Good News For When You Need It: 11 Parts

1.

Insecurity and anxiety are inevitable and human. And if they ever creep towards the unsustainable, get help, help yourself, and take solace in the fact that boiling peaks are finite; that when things are at your darkest, light creeps in.

When you’re the most hungover, you throw up, right? And the “before” is the worst, but it immediately leads up to sudden relief. Life can work like that too, if you let it. And keeping that in mind can be a blanket of sanity and calm when you need it most.

You’ll be okay.

2.

There will always be good walks and talk, long showers, puppies, chocolate, sunny days and naps. There will always be good TV and a backlog of those you haven’t even begun- Cheers, anyone?- promise this truth shall remain true.

You won’t always be in a good mood. But your mood isn’t so world-changing to blot out the permanent facts of good around you. They’ll be ready when you are, and they’ll be found when you look.

3.

If time is a flat circle, then there are people who’ll care about you that you haven’t even met yet. Travel back in time to the present now and give yourself some peace of mind.

4.

You are the only person who remembers the harmless but embarrassing things you did. We’re all too busy remembering our own, like the time I threw up on a girl’s best friend while talking about how much I wanted to date her best friend.

Okay, maybe she remembers that. But that’s life, you know? Embarrassing, idiotic, gorgeous, mortifying life.

5.

You’re allowed to be happy and find meaning and peace.

When you’re sad, happiness can sound easy or dumb.

It’s anything but. Test your talents and pursue it.

6.

If you feel worthless, remember the infinite potential you have inside you. Buy a scratch ticket and volunteer.

Either one could change your life. One could help change the lives of others.

7.

Babies who smile at you on trains and goofy friendly dogs on sidewalks like you fine. Trust their judgements.

8.

Everything is bad and crazy is one way of looking at things. But things have always been bad and crazy, and people have found corners of music, joy, and love inside them.

You don’t have to save the world. Save a corner of it, and bundle yourself up within it.

9.

We live too much in the present.

Remember how insane and different the present is than you’d have guessed it. When you’re at your most miserable, remember how much the world can change, even when it seems it won’t.

Will this problem still be the same in eight months?

Yes eight months is a long time. A very long time. But it’s also a fraction of a year; two-thirds to be exact.

Eight months, hopefully, represents less than one percent of your life, and would still be an absurdly long time for a problem to persist.

Give yourself an advance on relief and start to unwind now.

10.

Nothing is worthless.

Bad days, bad weeks and moments and experiences and dates, yes, they suck. I’m not going to blithely dismiss the real struggle and pain bad things bring.

But they aren’t worthless.

No, they might not be worth it. But you get something out of these experiences, and you can extract meanings, lessons, highlights and knowledge.

You can scavenge and salvage scraps from the refuse of your life. And that’s not super comforting, but that should comfort you too, because it’s not happy-go-lucky bullshit. It’s small but it’s true.

It won’t help a ton, but that should help a little.

And it’ll count.

11.

There will be good and bad in your life.

If that news sounds neutral, that’s because it’s true, and trueness masquerades as plain neutrality.

But if depression, that liar, is whispering extremes in your ear, remember the plainness of cold, immobile math promises you more.

There will be good and bad in your life.

When you’re just feeling bad, it feels infinite. But it isn’t; math again. And would math really lie to spare your feelings? Of course not. Math is cold and true, and even in that cold truth there’s relief.

There will be good and bad in your life.

The good, too, is promised.