Today’s delightful crochet mandala for the Mandalas for Marinke project comes to us from Hannah M. in Indiana. Hannah has been a crocheter for seven years and is just learning to knit. She loves “crochet, colors, yarn, animals, and all things beautiful.”
Hannah shared that although she didn’t follow Wink’s blog regularly, she would stumble upon it here and there and was always mesmerized by the beauty of the colors that Wink used in her work. As many others have also said, Wink brought a lot of color to our world and the world is a little bit dimmer without it. Hannah reminds us:
I wanted to reiterate today that depression happens regardless of circumstances. From the outside, it can appear that you have the best life ever, but that doesn’t reflect what’s going on inside. Courtney Bridgman calls it the “no matter what depression” and writes:
“No matter what” depression happens even if you can count 1,000 blessings. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t had your heart broken, been fired from a job or lost a loved one recently — the depression switches on and you feel doomed.
As someone with depression, one of the best things that you can often do for yourself is to let other people know what you are going through. This breaks through the facade that “everything is fine” and allows people in. They won’t all be able to help and occasionally some might be mean but usually letting people know you’re in trouble creates a situation where you can feel more supported than if you just let the world think that you’re doing okay when you’re not.
Courtney’s article was on Yahoo! Health as part of The Mighty writing, and there’s another article there from this week that can be helpful: Sarah Schuster’s roundup of 27 things people living with depression want you to know.
A lot of what we want you to know is that it’s hard for us to maintain our end of relationships and we feel terrible about that but we’re really lonely and do still want you in our lives. Several of the comments on the list are about that and I know it’s something that’s true for me.
And although it’s something of a tangent from the other information here, I wanted to also share a good article on PsychCentral about the difference between depression and “a dark night of the soul“, which is the concept that you can go through immense spiritual or religious suffering but that this differs from depression because they stay intact and feel there is a purpose to the pain. I’m not sure I agree with (or have experienced) all of this myself but I think it’s an interesting perspective that could be valuable.
Hannah’s mandala is the spoke crochet mandala pattern by Wink. See all Mandalas for Marinke posts here.
Very pretty mandala! Purple and green are my favorite colors.