A few years ago I started on antidepressants. I dithered for many years about taking meds—for a variety of reasons. I was suspicious of Big Pharma. I was convinced the drugs wouldn’t do much for my mental and emotional health—after all, nothing ever had before. And somewhere, in the back of my mind, going on antidepressants seemed like a copout. Shouldn’t I be able to power through to optimal mental health by dint of my preternaturally stiff Upper Midwestern lip?

Fortunately, thanks to the gentle wheedling of a compassionate (non-Midwestern) therapist, I eventually relented, and she referred me to a psychiatrist who could hook me up. I cried during my first psychiatric appointment when the doctor said she’d seen plenty of people whose lives had been completely transformed by meds. Up until that point, nothing had been able to clear the black—or, at the very least, gray—cloud that had followed me around for as long as I could remember. My official diagnosis was dysthymia—aka persistent depressive disorder. It’s a dry technical term that, for me, translated into a perduring, unshakable feeling that life simply wasn’t worth living.

Well, long story short, the meds worked. In addition to lightening my mood and elevating my baseline feelings of worth and contentment, I was much better able to focus on the positive. More than anything else, though, I became far more resilient. Knee-jerk defeatism—a frequent visitor that, for most of my life, had tended to loiter—left the premises and never returned. It was replaced by something that was less than Pollyannish idealism but much more useful than idealism’s polar opposite.

I became a genuinely optimistic person. And though I still get down from time to time (these short near-winter days certainly don’t help), I almost never have two bad days in a row anymore. I look forward to the future (whatever it may bring), and I now feel that the world is worth fighting for, no matter how fucked up it may sometimes get. But I also acknowledge that this whole racial/economic/social justice campaign we’ve undertaken—and revitalized in the past few years—is, and always was going to be, a tough slog.

I see a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth in the wake of Sen. Joe Manchin’s Sunday decision to shiv Joe Biden’s presidential agenda. I get it, believe me. And in the past this kind of news would have felt like being beaten senseless and falling in a ditch to die. To be certain, pharmaceutical assistance notwithstanding, I feel pretty shitty today. Omicron is about to slam into our already reeling country like a tidal wave, the Build Back Better Act (at least as we knew it) is at best in a coma, and the Jan. 6 coup-plotters are rebuilding the Death Star as we speak. I want to throw up, honestly.

But we have two choices: 1) crawl into the ditch of our own volition and surrender all hope or 2) buck up and get back to work. Because while I don’t know much about what the future holds, I know what resilience can do for a person. Five years ago, I thought I would die an unhappy, unfulfilled, emotionally tormented man. Today, I place no limits on what my life can be. After nearly 50 years of chronic moping, what I once thought was impossible is now my new reality. There’s a lesson in there for all of us, and I hope we’re not too myopic with rage right now to see it.

Hopefully, we’re at the end of Act 2 in this story—the part where the hero gets the shit kicked out them and the villains appear to be on a glide path to victory. And maybe I’ve seen too many movies, but I simply can’t accept that evil will triumph in the end. I can’t. As exhausting as false hope can be, it’s nothing compared to the debilitation that comes with simply giving up. I know. I have lots (and lots and lots) of experience in that area. 

I don’t know what’s around the corner any more than you do. Or Biden does. Or Manchin. Or any of those Republican assholes who would prefer to see a wannabe dictator returned to power than to help vulnerable families or meaningfully address climate change. 

The news is shit today, but we still have plenty of fight in us. And if I’ve learned anything through nearly 50 years as a pessimist—and just a handful as an optimist—it’s that optimism is the way to go. Because life has a way of surprising you, and not all those surprises are bad ones. 

For 2022, I’ll hope (and maybe even say some feckless agnostic prayers, just to cover my bases) for some good news—or even a rare black swan—that goes in the Democrats’ and the country’s favor. I don’t know if it will come, and I don’t know whether we’ll feel more relieved or aggrieved a year from now, but I sure as shit know that defeatist attitudes won’t get us anywhere in humanity’s millennia-long fight for economic and racial justice. 

That fight never ends, and likely never will end—and it continues apace:

Don’t get me wrong, I’m as dejected as anyone else, and it’s hard to see what will change in the near future to make me feel better about our prospects for the new year. But something always does, and losing streaks end—often when we least expect them to.

Call me naive if you want. That’s fine. But last year at this time I had zero hope that we’d secure even one of those up-for-grabs Georgia Senate seats, and we got them both. Without that near-miracle, Build Back Better would have been a nonstarter from the get-go. And at the very least, Democrats have moved the Overton window enough to offer a glimpse of what a child care tax credit—and other family-friendly policies—can do for regular Americans. We got stuffed at the 1-yard line this time, but there’s plenty of game left to play. 

Buck up, folks. And roll up your sleeves. We’ve only just begun.

For more resources on depression and other mental health issues, visit the National Alliance on Mental Illness website.