See... you may go through this blog, every December, and see at least one post wherein I am being a total Grinch. Which is just... accurate. I am. I'm not good at Christmas. Never have been.
There's supplementary reasons. Like. It's not just me being obnoxious.
Seasonal Affective Disorder for one thing. Everything going dark so early kills my mood so hard. The idea of waking up in the dark and going to bed in the dark just chills me to the absolute bone. It really carves away at any mental fortitude I previously possessed. It not being light enough to read by, just at random points in the day? Hatred. Hate that. So, so much.
Another thing. The moment the weather turns cold and damp consistently... all of my joints start to ache.
Rheumatoid arthritis is a hell of a thing. And cold, and damp, makes it worse. When I first went to get it checked out, because you know having this constant pain in my joints shouldn't happen, I was told that it was because I was overweight, it meant my joints had to deal with more, and suffered as a result.
"Fair enough," I reply. "But, like, the worst of it is in my knuckles."
As I didn't walk on my hands, that proved to be a bit of a stumper.
So throughout most of the winter I just have this added extra layer of ouch, both mentally and physically. Which is why the song "The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year" makes it hard for me to follow the philosophy of not wanting to yuck anyone's yum.
And that's before we even get into this year, this particular year, and the challenges it has put at our feet.
It's been hard. We've lost people. We've had to isolate ourselves so we don't lose more, and even those of us who are actually better at coping with isolation are suffering for it. It's throwing the nature of how our society works in our faces - every selfish act, every act of government cronyism and populist cruelty. It's inescapable, and it keeps taking.
That's before anything else goes wrong. Before the economy starts to tank, before the everyday bullshit issues that are going to spring up between now and... whenever.
It's just hard, at times. It's okay to acknowledge that.
But if I'm not so jolly, that's why.
Thank you for reading. Support your humble author via Patreon or Kofi, or follow social media on the right. See you next week.
Around four weeks ago I did a thingy on the social media wherein I asked for a band name, and I would throw out my favourite song by that band. It was neat, because I liked seeing what everyone else's was - I picked up a couple of bands that I hadn't really thought much about prior to that - and I also gave a serious thought to bands for whom I had only listened to one or two songs.
Well, someone (thanks Gareth) gave me Spanish Love Songs as a band - so I grabbed the only song of theirs that I really knew, which was this one: Losers.
It was two weeks later that I thought, hey - that song I put up. Maybe I should go back and listen to the rest of the album - named Brave Faces Everyone. Why not.
And that's when it happened.
Why would someone who suffers from serious depression - and has done for a long ass time, definitely longer than they have been diagnosed, probably since middle school - want to listen to a lot of songs that are... objectively sad?
The same reason as people ride roller coasters and watch horror movies, of course. Just from a different angle.
When you have this particular mind-chemical malfunction, everything sucks. Like, it absolutely sucks. Sadness is a byproduct, rather than the main effect, but it's an inescapable one at times. You get to feel fucking sad, sometimes without warning, for no apparent reason.
Sometimes you want to feel sad for an actual reason. You want to understand why. You want to know why, you want it to have a context. Just like there's different kinds of fear, there's different kinds of sadness - just try watching Schindler's List and Blade Runner, for two examples.
Spanish Love Songs bring forth a very specific form of sadness, in me, and that is in no small part due to Dylan Slocum's songwriting finesse and his voice. I know I bang on a lot about singers and their voices, but his voice is perfect.
The very first song on this album - Routine Pain - begins with this:
On any given day, I'm a six of ten
Bed to desk to bar, eyes on the floor
Still apologizing for the way I've been
Each breath more full of shit than the one before
I mean... that's a statement.
I don't think I can write an entire screed about the instrumentation - it's very good but it isn't anything I can be particularly insightful about. Suffice to say that all of it is a superb accompaniment for the stories that we are being told, and the pleading, entreating, broken voice telling them.
That speaks to me. Right? It being inescapable that the singer feels the song they are singing. That they aren't unaffected, that they can't be, because that song is coming from a part of them. That they are telling you a part of their truth. You are being shown a facet of the person behind the microphone and the lyric sheet.
The entire album is filled with gems like this, little moments of song that jump out and grab you. That sink in and make you think.
One song in particular, though, really got its hooks in me.
