I realized something a few days ago that was really powerful for me, so I'm writing this down both for my own reference and in the hopes that it'll help at least one person browsing this sub because they're experiencing a low mood. 

When you're happy, you can look back on your life and see all of the bad things that happened in the past as irrelevant or, even better, somehow contributing to your current happiness in a way that you couldn't have anticipated at the time. We like to view our life as narratives, and the present moment tends to carry with it a sense of true weight, not only because it's the moment we're inhabiting but also because it's the most recent thing that's happened. There's a sense of "Okay, wow -- THIS is how things turned out." 

When we're upset, of course, this frame of thinking works much the same way. The present moment feels like the conclusion to a story, and all of the terrible sad feelings grip you completely. You feel like this is what it's all amounted to. You feel like this is the true outcome of everything that's led up to the present, and it sucks, and you despair because everything feels so real and final. 

But really life is a series of ups and downs, and you'll never be able to definitively know what each event in your life might lead to next. I'm sure most people here can point to a break-up they had with someone years back and view it with some measure of relief. Maybe you were devastated then, but later on you met someone who you liked even better, and you were filled with relief that the first relationship ended so that you could meet your next lover. 

Life happens in ways we just can't predict. I can list tons of instances where something bad turned out to be a blessing in disguise, where I thought I would never speak with someone again and we ended up becoming closer, where I was SO SO sure that something would happen one way and it happened in a way that I could've never imagined. 

Right now I feel really sad, but I can remember how hours ago I felt pretty good. I'm experiencing a pretty standard mood swing for me, but even if I were responding to some event it's never the end in the way that you think. Going back to the narrative analogy, I'm going to try to tell myself every time I find myself devastated by some perceived setback that this isn't the end of the novel. Rather, it's that fascinating section in the middle where clash and conflict drives the story forward. There's always more to come, and some of it will be bad, and some of it will be good, but rarely is whatever situation we're dealing with "the end."

In a weird way this gives me a lot of reassurance and hope. I hope you're having an okay day and that this might help a bit for those of you having a less than okay day. &lt;3