We erected the Tree of Despair in our living room. It is a yearly tradition. A bare-branched thing, it’s Charlie Brown Christmas meets “Twin Peaks.” When the pandemic came, my husband and I found a simple black bulb with the word “despair” to adorn it, taking it from funny contrast to holiday piled with tinsel and toys to a totem of dread. Alongside all of the blessings and joy, which are very real and important to us, the tree takes up the space that fear, uncertainty, and hopelessness need. Despair is real and important, too. It deserves its due.

Despair also requires space in good writing. We read, in part, to see ourselves, and when a character struggles with an emotion so dark and endless–the sort of emotion we are sure we are alone with–we are embraced. When despair gets put into a new language with a new perspective, challenging readers to see their own burdens differently, we are lifted.

When I had cancer, I learned from peers with much more serious forms of the disease that one of the most tiring things about the experience was that everyone expected brave warriors, not righteous complainers. Positive thinking is sometimes strangled into a religion, abundance immediately available if your energy and thoughts are just right, but the negative can nourish too.

I have been working on revising a memoir manuscript, and upon sharing recently, one reader said, “but how did you feel?” in response to a scene about a breakdown. The scene is about nothing but the heaviest of feelings that I framed through a metaphor of gray goo oozing, popping up from every nook and cranny of a room. Another reader appreciated the metaphor, but while it painted the picture of a mood, it still kept the truth of the moment distant. Something to look at rather than the hardest of things to feel in the heart, the bones, the softest parts of the flesh, the torn fingernail, the tightened lungs. I, as the writer, was holding the despair of the moment at arm’s length, and the readers needed me to hold it close so they could do the same.

I am still revising the scene, and as I search for the words to carry the feelings, I start by closing my eyes and letting the despair come. The Tree is a meditative guide just beyond my laptop. I recall those cancer complainers, needing to recount every terrible detail, every fear, every reminder that our time here is a blip. In doing so, they took nothing away from the warriors but fortified all of us by reading their grimaces and tightened brows as solidarity and truth-telling.

Of course, readers and writers alike need all the space and words in the world for joy, lightness, smiles, and sighs made visceral. Let us also write the worst. Like our Tree of Despair, those words may make the dread livable for the New Year.