It's called Optimism (As A Radical Life Choice), and the first time I heard it, I literally had to put down the mini I was painting and stare at my speaker until the song was finished.
Can't even have my coffee without exploiting someone
Or making another millionaire, or billionaire
What would it take to be happy?
I'll probably start with the money
It was as I listened that I realised another point of sad music, and why it is important.
Armageddon on my mind
I'll try to smile all the time
Like Hell's a construct that I need
To make amends or keep myself clean
And yes, I'm aware it's fleeting
See, a big part of depression - a big aspect of how it can fuck you up so badly - is because it isolates you. It cuts you off from all the good feeling in the world. It separates you mentally and emotionally from everyone that isn't going through this, convinces you that this is all on you.
It tells you that you are alone.
One thing that music does - even music about being isolated, even music about being alone - is tell you that, at least one other person has felt this, and is feeling it. At least one other human being has stood on the same spot that you currently occupy. A person has been where you are, and has felt what you felt; and as the truth of the words sink in, the numbness cracks.
But I'm done dying on the inside
Now that everything is dying outside
The sky is letting go
Of holding on like a crying child
Sure, often, it cracks into tears; it fades away to reveal a surface raw and aching and tired, but you are feeling it, you are feeling something, and it's okay to do so. Before the sociological conditioning that we've been at the mercy of our entire lives kicks in and shames us into feeling guilty for daring to have an emotion we can't adequately conceal.
But for those few moments, you actually want to live; and that's when the chorus speaks for you.
Don't take me out back and shoot me
I know my circuits are faulty
Now I've only ever been a kid
Pointing out dead dogs on the road
Take me down in the landslide
Can we weather this high tide?
I'll wear you out waiting for me to implode
Don't take me out back and shoot me
How eloquently a song can advocate for a person's mindstate. How devastatingly it can take that simplest, most basic plea that - when it gets really bad - we aren't even capable of voicing aloud, when every ounce of brain chemistry is yanking the wheel toward the oncoming lane.
We're trying. Please, don't give up on us.
Don't take me out back and shoot me.
It's been a tough few months. It's been a tough half-a-year. We're all suffering. I daresay almost all of us have lost people in one way or another. Times like these lead to thoughts like these, and anything we can do to navigate our way out of the shadows and want to be saved is a bonus.
Look after yourselves and each other.
No pushing my Patreon this week. Instead, consider donating to Papyrus UK. They work in suicide prevention. Thank you. Sorry this was a rough ride, but - sometimes it has to be.
Fair warning: what follows is going to be about my mental health, which is perhaps an ugly place to visit. So if you aren't down for that particular fantastic voyage, I'd check out an earlier blog. A further warning: this will include a frank discussion of topics such as suicide. Yet again, if you don't want to deal with that, don't make yourself. I'm not here to upset you.
I know that I have discussed this before, and I know that a popular definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over and expect a different result.
Nevertheless.
A term I see used to describe depression, often, is numbness. It's a simple way to explain a complex scenario but - on the surface of it, I agree. You become numb to certain stimuli but not to others. If it's assumed that life's positive stimuli are the "default", then yes, you are numb, because that is the stuff that gets muted. Like flattening the top end of a sine wave.
All the bad stuff, though - that gets worse. Like, even minor setbacks become insurmountable problems or breakdown-worthy complications. If we use the idea of the sine wave - just move the entire thing down. The peaks are less high, the troughs are far more low. Our mountains are flattened while our valleys gouge deep.
That would be pretty bad in and of itself, right? Because that isn't just a thing you sack up and deal with, not if it is hitting you for days, weeks, months. It robs you of life. It robs you of Good Things.
And that isn't the final step.
Not by a long shot.
So with this dunk in your serotonin, stuff that is usually fun stops being fun, and stuff that sucks increases in suck. Which means everything takes a lot more effort. Everything is more tiring. In a brain that isn't working under these conditions, something coming up that you are looking forward to makes it easier to get to the thing, to do what is necessary to enjoy that thing. The drive to go do a thing, when your ability to enjoy the good stuff it will bring you is suppressed BUT your ability to suffer from the bad stuff is heightened, takes a huge hit.
Which begins a spiral, because you start doing less good things, which leads to less good things, and... well, here we start to understand how depression is a battle of attrition against the rest of your existence.
