Migraines?  Excedrin alone will sometimes work, but I’ve got other pills in my arsenal if I need them.  Arthritis bugging me?  Allergies? Same thing.  There’s almost a pill for each everyday physical ill, or something that works in a matter of days.  Non-medicinal remedies too– more water, less sugar, more walking, less gluten.  The lag time between applying the cure and the end of what ails me is short, and the resolution is tangible.  Hour by hour, I can feel myself getting better– and if it’s not a cure, then at least there are palliatives that can be repeatedly applied to assuage the feelings of not-rightness.

Not so with mood.  Taking your meds, getting enough sleep, watching my carb intake, trying to get out in the sun and to move around some more only help so much.  Positive self-talk, journaling, talk therapy, too.  The distance between what I know and what I feel?  Sometimes it’s a short reach across a small crack, and I can grab hold, strongly, to join the brain and the heart for days, weeks, months.  Other times, that crack is a chasm, miles wide and deeper than imagining, and there’s nothing to be done but hunker down with my darkened heart, and hope that in the meantime, the brain on the other side of the chasm will kick in and figure out how to bridge the crossing.  Right now, the gap is narrowing, something my brain side knows and something my heart side hopes, and my heart side is reaching out, but my heart and my brain are still fingertips away, swiping at each other– I know it’s close, but any contact now is tentative, fleeting, too weak to get me across without making a lunge that I know, from experience, may not get me across.  There’s no quick fix– just a waiting game.