbed wire around it. And maybe a spot light. And it's really, really tall. This morning was one of those days. I woke up and sat on the edge of my bed like an old woman taking a moment to conserve her strength before she can stand. My pants looked too short in the mirror and I had stayed up worrying about what my statement of purpose was. Not in a philosophical sort of way, but for my grad school applications. I don't know what I want to study but I'd better come up with something fast. And not too tired.

It could have just been the early hour, or the fact that I hadn't heard back from this boy I asked out, or the fact that I was thinking about grad school while my sister had her boyfriend over, but I could feel the blues sneaking up, undetered by the speediness of the bus, or the oblivious morning commuters trying to impose their comforting humanity on me. I got to work and just felt like today was one of the days I should have called in sick. I should have stayed home and drank tea, watched shiny movies on AMC and felt miserable for myself for no apparent reason.

But life doesn't work that way. Somehow, despite all my resistance I'd be forced out of bed and taken on a cupcake adventure, or a discovery of mountains or to the bookstore to read celebrity magazines (because even though reading them makes me feel like I've eaten too much candy, I always feel better that at least I'm not being photographed at every corner.)

I decided to combat this in the only way I know how, reading. With my blue scarf wrapped around my neck like Linus' security blanket, (how wise I was to put this on, I thought I'd only need it for the physical cold today!) I looked up some quotes about depression and discovered the ones you see above you. And then I got on here to share them, but before I could get to my blog my eye caught this: the "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks and I found myself laughing at the witty snarkiness of people who can't stand bad grammar but love irony. And that led me to this one: Crummy Church Signs and I also checked out this one: Mustaches of the Nineteenth Century for my friends Corey and Megan.

After following the advice of Benjamin Gladstone who said, "If you are cold, tea will warm you; If you are too heated, it will cool you; If you are depressed, it will cheer you; If you are excited, it will calm you.", I made myself some tea, and thought about how one good cure for feeling sorry for yourself is doing something nice for someone else, and how I'm going to volunteer tonight and teach girls about literature, and without so much as a warning my early morning blues dribbled away.

Because the Charlie Brown quote reminded me of one of my favorite authors, Anne Lamott, and because I love quotes just a little too much I'll leave you with this one:

"Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up."