@dicentra is so appreciative. Always trying to reach out, build community and get people interacting - whether by humour, poetry, deep thoughts, music, encouragement, multimedia creativity, or any of the beautiful ways her mind works.
So, Dicentra, this is an attempt to appreciate you.
To know what Dicentra means to me, you have to know where I was. She found me in deep depression. I’ve lived with bipolar disorder for over 20 years. I had chronic, treatment-resistant depression, and for the last five years I lived in isolation. In spring 2024 I tried one last time to heal my life, but the dark tower did not fall. I was depressed for months. I thought I was done. I was only spiralling towards death. I did not want 2025 to happen for me.
She saw me. Somehow, from my scattered posts, she saw someone I couldn’t see. She decided she could make a difference to me. And she did. She began to daily build me up, like I have never been built up in my life. All the encouragement I could ever need. So many conversations. Just the perfect amount of deep, weird thoughts to make my mind come alive. To feel known. To feel like maybe my dreams were not dead after all.
She led me on a path of self-acceptance when I had hated myself my whole life. Nobody had ever been able to do that. Suddenly there were positive thoughts in my head that had never existed before. It has been like learning a new language.
She dreams of a magical side to the world, that makes life beautiful, exciting, daring, creative and multicoloured. I hope she knows this magic exists in every part of her. She literally brings to the world everything she would like to find.
She will remember a metaphor you used three weeks ago, and seamlessly develop it in conversation. She remembers little details, no matter what is distracting her. She can go off on a side-quest to tell you about something else for a while (always fascinating) but she’ll always cycle back to what she was originally going to say because if it matters to you, she doesn’t forget it.
I call her the rogue psychologist, because she is more brilliant than pretty much any psychologist who ever treated me these last two decades. She has gained more insight than most of them put together, but like a guerrilla she is fighting by your side in the trenches and giving you all her insight out of empathy and love.
She is a total warrior in every conceivable way. Her strength and perseverance in life are breathtaking. She destroyed the dark tower in my life, like it was nothing. Many warrior cultures have fascinating lore, and Dicentra is a warrior with her own unique ways of fighting battles and her own codes and values.
She is so creative. Her videos and her poetry are so carefully constructed and laden with meaning, and so full of beauty, vitality and the expressions of her heart.
Her value to this world is immeasurable. There is simply nothing and no one like her.
I want to end with two lyric quotes. The first is from Editors:
You fuse my broken bones
Back together, and then
Lift the weight of the world
From my shoulders again
This is what she did for me.
The second is from Alice and the Glass Lake:
I see it running through you
Through you
Oh, Love
Runs through you
This is who she is.
Thank you, Dicentra, for saving, changing and lighting up my life.
