Depression is exhausting. It gets old so fast, listening to the elaborate prose of your brain tell you that you’re an idiot for even trying. When the game is being played, I feel certain it will never end. But that is a lie, like most certainties. Now always feels infinite and never is. I was wrong about life’s meaninglessness when I was a teenager, and I’m wrong about it now. The truth is far more complicated than mere hopelessness.

Believe. My friend Amy Krouse Rosenthal once told me to look at the word and be awed by it. See how it contains both be and live. We were eating lunch together, and after telling me about how much she liked the word believe, the conversation drifted off toward family or work, and then out of nowhere, she said, “Believe! Be live! What a word!”

Etymology dictionaries tell me that believe comes from Proto-Germanic roots meaning “to hold dear” or “to care.” I like that almost as much as Amy’s etymology. I must choose to believe, to care, to hold dear. I keep going. I go to therapy. I try a different medication. I meditate, even though I despise meditation. I exercise. I wait. I work to believe, to hold dear, to go on.

One day, the air is a bit warmer, and the sky is not so blindingly bright. I’m walking through a forested park with my children. My son points out two squirrels racing up an immense American sycamore tree, its white bark peeling in patches, its leaves bigger than dinner plates. I think, God, that’s a beautiful tree. It must be a hundred years old, maybe more.

Later, I’ll go home and read up on sycamores and learn that there are sycamore trees alive today that date back more than three hundred years, trees that are older than the nation that claims them. I’ll learn that George Washington once measured a sycamore tree that was nearly forty feet in circumference, and that after deserting the British Army in the eighteenth century, brothers John and Samuel Pringle lived for over two years in the hollowed-out trunk of a sycamore tree in what is now West Virginia.

I’ll learn that twenty-four hundred years ago, Herodotus wrote that the Persian king Xerxes was marching his army through a grove of sycamore trees when he came across one of “such beauty that he was moved to decorate it with golden ornaments and to leave behind one of his soldiers to guard it.”

But for now I’m just looking up at that tree, thinking about how it turned air and water and sunshine into wood and bark and leaves, and I realize that I am in the vast, dark shade of this immense tree. I feel the solace of that shade, the relief it provides. And that’s the point.

My son grabs my wrist, pulling my gaze from the colossal tree to his thin-fingered hand. “I love you,” I tell him. I can hardly get the words out.