Despair is a state of repair
Brené Brown puts despair as a synonym with hopelessness in Atlas of the Heart, so I’m going to go with David Whyte’s take on it instead. (Whyte and Brown, lol.)
((Note: maybe what I classify as despair would be more what Brown describes as anguish??))
Per Whyte, in Consolations, despair is a necessary and seasonal state of repair, a temporary healing absence, an internal physiological and psychological winter when our previous forms of participation in the world take a rest; it is a loss of horizon, it is the place we go when we do not want to be found in the same way anymore.
Despair takes us in when we have no place else to go. It is a haven of self-compassion, an invitation, a last protection.
Brown classifies despair as the permanent state of hopelessness, whereas Whyte calls it, “strangely, the last bastion of hope,” which turns to depression and abstraction when we try to make it stay beyond its appointed season. (So still the emphasis on the necessary and seasonal state of repair.)
Despair is kept alive by freezing our sense of time and the rhythms of time; when we no longer feel imprisoned by time, and when the season is allowed to turn, despair cannot survive.
This feels like it can encompass more of what I classify as despair, which is usually part anguish, part grief, part shutdown, overwhelmed by something I no longer want to be a part of. (The ongoing US-backed genocide in Palestine; the climate crisis; every war across the globe.)
In Atlas, it’s more personal, and doesn’t really include that necessary need for hibernation and repair. What Whyte calls a difficult, beautiful necessity, as human beings caught in a fierce and difficult world where half of our experience is mediated by loss.
And how to emerge, when nothing is in one’s control to fix? By giving the despair a profound and courageous attention.
To see and experience despair fully in our body is to begin to see it as a necessary, seasonal visitation, and the first step in letting it have its own life, neither holding it nor moving it on before its time.
Basically, you could say it is a waveform, not a prison:
We take the first steps out of despair by taking on its full weight and coming fully to ground in our wish not to be here. We let our bodies and we let our world breathe again. In that place, strangely, despair cannot do anything but change into something else, into some other season, as it was meant to do, from the beginning.
That makes me think of Ecclesiastes, to everything a season. And Alan Watts’ wiggles. And Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.”