DESTINY DIVINE

A note before you read: this is a personal story, not a clinical prescription. Laughter is powerful medicine – and so is professional help. If depression has moved into your life, please talk to someone who can walk alongside you. What follows is simply what helped me survive my own dark season – and my prayer that it helps you too.

Darkness is not always loud.

Sometimes it moves in quietly – like a fog that settles so gradually you do not notice how completely it has swallowed the room until you reach for something familiar, and find only gray.

That is how it came for me.

I did not wake up one morning and find myself in a pit. I slid into it slowly, the way a person slides into cold water – one degree at a time, until the cold is all there is and you cannot quite remember what warmth felt like.

Grief had come to my door the way it always does – uninvited, unapologetic, and carrying more weight than any human being should have to hold.

I had lost someone I loved. And love, when it has nowhere left to go, becomes something that lives in your chest like a stone you cannot put down, and cannot carry much longer.

I gave grief permission to be there. I knew it belonged. I knew it was the natural response of a heart that had loved something real, and lost it.

Grief was not my enemy. Grief was simply love in its most broken form, doing the only thing it knew how to do.

But somewhere in the middle of all that – quietly, without announcing itself – something else moved in alongside the grief.

Something heavier. Something darker. Something that did not feel natural at all.

It felt suffocating.

I did not have a name for it yet. I only knew that what I was living inside had stopped feeling like grief, and started feeling like a place I might not find my way out of.

The darkness had weight. It had texture. It pressed against me from every direction, and some days the simple act of existing inside of it took everything I had.

I had never been in a place like this before. And I was scared.

What I did not know yet – what I would only understand later, from the mercy of the other side – was that I had fallen.

Fallen from grief, which is painful but survivable, into depression, which is something else entirely. Something that does not move through you the way grief does. Something that simply stays.

But even from inside that darkness, something in me knew one thing with absolute certainty.

It was okay to be here. But I could not stay here long.

Grief Versus Depression – Knowing the Difference

Here is what nobody tells you about grief.

It is supposed to hurt.

The pain of grief is not a sign that something has gone wrong inside you. It is a sign that something was real.

That you loved someone who mattered. That their absence leaves a shape in your life that nothing else can fill.

Grief is not a malfunction. Grief is the price of love – and most of us, if we are honest, would pay it again.

I understood that. Even in the middle of it, I understood that.

What I did not understand – what I could not see clearly until long after I had made it through – was that grief and depression are not the same thing.

They can arrive together. They often do. But they are not the same visitor, and they do not respond to the same medicine.

Grief moves. It comes in waves – crushing and then receding, unbearable and then quiet, raw and then, eventually, soft around the edges.

Grief has a current to it. It is painful, but it is alive. It flows. And if you give it room to move through you, it does. Slowly. Imperfectly. But it moves.

Depression does not move.

Depression settles. It fills the room from floor to ceiling and then it sits there – heavy, still, and indifferent to everything you try to throw at it.

Depression does not crash over you in waves. It simply occupies you. It takes up residence in the places where your joy used to live, and it makes itself at home like it has no intention of leaving.

I did not know I had slipped into depression while I was inside of it. That is one of the cruelest things about it.

Depression does not hand you a diagnosis. It does not introduce itself. It simply dims the lights, one by one, until the darkness feels normal – until you forget that the room was ever bright at all.

It was only later, standing on the other side with clear eyes and a heart that had healed enough to look back honestly, that I recognized what had happened.

Grief had come first – legitimate, natural, necessary grief. And then, somewhere in the long and heavy middle of it, I had fallen. Slipped past grief into something deeper, and darker, and far more dangerous.

The suffocation was the difference. Grief hurt. Depression suffocated. Grief made me cry. Depression made me go quiet in ways that frightened me. Grief felt like loss. Depression felt like disappearing.

Grief hurt. Depression suffocated.

I had never experienced anything like it. And I want to say that plainly – without shame, without apology – because I know someone reading this right now is nodding.

Someone reading this has felt that suffocation and never had a word for it. Someone has been living inside that stillness and calling it grief because depression felt like too large, and too frightening a thing to name out loud.