That's what it turns into. It chips at you, digs away at your ability to just go and do things. It erodes your will to take steps to make your life better or even just less sucky. It undercuts you at every turn. All of the things you want or need in a day, become a struggle, and sooner or later, you start to lose that struggle.
You ever wonder where the nihilistic sense of humour comes from, that a lot of folks that suffer depression have? It's about here.
This is where we talk about something called passive suicidal ideation.
Suicidal - that is a very scary word, yes? A lot of people will freak out just from seeing it written down there. It's scary, and we hate to think that people we know have even considered it. When they actually perform the act (there's a reason I don't use the word succeed) then it is a heartbreaking tragedy.
The difference between passive and active suicidal ideation is relatively simple when we get down to it.
If you are active, then you are doing the thing, seeking to do the thing, wanting to actually physically do the thing. If you are passive, then you just... kind of want that, a little. Maybe not even specifically death. You just kind of wish you didn't exist any more. Didn't have to deal with it.
When you have little value for your own life, this passive ideation state is very common. Because life is tiring, and a bit rubbish, and you don't want to have to deal with it day in and day out. Like, you wake up and you are tired already. Great, right? Fucking great.
Some days it is worse than that, and those are the days when you can't really hide it.
It is at this point that, those people I know who are wondering if this is a delayed cry for help or an indictment for not being sufficiently "there" or similar - this isn't that. That's not what I am doing here.
There's not a lot of helping. Not from outside. Nothing much you can do to redress the chemical imbalance that is kicking the shit out of our will to achieve anything at all. That's a very internal thing, and no amount of positive words, friendly memes or song-and-dance numbers will actively correct that. It's like an invisible switch in our skulls.
There just comes a stage when you are halfway doing something totally normal, like something that is just everyday and ordinary and shouldn't cause anyone any issues, even you... and it's like something pops, inside.
You want to break down in tears, right on the spot. Wherever you are. Your face contorts and it is going to be ugly. You grit your teeth and swallow and you tell yourself, no, not here. Not now. Not fucking now.
Not now.
And if you're lucky that only happens once, and you can get on with your day.
That's only on real bad days, mind. But it's those real bad days that dig at you, because even the good days are only okay, and the okay days kind of suck. It's like working retail, customer-facing. You don't remember the 99% of customers who just wanted the thing, paid the fee, said thank you and left. You remember the jerkwipe that took it as a personal insult that you don't stock that brand that you've never stocked, and wants to talk to your manager about it.
That leaves the world looking like a cold place even at the best of times.
I don't know what sparked this particular quagmire of nonsense. Maybe it's the change of season - the Autumnal chill in the mornings telling my subconscious that soon shit is going to turn bad. Maybe it's because I experienced several minor triumphs in the last two weeks, including meeting some family I've never met before, and my brain is incapable of seeing that as just a thing that can happen. Maybe the universe rolled some dice and they came up Double Fuck You, and that's where my brain goes.
I don't know. It happened though.
I am mostly riding out of it, right now. Like, the less of a pit you are in, the easier it is to talk about the pit. Sort of.
If I had anything else in mind to blog about at the end of this week, it all kind of went away late Friday early Saturday. But hey, that's what this blog is for - and for god's sake, don't worry about me. I've lived with this since I was in middle school. It'll be fine.
Sorry. This one was heavy, and it doesn't have an answer or a solution, outside of this:
I am at this very moment planning on getting more help than I currently have.
There is zero shame in getting treatment for any medical condition. Mind, body, spirit.
Get help.
Don't suffer this alone.
If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.
Fair warning: I am going to be talking about mental and physical health, including some talk about suicide and depression. Read on with caution.
When you have a long-term illness, short-term illnesses are weird.
Like... my lungs don't work normally in the first place, and some days they are worse than others, so - how do I really know when I have got a chest infection? My joints hurt all the time, how do I know if I have pulled something?
It changes your baseline level of "okay", which also means changing your idea of what being "not okay" is. I've heard stories - that I fully believe - of people that get menstrual cramps so bad that they actually believe that is what is happening to them when their appendix bursts or when they develop potentially deadly stomach ulceration. Barring the huge issue of sexism within the medical system, the other thing this highlights is that when you usually feel like you are 40% fucked, an additional 10% doesn't feel like much.
