Took this picture in Boston MA, USA in November 2013

Lisa never thought the day would come when she would be stripped of all of her tricks to beat depression. It had always been a lingering enemy eavesdropping on her as she spoke with confidence to motivate her peers, or an overarching cloud hovering above her even on her happiest days. It was an unwelcome guest that always invited itself into her life, popping unexpectedly at mid sentence or rushing to her chest the minute she opened her eyes in the morning.

Time counted in Lisa’s life. How she managed it and how she used it defined her success. When she first began to feel doubts and unease she couldn’t understand what was wrong. Things seemed to be going well for her, she was warmly welcomed into people’s lives and her friends enjoyed her company. There wasn’t much room for negative perceptions of events because there was little time for her to ponder on things. She was hardly ever alone. She decided at first that this was an unknown force trying to pull her back, so she constructed a backfire system of words that she placed on autopilot and she let it run. Invasive thoughts like “What’s the use?” were met by “This is important!” “You’re no good” was hammered by “Keep trying because that’s what ultimately counts,” and “Forget it” was often crushed with “Let’s do this.”

With time, however, she discovered that this tactic was no more than a temporary painkiller. Each backfire silenced a single word, and instead of it tiring that dark force, it grew tired, and so did she. She decided that the mere act of firing back was an acknowledgment, attention given to an undesired force that only resulted in feeding that force and making it stronger. So she ignored it. Background self-talk of doubt, fear, frustration, and despair continued to roll in her head as she continued to ignore it and move on with her life. She redirected her immediate urge to backfire with more positive words in her talks, she turned it into a gush of energy that almost visibly invigorated her listeners. But there was no ignoring the sense of despair that began creeping in each night as she turned out the lights and went to bed.

Lisa began to feel that she was running out of ways to protect herself from depression. Everything she tried helped her only get on with her life, but it never permanently crushed the darkness.

Darkness! She said to herself one morning like she’d just made a groundbreaking discovery. This thing has a color. Lisa realized that even her recent attempts at ignoring that force weren’t working because they played on what it said, what thoughts it put in her head. Getting back at it or ignoring it, she was still listening. She realized that she had never looked at it. She had never seen what shape or color it had. She’d been afraid that if she did she wouldn’t recover, until that revelation of its darkness came through to her like a beam of light. She jumped from bed and looked around the room. The bed sheets were grey. The wood of the bed was a burned brown, and the walls were an ailing dark beige. She ran to her closet, burned wood, and looked inside. Her clothes were all shades of grey, dark blue, black, and an occasional white, yet at the far end of the rack she found the red coat and umbrella her mother had given her as a gift two years before. She’d thanked her dutifully and accepted the gift, had placed it in her closet and had never thought of it again.

She was unsure if what she’d discovered would help her, but as the rain began to trickle at the window she felt an urge to go out for a walk and have it wash away the noise in her head. She pulled on her new red coat, grabbed her red umbrella and went out, penetrating the grayness around her with a bright red color. It was her final act of defiance. She had initiated a silent war of colors.