You can name it. It is okay to name it.

Naming it is actually the first step toward finding your way out.

I did not have a therapist sitting across from me telling me what was happening. What I had was faith, and the quiet but insistent voice of something inside me that kept whispering the same thing over and over until I finally listened.

It is okay to be here. But you cannot stay here long.

That whisper became my turning point. And what I did next – the decision I made from inside the darkest place I had ever stood – is what I want to tell you about next.

The Decision – “I Can’t Stay Here”

Decisions made from inside a dark place rarely look the way we imagine decisions are supposed to look.

They are not triumphant. They do not arrive with clarity, and confidence, and a sudden flood of light breaking through the clouds. They do not feel like breakthroughs.

They feel more like survival. Like a person who has been underwater long enough to know that if they do not kick toward the surface right now, they may not get another chance.

That is what my decision felt like.

Not dramatic. Not powerful. Not even particularly hopeful.

Just necessary.

I looked at where I was – really looked at it, with the kind of honest, unflinching eyes that darkness sometimes forces you to develop – and I understood something that I believe saved my life.

I understood that grief had a natural end to it. That if I gave it room and time and gentleness, it would eventually move through me and leave something survivable behind.

But depression was different. Depression did not have a natural end. Depression would stay as long as I let it. And if I let it stay too long, I was not sure I would find my way back.

So I made a decision.

Not a loud one. Not a dramatic one. Nobody witnessed it. There was no moment of triumph, no music swelling in the background, no sudden surge of strength that made everything feel possible again. It was quiet. It was desperate. And it was the most important thing I had done in months.

I decided I was not staying.

I gave myself permission to be exactly where I was. I did not fight the grief. I did not pretend the pain was not real or that the darkness was not as deep as it was.

Pretending would have been its own kind of trap. The grief was real. The depression was real. The darkness was real. And I honored that reality by letting it be what it was without drowning in shame on top of everything else.

But I drew a line.

It is okay to be here. But you cannot stay here long.

That line became the sentence I lived inside. I said it to myself on the hard days. I held onto it on the days when the depression pressed so heavy that getting out of bed felt like climbing a mountain.

It is okay to be here. But you cannot stay here long.

It was not a cure. It was not a prescription. It was simply a boundary I drew between grief and surrender – a decision that I would give this season what it needed without giving it everything I had left.

And underneath all of it – underneath the decision, underneath the line I drew, underneath every small act of survival I managed in that dark season – was my faith.

I could not have made it out without God.

I want to say that as plainly and as directly as I know how, because it is the truest thing I can tell you about this season of my life.

My faith was not a feeling during that time. Feelings had mostly gone quiet. My faith was a foundation – something solid underneath me even when I could not see it, even when I could not feel it, even when the darkness made it hard to believe anything solid existed at all.

God did not remove the darkness immediately. He walked through it with me. And that made all the difference between a pit I visited, and a pit I never left.

The decision was mine to make. But the strength to make it – and to keep making it, day after day, in the small and unglamorous ways that surviving depression actually requires – that came from Him.

So I decided. And then I did something that might surprise you.

I went looking for laughter.

Not because I felt like laughing. Not because anything in my life felt remotely funny. Not because the darkness had lifted or the grief had passed or the depression had loosened its grip even slightly.

I went looking for laughter because something deep inside me – some quiet, faithful, stubborn part of my spirit that depression had not yet reached – understood something that my mind was too heavy to fully articulate at the time.

Laughter was medicine. And I was sick enough to need it.

The Prescription – Flooding Your Space With Laughter

I want you to picture something.

A woman sitting alone in a room that grief had made heavy. The kind of heavy that has a smell to it, a texture, a weight that settles on your shoulders the moment you walk through the door.

The curtains may or may not have been open. The day may or may not have been bright outside. None of that mattered much. Because the darkness she was living inside had nothing to do with sunlight.

That woman was me.

And she made a decision – not a glamorous one, not an inspired one, but a faithful and desperate one – to fill that heavy room with something lighter. Something that carried the possibility of joy even when joy felt like a foreign country she had no map to reach.

