GPT

In 1988, a series of wildfires tore through Yellowstone National Park, burning nearly 800,000 acres. At the time, it seemed like a disaster. Blackened trees stretched as far as the eye could see, the air thick with ash and loss. But Yellowstone is what ecologists call a fire-dependent ecosystem.. Many of its plants have adapted to require fire to reproduce. Lodgepole pine cones, for instance, are so tightly sealed with resin that only extreme heat can open them, releasing the seeds inside. By the summer of 1989, the first green shoots were already appearing in Yellowstone’s charred soil. The fires hadn’t destroyed the park—they’d awakened it. Anxiety feels like a wildfire. It consumes everything, leaving you raw and exposed. Depression feels like the smoldering aftermath, gray and lifeless.

Glaciers don’t rush. They don’t do anything in a hurry. Depression has the same grinding slowness, carving out valleys in its wake. You don’t notice it at first. You’re too busy surviving the cold to realize what’s being worn away. It’s only after, when the glacier retreats, that you see the gouges it’s left behind. In Iceland, there’s a monument to Okjökull, a glacier that no longer exists. The plaque is blunt: “A letter to the future,” it reads. “This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done.” The ice is gone. It won’t come back. But here’s the thing about glaciers: when they melt, they don’t vanish. The water flows into rivers and lakes, changes form, moves elsewhere. The glacier is gone, but the impact remains. The valleys carved by the ice don’t refill. They stay open, raw reminders of what was. 

There’s a tree in the Mojave Desert called the Joshua tree. Its twisted limbs and spiny leaves make it look more like a sculpture than a living thing, as if some artist decided to carve persistence into wood. The Joshua tree thrives in one of the harshest environments on Earth, surviving on less than four inches of rain a year. But what’s remarkable isn’t just its resilience—it’s how it became resilient. For centuries, the Joshua tree’s survival has depended on a single species: the yucca moth. The moth lays its eggs inside the tree’s flowers, and in doing so, pollinates them. The tree provides food for the moth’s larvae, and the moth ensures the tree can reproduce. It’s a precarious partnership, one that has allowed both species to persist in conditions where neither should thrive.

The Mariana Trench is the deepest part of the ocean, where the weight of the water above is enough to crush a human body in seconds. It’s an alien world down there, home to creatures that look more like fossils than anything alive. Depression feels like that pressure. It wraps itself around you, constricts you, makes even breathing feel like too much effort. And yet, somehow, life exists in the trench. Not thriving, exactly, but persisting. Anglerfish, amphipods, translucent eels—all of them fragile-looking, all of them surviving in conditions no one would willingly choose. The creatures of the trench aren’t triumphant; they’re just there. Existing in a way that seems impossible but isn’t. Depression feels the same way. You don’t conquer it or outwit it.