The thing that tells me that I am coming down with something is, usually, when my mood absolutely tanks for no apparent reason; and that is a problem, because depression also makes that happen.
So what actually happens, when the brain stops making the juice that makes stuff good and happy and leaves you basically shivering naked in the icy void emotionally speaking, is you wonder briefly - do I have a cold, or is this just a thing that is happening to me now?
There is no cure, unfortunately. One simply has to turn to coping mechanisms, and hope that you've learned good ones.
One good one I have, that I have talked about before, is songs. Music. The stuff capable of leaving me in bits usually.
There's a Brandi Carlile song called Party Of One.
If you don't know who Brandi Carlile is, she's an American folk singer. She's great. It's not my usual stuff but she's a superb singer-songwriter. One of her songs I like a lot is called The Joke, which most people should learn about if they don't know already.
So there's this other song, this Party Of One. It's the last track on her most recent album - By The Way, I Forgive You, from 2018 - and the version from the end of the album is just her singing it. The video of which is beautiful, by the way.
The song is about two people, who have fought, and who are trying to reconcile. They've obviously been together for a while. They know each other. They live together. That is only part of what it is about, though. It's about being exhausted, about being unable to keep up a struggle, but still being there tomorrow. It's about someone being hard to love, but loving them anyway, and about them loving you anyway.
Something about Brandi Carlile's voice when she sings about how she is tired. The way her voice cracks. She is tired. She knows how tired feels. She knows how it seeps into your bones, how you can be a level of exhausted and worn out that it has a physical pain all of its own.
I know that feeling, but there aren't a lot of songs that sing that feeling to me.
The first time I heard the song, it literally stopped me in my tracks. I was heading home from work, and I had to... like PHYSICALLY stop, so I could listen to it.
It's a song I go to when I am in that place in my head, as I have been recently. When I am basically all out of spoons, mentally or physically, and I am on a scale of fatigue that makes me feel like I can feel my hair growing - and it fucking hurts. When it's all you can do to get home without screaming or laying down in the street.
Sometimes that is how it is. Sometimes that is what the world and existing in it feels like. Sometimes, it isn't that you want to literally die - you just don't want to have to continue existing.
That is what being that tired does to you.
That's why I curate these songs that are capable of just... dropping me. Songs that can dig through that grey fog of soporific exhaustion and make me react.
These are musicians that have saved my life in a quite literal fashion. Never, ever underestimate music's power.
For those curious - turns out I was coming down with a cold. Hah. Take that, brain.
If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.
When I was asked when I was five years old what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said with full confidence that I wanted to be a robot.
It didn't take long for that to become wanting to be an astronaut, I think maybe because I realised when I was about six that robots get built and people get born and I was in the latter section of society. I don't remember being that upset about the revelation. I mean, today - if I was fully of the belief that in several years I would be contained in the chassis of an immortal machine, then told today that it wasn't going to happen, I'd be livid.
Other, more feasible dreams followed.
Being wealthy and happy after an indeterminate period of time, because all you had to do was live that long. Being a rock star. Being a professional writer. Being a rock star again. Being a writer again. That kind of calibre of aspiration, running at that kind of level of want or need. It was joined with a variety of other dreams, like travelling the entire world, living in California (I was young enough that I couldn't really differentiate different bits of an albeit huge state), owning a Lamborghini, owning a private jet.
I can tell you the approximate moment in my life when depression really started to kick in, and that was when I was thirteen years old, because my dreams and aspirations started to change.
Now, a lot of folks - the kind of folks who like to use terms like "never did me any harm" or "back in my day" or "that's just the way it is suck it up" - would point out that this is just part of growing up. You put your childish dreams away, and you start having adult ones. Right?
Well, my dreams and aspirations started to include getting through a school day without being verbally abused or physically assaulted.
Dreams of getting out of school and having a job, and maybe owning a record store, and having a flat that was near the shops. Of living near a railway line so I could hear the trains rattling through the night. Of being able to open my windows and hear the world existing outside them, without having to be out in it. Things became a lot more prosaic.