She got out the VHS tapes.

This was before Tyler Perry became the Tyler Perry the world knows today – the mogul, the studio owner, the filmmaker whose name appears on marquees and streaming platforms across the country.

This was the earlier Tyler Perry. The one who packed church halls, and auditoriums, and theater seats with Black audiences who came dressed in their good clothes, and left with their sides hurting and their eyes wet – sometimes from laughter, sometimes from something that cut a little closer to the bone than comedy is supposed to reach.

His stage plays did both. They made you laugh until you could not breathe, and then they turned a corner and suddenly you were crying, and then somehow you were laughing again through the tears, and by the end of it you felt – wrung out is the only way I can describe it.

Wrung out and somehow lighter. Like something had been lifted that you had not even known you were carrying.

I watched those VHS tapes the way some people take medication.

Deliberately. Consistently. With intention and with faith in what they were capable of doing inside me.

And here is the part I need you to understand – because this is the part that matters most.

I could not always laugh.

Some nights I sat in front of those tapes and watched the humor unfold on the screen and felt it from a distance, the way you feel the warmth of a fire when you are standing just outside the door.

Close enough to know the warmth exists. Close enough to want it. Close enough to feel the edges of it reaching toward you. Close enough to believe that if you stayed – if you just kept sitting there – eventually the warmth would find its way in.

I sat there anyway.

I let it play. I let the laughter fill the room even when my body could not yet participate in it.

I let the sound of joy wash over me when joy itself still felt out of reach.

I let other people’s laughter become a kind of company in the silence – a reminder that somewhere on the other side of what I was carrying, laughter still existed. Still lived. Still waited for me.

Because I believed something. I believed it the way you believe things when you have nothing left but faith and a stack of VHS tapes, and a God who has not let you go.

I believed that if laughter could get down into my soul – past the grief, past the depression, past all the heavy and suffocating layers of that dark season – it would do the work my heart could not yet do for itself.

Laughter, I understood, was not a distraction from my healing. Laughter was part of the healing.

An active, living, physiological part of the process that was working on me even when I could not feel it working.

Even when I sat in front of those tapes dry-eyed and hollow, and nowhere near ready to laugh myself.

The medicine was still moving. The healing was still happening. Even in the stillness. Even in the silence. Even in the dark.

I watched other funny things too during that season. Anything that carried lightness. Anything that reminded my nervous system what it felt like to not be heavy.

But those Tyler Perry stage plays stand apart in my memory – vivid and specific and dear to me in a way that is hard to fully explain to someone who was not sitting in that room with me.

They were Black. Fully, unapologetically, beautifully Black. They carried the full range of Black life – the humor and the heartache, the church mothers and the wayward sons, the love and the dysfunction, and the faith that runs underneath all of it like a river that never fully dries up.

Watching them did not just make me laugh. They reminded me of who I was. Where I came from. What my people had survived.

And something about that reminder – something about seeing Black joy, and Black resilience, and Black laughter held up on a screen with no apology and no restraint – reached places inside me that nothing else was reaching at the time.

I held onto one hope through all of it.

Simple. Quiet. Stubborn.

That one day – when enough healing had happened, when enough of the darkness had lifted, when enough of the grief had moved through me and enough of the depression had finally loosened its grip – I would laugh again.

Really laugh. Fully laugh. The kind of laugh that starts somewhere deep and moves through your whole body, and leaves you breathless and grateful and entirely present in the moment.

I held onto that hope on the nights I sat dry-eyed in front of the television. I held onto it on the mornings the heaviness came back before I even opened my eyes. I held onto it because letting go of it felt like letting go of the possibility of ever being well again.

And I was not ready to let go of that.

So I kept the tapes. I kept sitting in front of them. I kept letting the laughter fill the room.

And I kept believing it was working.

What Laughter Actually Does

I am not a doctor.

But I have lived inside a body that needed healing badly enough to pay close attention to what actually worked.

And laughter – deliberate, consistent, faithful laughter – worked in ways that still humble me when I think about it.

