When I was discharged from the hospital, a friend gave me a Raku Angel from the Yukon. It was the best, most meaningful gift I’d received in my life. The hand-crafted ceramic angel was covered by streaks of blue and pink; the pottery-firing process used meant that no two angels were identical.
Four years before, she had lost someone deeply important to her, and her uncle bought her tickets to northern Canada to unwind and process the loss. She stared out at the northern lights and realized that the world was so vast; she was just a tiny piece of the whole. She happened upon a local artist making Raku Angels. She purchased one for herself, but the woman stopped her before check-out and said, “someone close to you will really need this little Angel.” When I told her about what had happened with the hospitalizations, she thought about that moment four years before.
The Angel is a piece of a bigger picture. One of the professors I respect at school told me that things that seemed huge when he was young don’t now. A crisis counselor introduced me to Pixel Thoughts, a website for anxiety where you can enter a worry and watch it disappear like a star fading into the distance (https://www.pixelthoughts.co/#). For me, looking up at the clouds on a sunny day and the stars on a quiet night helps me shrink my pain.
It reminds me that this is how I feel right now, but taking a step back, this is a small piece of the mysterious puzzle that is my life. My existence is one out of many in the universe. What seems earth-shattering now will one day be just a story about a girl who struggled with depression. I’m not alone, in that there are many others in pain like me, but I also have control over my own destiny. My guardian Angel watches over me as I plunge headfirst into the scary uncertainty of the future.
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