Around about 15, when I had to put down the groundwork for the rest of my educational life, I had dreams that I'd be successful. That I'd have an office in a legal firm, and a bowl on my desk which I would fill with cherry tomatoes, and eat throughout the day. ...I mean, I had no idea what a career in law actually entailed but I had to pick something, and the panic attack I had during the careers meeting didn't help much. Those dreams included waking up and wanting to do the things that I had to do that day, which was steadily becoming more and more unlikely - but the vague dreams of travel, of seeing things that interested me, of seeing the bands I loved, still remained.
Funny how things change.
When you're a teenager you never conceive of having a medical condition that could literally stop you doing things you want to do. Physical OR mental. It happens to other people you know, but you never really consider what it means, let alone what it is like to have it happen to you. That is, in fairness, partly because of society's habit to assume that every illness or condition can be prevented as long as you do the right thing. If you ever need evidence of that, ask people with chronic health conditions the advice they have been given by people without those conditions. (I have some stories, I tell you.)
So life happens to you - life in the boundary of the world as it stands today, here and now. Life in the expanding gulf between rich and poor, wherein all the things that you were promised as a child of the seventies, eighties or nineties becomes the purview of a thinner and thinner slice of society.
It can feel like calcification. Like a million doors that were previously open are closing one at a time, even if now and then a new one opens.
That's why it's important to grab onto the ones that are left, where you can.
It is easy to spend one's life staring at the aspirations on the shelf that we can't reach for any more. I understand that. The mentality of it - how hard it can be to reach for the new thing, when the old things we wanted so badly are unreachable. We have to find the things to reach for that we can grasp. We need to find our victories where we can, rather than pine for win conditions that no longer exist. It's the only way we can keep going. And if those win conditions are as simple as having a day end wherein you actually look forward to waking up tomorrow, then draw your plans and march your troops.
Everyone needs something to strive for.
I don't think there is some overarching point to this ramble. It's something that has been occupying my thoughts recently, after I was asked what I wanted to be when I was a kid, and I had the most incredible wave of nostalgia wash over me as I remembered the one thing I really, really wanted to be was a robot.
If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.
So I am making a conscious effort to not piss in anyone's Wheaties, in my life in general. Which is sometimes hard, because I'm an opinionated asshole.
It is, for the most part, reasonably simple to just keep my mouth shut when someone likes something that I really don't.
I mean it's all opinions, right? If we're in an environment in which a discussion would be appropriate or welcome, then we can have a discussion - but immediately jumping in with the shit-talk is something I am trying to do far less. I used to do it a lot. I was REALLY annoying.
So that usually means keeping my trap shut when it comes to Christmas.
You've maybe seen my festive blogs before. They're not very festive. You can draw your conclusions from how I feel about Christmas from... well, let's just say there's a plethora of evidence.
In my office, there is a significant amount of Christmas cheer. Like the place is bedecked with happy people eating mince pies and doing secret santas and cheerful and yay and joy and.. I don't want to fuck that up.
I know the value of happiness.
Last blog I talked about how the little things are important - the little good things in our lives, the things that make us happy when everything else seems to be devoted to making us miserable. When it is so easy for the negative to have sway over us and so hard for the positive to really sink in, those individual examples of niceness and pleasantness hold a lot more significance.
So yeah. If wearing the hat and dancing around to Mariah Carey is gonna make you happy, then... well, I should probably keep my grumbling to either myself or someone that I am fairly sure agrees with me.
Cowardice? Maybe. Dad always taught me to pick my battles and telling other people to not enjoy an inescapable marketing event isn't one that will have any positive result. Also... what would the point be? It's not like we're talking about eugenics or white supremacy or corporatocracy. It's just people having a laugh. I ought to let them.
I don't know if I have an actual point, for this blog. I think I'm just talking about my feelings and thoughts on this topic?
Most of the stuff that I don't like about the season isn't actually Christmas' fault. It's just people, when I come to think about it.
Maybe I am more of a misanthrope than I'd like to admit.
Anyway. Tune in next time for the New Year Run Up Special.
(You should probably be warned: this one is about depression and various other mental health issues. If you aren't in the frame of mind to read it, no offence taken. I've written plenty of blogs that are about something else. Try this one, which is about the Fermi paradox, and where all the aliens are.)
So. Hello again.
People will often talk about how depressed they are, and I can almost guarantee that - unless it is said in jest - the person in question isn't suffering from depression.