Science, it turns out, already knew what I was learning the hard way in that dark room with my VHS tapes.

Laughter does something real inside the human body. Something measurable. Something that researchers in labs with equipment and clinical trials have documented with the kind of precision that leaves very little room for argument.

When you laugh – really laugh, the deep kind, the belly kind, the kind that takes over your whole body and leaves you gasping – your brain releases endorphins.

Those are the same chemicals responsible for feelings of pleasure and relief. The same chemicals that make you feel, however briefly, that the world is survivable.

Laughter lowers cortisol – the stress hormone that depression and grief pump into your system in quantities your body was never designed to sustain long term.

It reduces physical tension in muscles that grief and anxiety have pulled tight over weeks and months of carrying more than any body should carry.

It strengthens the immune system. It improves circulation. It triggers a physical response in your nervous system that signals – at a cellular level, beneath thought and feeling and conscious awareness – that safety exists.

That relief is possible. That the body can, at least for this moment, put some of its weight down.

Your body does not fully distinguish between performed laughter and spontaneous laughter. It responds to both.

Which means that sitting in front of those VHS tapes – letting the laughter fill the room even when my body could not yet generate its own – was not passive.

It was not simply waiting. It was medicine. Active, working, cellular medicine entering my system through the only door that depression had left open.

I did not know the science at the time. I knew something simpler and older than science.

I knew it in my spirit.

Proverbs 17:22 says it plainly – a merry heart doeth good like a medicine. 

That verse did not arrive in the Bible as metaphor. It arrived as instruction. As wisdom from a God who designed the human body, and understood exactly what He had built into laughter when He created it.

Joy as medicine is not a modern wellness concept. It is ancient truth. It is scripture. It is the kind of knowledge that sits in the bones of people who have had to survive things that should not have been survivable – and found a way through anyway.

Black laughter, specifically, carries something that I believe deserves its own recognition in any honest conversation about healing.

Black people have always laughed. Through slavery. Through Jim Crow. Through redlining and mass incarceration, and every systematic attempt to break something in us that refused to break.

Our laughter has never been naivety or denial. It has been survival technology. It has been the mechanism by which an entire people metabolized the unmetabolizable – processed grief and rage, and exhaustion and loss into something that kept the spirit alive when everything else was trying to kill it.

When I watched those Tyler Perry stage plays – full of Black church humor and Black family chaos, and Black love and Black pain rendered hilarious and heartbreaking in the same breath – I was not just watching entertainment.

I was participating in a tradition of survival that stretched back further than either of us could trace. I was letting Black joy do what Black joy has always done for Black people in dark seasons.

Hold them together until the light came back.

If I were a doctor – and I say this with full conviction and zero hesitation – I would write every patient a prescription before they left my office.

It would read something like this:

Take 10 big belly laughs daily. Morning doses preferred, but evening doses accepted. Repeat as needed. Refills unlimited. No insurance required.

Ten big belly laughs. Not polite chuckles. Not quiet smiles. Not the kind of laughter you perform for other people’s comfort.

The deep kind. The kind that starts somewhere below your ribs, and takes over before you can stop it.

The kind that makes you reach for the person next to you because joy that large needs somewhere to go.

The kind that leaves you breathless and present and, for at least a few seconds, entirely free from whatever has been pressing down on you.

Ten of those. Every day.

Find what delivers them. A stage play. A stand-up special. A friend who makes you lose it every single time. A memory that still gets you. A grandchild doing something ridiculous. A show you have watched seventeen times, and still find funny.

Whatever opens that door inside you – walk through it. Every day. With intention. With faith in what is happening inside your body and your spirit, even when you cannot feel it happening.

Because here is what I know from the other side of that dark season.

The laughter was working even when I could not participate in it.

The medicine was moving even when I sat dry-eyed in front of the television feeling nothing.

The healing was happening in layers I could not access yet – deeper than feeling, deeper than awareness, deeper than the depression’s reach.

And one day – one ordinary, unremarkable day that I did not see coming – I laughed.

