Persephone Rising

A Narrative Approach to Coping with Existential Season Depression

As Summer was beginning to die back, and the smell of crisp Autumn mornings settled in, I decided, this year, I would embrace my seasonal descent into the Underworld. It has been twenty-eight cycles, since I first bled, of journeying into the underworld of existential seasonal depression. Existential depression was developed even earlier, how far back is hard to say. I was born with a level of consciousness that made me empathically sensitive to every part of this reality on Earth. It took decades to decode. I sit now with understanding and memories, I work to rewrite, of being alienated by my absorption and processing of the world around me. 

The level of consciousness required to understand the anxiety and grief-like sadness that would embroiled that little girl, I once was, each time the commercials for Save a Child Foundation came on between fantastical animated realities, would not be developed enough for true reflection for many decades. Where were the adults to care for these children? Why did strangers need to donate ten cents for these children to have clean water, food and love? These questions plagued the early development of my human existence. In fourth grade, there was a homework assignment to summarize a news article. Why I chose the article I reported on, I have no idea, but it impacted my eight year old self so deeply, I began perhaps one of my first deep dive investigations. The Rwandan Genocide was happening in a world far away from my reality. My brain engulfed in  visualization of  the reality described in these  articles. My emotions, empathically connecting to the fear and pain of the experience of all those souls, living out that paradigm, so foreign from my physical reality, but through words, now enmeshed within my soul’s experience of pain on Earth.  Our emotions are what builds memory. The stories I read, of the past and the present realities, still haunt my soul, as the suffering of humanity continues without relief, despite the evolution of the psyche.  

There was also my first visit to Iran, at the age of five. My first year of kindergarten, stepping into American culture, from the insulated reality created by my Irish American Catholic Mother and Muslim Iranian Father. Both artists, and with their own qualms with American culture, Home was a culture and cult within itself. Kindergarten was a new reality that I had not been designed for, and then just as I got the hang of it, I was pulled out just before the end of Summer to go visit my father’s family for the first time, in a place where every American around me believed I would not return from. This being the same year as Sally Field’s starring in the movie “Not without my Daughter”, the tale of a Iranian husband holding his children in Iran when the American mother wanted to divorce him and go back to the states. Islamic law gives parental rights to the father, or it did at least back then. Or maybe that was all just American propaganda. As now I know thirty-three years later. If they are talking about Iran, or if it is set in Iran and produced by American Media, it’s bullshit.  The beginning of the reality that I was of two different worlds, and the realm I lived my day to day existence in would forever seek to destroy the world where the village of family members lived life as all humans do. Seeking love, happiness, peace and sustainability of existence. 

So where and when this experience of existential depression developed, I have no idea, but I have been diligent in finding ways to cope. I have never taken a prescribed medication for any mental health conditions, I inherently had a great fear and in a way am glad, although it might have been an easier road. I inherently choose the harder road, it feeds the soul’s desire for purpose when things get boring and everything gets boring. Depression often kicks in when I feel limited and or bored by the inefficiency or lack of progress by society. Evolution takes too long for my psyche to feel satisfied. My nightly lucid dream realm moves so much quicker that sleep feels more efficient than waking life. 

This year I am taking a fresh approach. Hades is calling and I knew he would, as he has for twenty-eight cycles. Except this time, I know him. I know his tricks. His games. I know myself enough to know I can walk into the Underworld this year, not be dragged down, or stay in denial until he pulls the rug out from under my toxic positivity. No this year, I showed up early, with a plan. I was going to embrace the potential lessons the Underworld would offer. I planned to work as a Hospice aide, after my landscaping business was seasonally put to bed. I would meet death and the transitioning souls, using my inherent nurturing and empathic psyche to sit with their experience. You can’t out smart the God of the Underworld. Although, I know he is deliciously amused at my attempt. Instead, he forced me into an early shut down of tending to the earth, and has locked me away in a cave, until he decides, I am allowed to leave. He made such a dramatic end to it all, I had no choice but to surrender. I accepted. There was some grief, but not long lasting. Instead, I have been transmuting the morning cries into art. Experimentation of different media, everything and anything to keep the power over myself in the experience. When I feel the attacks on my psyche, I lean in. I allow the existential grief to envelope all of my existence. I don’t fight it. I give it parameters from which to exist, so as to process and then transmute the energy into a cathartic experience. Most of what I feel is not my own, but I can take them. I can transmute this. I will.  He only wins if I give up hope and starve myself of the light. 

I danced in the kitchen erratically full of joy last night. Alone. So Alone. I visualized the dance as a defiant radiation of the inner light of my existence. The love and deep emotions that bring me to my knees. I laughed in his face as he watched me. If we are going to cycle, then it is up to me to change the game. Perspectives of rational reality will not console my soul, they send me into deeper pain of the ostracization my being brings upon me. No, this time, I step fully into the delusion. Into the narrative. If you are going to pull me into the Underworld, once again my beloved, then I will sit with you and bring nurturing love and radiant fertility to the darkness you desire so deeply to drown me in. It’s 2023, Persephone is Rising.