No feeling lasts forever

I spent the day painting in my studio with my sister-in-law. Between long stretches of quiet concentration, we found ourselves in conversation—the kind that slips in gently, then settles deep. I shared some of my mental health struggles, and it stirred a memory of a truth that quite literally saved my life years ago:

No feeling lasts forever.

I would add now that no season does either.

Hard things arrive without asking. Loss, grief, trauma, the sudden unraveling of what once felt secure—each of us meets the darker edges of life at some point. There is beauty here too, of course, moments that shimmer and sustain us. But in my experience, life is not easy. Some seasons press heavier than others, and some feel almost unbearable while you’re standing inside them.

For ten years I lived with undiagnosed Bipolar I, my symptoms loud and unrelenting, before I reached for help. Back then, I didn’t know that feelings move, that they shift and loosen their grip. I believed whatever emotion I was trapped in was permanent—my forever.

Bipolar disorder widens the emotional spectrum. In mania, the world glows brighter, colors sharpen, thoughts race ahead of themselves. You feel exceptional—brilliant, magnetic, alive. (A perception, not the truth, but a convincing one nonetheless.) And then it can drop you into the deepest hollow of depression, a place that feels like a black hole—isolating, airless, and endless, as though escape simply doesn’t exist.

Now, when I find myself in the thick of whatever life is throwing my way, I don’t try to minimize the pain—mine or anyone else’s. I have learned how to sit with it. To stay. To breathe alongside sorrow, fear, and grief—whether my own or a friend’s. Experience has taught me this: I have survived before. Tragedy, illness, anxiety—I have lived through them, and that history gives me context.

The pain may not vanish. Some losses never fully release us. But it will soften. It will grow less sharp. And you will survive today, and then tomorrow, and then the day after that. Soon those days begin to string themselves into weeks, into months, into years.

And one day, almost without realizing it, you are no longer in survival mode. You are living again. You have stepped into a new season—one of rest, recovery, and quiet possibility. And from there, the future opens, unfolding into one chapter after another, each one waiting to be lived.

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Blessings, Ashley