Really laughed. Fully laughed. The kind that takes over before you can stop it.

And I knew something had shifted.

The Other Side – What Healing Looked Like

I cannot tell you exactly when it happened.

That is the honest truth of healing – it rarely announces itself. It does not send you a calendar notification or tap you on the shoulder and say today is the day you turn the corner. 

It simply happens, quietly and without ceremony, somewhere in the ordinary middle of a day you were not paying particular attention to.

One day I laughed.

Not the polite kind. Not the performative kind. Not the kind you produce for other people so they stop worrying about you.

The real kind. The kind that started somewhere deep and moved through my whole body before I even knew it was coming.

The kind that left me breathless and present and, for a few seconds that felt like grace, entirely weightless.

I remember the feeling more than I remember the moment. The surprise of it. The way my whole body participated without asking my permission first. The way it felt simultaneously familiar and brand new – like remembering something I had been afraid I might have forgotten forever.

And then, right behind the laughter, came the tears.

Not grief tears. Not depression tears. Something different. Something that felt like release – like a pressure that had been building for a very long time finally finding its way out through the only door that joy had opened.

I sat with both of them – the laughter and the tears – and I did not try to choose between them, or make sense of them, or apologize for either one.

I just let them come.

Because I understood in that moment, with a clarity that the darkness had made impossible for a very long time, that I was still here.

That I had made it through something that had genuinely frightened me. That the pit I had slid into slowly and without realizing it had not kept me.

That the depression that had settled into my room like fog and pressed against me from every direction had not won.

God had walked me out.

That is the only way I know how to say it. I did not walk out on my own strength, because my own strength had been nowhere near sufficient for what that season required.

I walked out because something larger than my grief and more stubborn than my depression had refused to let me go.

Every morning I woke up when part of me had wondered if I would. Every day the fog lifted one degree more than it had the day before.

Every VHS tape. Every moment of laughter filling a room I had not yet filled with it myself. Every quiet prayer offered from a place too exhausted to be eloquent.

All of it was God moving. All of it was grace operating in the most ordinary and unglamorous ways – through a stack of VHS tapes, through the sound of laughter in an empty room, through a sentence I repeated to myself like a lifeline until I believed it enough to act on it.

It is okay to be here. But you cannot stay here long.

Standing on the other side, I finally understood the full weight of what I had walked through.

Depression is not weakness. It is not a failure of faith. It is not what happens to people who did not pray hard enough, or believe deeply enough, or try hard enough.

It is something that happens to human beings – real, faithful, praying, trying human beings – and it deserves to be named honestly, and faced without shame.

I had fallen into it without a map, and climbed out of it without a manual.

And looking back, I could trace every handhold. Every moment of grace disguised as something ordinary.

Every laugh that moved through a room I was sitting in, working on me from the outside in, doing the quiet cellular work of healing that I could not yet feel happening.

The laughter had worked. Even when I could not participate in it. Even when I sat dry-eyed and hollow in front of the television feeling nothing at all. Even then – especially then – it was working.

And I came out of that season carrying something I did not have going in.

I carried a deep and unshakeable understanding that joy is not frivolous. That laughter is not a luxury reserved for people whose lives are going well.

That choosing to fill your space with lightness in the middle of your darkest season is one of the most faithful, courageous, medically sound things a human being can do for themselves.

I carried gratitude – the kind that sits in your bones rather than your feelings. Gratitude for faith that held when feeling had gone quiet.

Gratitude for a God who walked through the darkness with me when He could have simply waited for me at the other end of it.

Gratitude for Tyler Perry and his VHS tapes, and the Black laughter and Black life and Black faith he poured into those stage plays that reached me in a room where very little else could.

Gratitude for laughter itself. For the ancient, designed, irreplaceable, medicine-grade gift of it.

I came out of that season a believer.

Not just in God – I had always believed in God. But a believer in joy as an instrument of survival.

A believer in laughter as a prescription worth taking seriously. A believer that the darkest pit has an exit, and that sometimes the exit looks nothing like you expected – sometimes it looks like a woman alone in a heavy room, pressing play on a VHS tape, letting someone else’s laughter fill the space where her own had not yet found its way back.

