This Close To Okay

by Leesa Cross-Smith

She knew making suicide harder for people who were considering it was sometimes the difference between life and death.

He was depressed, and depression wasn’t sexy. She saw so much of it every day that she didn’t have a romanticized idea of it.

Depression was a vacuum that sucked out everything—leaving nothing behind except the burdening weight of nothingness.

So much of therapy was practicality and giving people a much-needed pass to relax when they needed to or be weird when they needed to. To free their minds from doing what they felt like they should be doing if it always went against what they wanted to do. To ask questions like why when the client had never considered it.

Anxiety began itching at his neck, and his body ached with grief, a fact he’d gotten used to after years of living with it. “Grief hurts…physically,” his dad had warned him.

if you didn’t want the bad shit in life to win every time, you had to keep your eye out for a bright thing.