These Feelings Will Be Over Soon
These feelings will be over soon, this will be over soon, these feelings will be over soon.
Nothing lasts forever. Not happiness, sadness, panic, pain, anxiety, fear, hate. I don’t know when I began creating and reciting mantras, all similarly focused on the impermanence of whatever emotion that consumed me, but they’ve become integral to my livelihood. Anxiety, depression, and hypomania are a part of who I am. Living with endlessly fluctuating moods, moods that overflow and drain without warning, is my permanent state.
These feelings will be over soon. Most people with panic disorders know that overcoming panic attacks is just a waiting game. There is no trick besides to exist, to breathe, and to wait. To let the panic happen, to hope it doesn’t stay too long, and to remind yourself that it will be over soon. I’ve had panic attacks for most of my life and I know they don’t last forever. My racing heart will slow, out of gas, leaving me stranded in a public restroom, or in my car, or curled up in bed. I’ve learned, though hundreds of practice rounds, how to succumb to the impermanence of panic. Because it isn’t permanent, only powerful, and not as powerful as me.
These feelings will be over soon. Hypomania feels like warm sun on cold skin, like getting the best idea and wanting to share it with everyone, like kissing someone for the first time and smiling the whole way through. It feels like clarity after walking in fog for a long, long time. For so long, I thought of my hypomania as myself. As the real, the best, versions of myself. Even now I sometimes wish that my permanent state could be hypomanic. But, of course, it’s not. And it shouldn’t be. Hypomania is not happiness. It’s not confidence. It’s delusion. It’s swimming as far as I can out into the ocean without a way back — without wanting a way back.
These feelings will be over soon. I have lived with depression as long as I’ve lived with hypomania. If hypomania is the state I wished was permanent, depression is the state I wanted to permanently leave behind. But, of course, that’s not how it works. Now when I am flung into a sea of depression, I am caught between wanting to drown completely and just wishing that the waters of hypomania were a little closer. It’s strange at times, knowing that my depressive episodes will end but also knowing that the shore may not be solid, may not be permanent. Sometimes I emerge on solid ground, arms sore from swimming, alive and as stable as I get out. Other times I emerge, exhausted, only to shoot back out to sea of hypomania. No island is permanent. No feeling is forever.
These feelings will be over soon and more feelings will follow. I am okay with this, and not okay with this. I am angry and I am thankful. Knowing that each feeling won’t last forever saves me, inspires me, and helps me continue. I am not a single emotion — I am all of the emotions. I am alive.