Healing is rarely dramatic.

It is mostly just faithful.

And faithful was enough.

A Final Word

I do not know who you are.

I do not know what brought you to this page today, what you typed into a search bar, or what link a friend sent you, or what quiet prompting led you here on this particular day at this particular moment in your life.

I do not know what your room looks like right now, or how long the heaviness has been sitting in it.

But I know someone reading this is in the pit.

I know it the way you know things that live in your bones rather than your head. Someone reading these words right now recognizes everything I have described – the fog, the suffocation, the difference between the grief that moves and the depression that simply stays.

Someone reading this has been sitting in their own heavy room wondering if the lightness will ever find its way back in.

I wrote this for you.

Not for the person on the other side of their healing – though I hope they find something here worth carrying forward.

Not for the person who has never been in a pit – though I hope they tuck this away for a season they cannot yet see coming.

I wrote this for the person who is in it right now. The one who is tired in a way that sleep does not fix.

The one who laughs when they need to so that nobody asks too many questions, then goes quiet again the moment they are alone.

The one who loves God and is still struggling – and carries the quiet, unspoken shame of believing those two things should not be able to exist in the same body at the same time.

They can. They do. And you are not broken for living inside both of them.

So let me say to you what I said to myself in the darkest room of my life, on the days when the fog pressed heaviest and the exit felt furthest away.

It is okay to be here.

Grief is real. Pain is real. Depression is real. Whatever brought you to this place – the loss, the trauma, the weight of living in a world that has never made it easy to be who you are – it is real, and it deserves to be honored rather than rushed.

You do not have to perform recovery for anyone. You do not have to be further along than you are. You do not have to explain or justify or apologize for the season you are in.

It is okay to be here.

But you cannot stay here long.

That second part matters as much as the first. Give yourself the grace to be exactly where you are – and give yourself the permission to start moving, even slowly, even one small faithful act at a time, toward the light you cannot yet see but must choose to believe exists.

And here is where I want to give you something practical. Something you can do today. Not tomorrow when you feel better, not next week when things calm down, not someday when the conditions are right.

Today.

Find your laughter.

I do not care what delivers it. A stage play. A stand-up special. A comedy series you have watched so many times you could recite the lines but somehow it still gets you.

A friend whose voice alone makes something loosen in your chest. A memory that still lives in your body as joy.

A grandparent’s saying. A child doing something ridiculous and perfect.

Whatever opens that door – find it. Get it into your space. Press play. Let it fill the room even if you cannot yet fill it yourself.

Sit in front of it the way I sat in front of those VHS tapes in a room grief had made heavy.

Let the laughter be present even when you cannot participate in it. Let it work on you from the outside in.

Let it move through your nervous system and your cells, and the deep quiet places inside you that the depression has not yet reached.

Because it will reach them. The laughter will find its way down. It always does.

Take your ten big belly laughs a day. Take them like medicine because they are medicine – ancient, designed, scripture-endorsed, scientifically documented, soul-deep medicine that your body knows exactly what to do with.

Take them on the days you feel nothing. Take them on the days the fog is thickest. Take them especially then. Trust that the healing is happening even when you cannot feel it happening.

And hold onto the hope – quiet, stubborn, faithful hope – that one day, on an ordinary unremarkable day you will not see coming, you will laugh again.

Really laugh. Fully laugh. The kind that takes over before you can stop it, and leaves you breathless, and present, and entirely surprised by your own joy.

That day is coming. I am a witness to it. I am living proof that the pit does not have the final word, that depression does not get to write the last chapter, that laughter and faith and a God who refuses to let go of you are more than sufficient to bring you through to the other side of whatever you are carrying right now.

You are going to make it.

Find something funny. Press play. Let the laughter in.

And if nobody has told you today – you are seen. You are loved. You are worth every prayer, every faithful act of survival, every small and unglamorous step toward healing that you have taken, and every one you have yet to take.

Healing is on its way.

With love, laughter, and the unshakeable faith of someone who made it through –