I don't mean to gatekeep. It's just such a small word for such a heavy condition.
Heavy. That's a good descriptor.
Something that comes up with fair regularity when I talk to fellow sufferers and survivors is that only the people who have been there - or are still there - can really grasp you, when you talk about the condition. Which I daresay is true of a lot of this really heavy stuff. It's true about a lot of experiences - how do you really convey how it feels to parachute jump to someone that has no frame of reference? So of course it would apply to mental health, to traumatic experiences.
In terms of depression, heavy is a good term, because it makes literally everything feel heavier. The process of achieving anything, pushing for anything, even going anywhere, even doing basic things, just takes that much more effort. You know when people talk about how hard it is to get out of bed in the morning? Imagine that, but it isn't because bed is lovely and cosy and warm. It's because actually galvanising yourself to stand up requires a literal self-pep talk and takes half an hour. Because your door is all the way over there, and everything else is all the way out there, and then you have to deal with this, and that...and it's all so god damned tiring.
I was having difficulty deciding what to write about today - while trying to drag my carcass out of bed - because every topic I half-settled on seemed so big, and so looming, or so trivial and so unimportant. And that was something I had to do after I got up, which in and of itself seemed like a task fit for Hercules (not one of the big ones, just like shovelling the shit out of the Augean stables).
So why not talk about that?
Then I wondered if maybe talking about depression was a bit much for a Sunday lunchtime. Do people really need my perspective on this illness again? Is it something that should be read? Something that deserves reading?
That's what made me decide to do it.
The thing is, with exposure comes understanding. Just like anything else on earth. I can't write about what it is like to run an Olympic marathon, or raise children, or earn a million. This, though - this I can talk about. And the more I and others talk about it, the better others who don't suffer can understand.
It's a neat little encapsulation of an experience; sitting there at the end of my bed, willing myself to move, and knowing now that this very moment is my topic.
That's what it is like.
It's a duality. A split motivation. You know you want to do the thing, you have to do the thing. The thing requires being done. But doing the thing is beyond you and you know it. You want to not have to. You desperately want to not have to even make the decision either way.
A common thing for people with non-diagnosed depression to think about themselves - or be described as by others - is lazy.
It gets used as an invective, as a pejorative. It gets used as a weapon, against ourselves, by others against us. Mostly because people like to believe that mental health is something that can be fixed by well-wishes and just Not Wanting To Be Like That, that way they don't have to worry about it. Which is ridiculous.
The guy missing two legs and one arm - if we expect him to do everything as quickly as someone with a full compliment of limbs, we're frankly mad. How could we think that? It's cruel and idiotic. Likewise, we don't expect the person undergoing heavy chemotherapy to be as full of energy and drive as anyone else. To do so would, again, be cruel and idiotic.
But depression is a mental health issue, so it pretty much gets ignored. It gets equated with people just being a little bit sad, and nobody can understand why being a bit sad can stop you doing anything.
The spread of knowledge, people's grasp of the situation, the illness for what it really is, has greatly improved in recent years. At least, as best I can tell. There is still the stigma, though. How do you talk about it? How do you talk about it to people that don't know? Especially when actually doing so is one of those aforementioned tasks, that seems all the more insurmountable from the bottom of the cliff.
Well, this is what I'm doing about it.
I'm talking about it, for anyone to read if they see fit.
I think, maybe, I ought to talk about it more.
Sure, it's daunting - but I'm not going to let that stop me.
So since...actually a few days before the last blog, I have been sick as a dog.
Chest infection, basically - with a few caveats. Like, I've had so many chest infections that they all feel a little different, but this one hit harder than most. Not quite pneumonia. I've had pneumonia. That shit almost killed me. Most chest infections, I get over relatively quickly. This one has put me totally on my ass.
Right before Christmas.
I don't need to do another blog about my feelings about the holiday. It's pretty obvious to anyone.
Frankly there are worse times for this to happen. I'd have had to miss at least two weeks work with this shit. That's not much fun, but right now hours are a little quiet, so I'll take the hacking crud now.
Still, there are better times, too. I want to do things. I want to go see people. I want to be the sociable person people are expected to be round about the bottom half of December. I want to see The Last Jedi for god's sake, and no, I haven't seen it yet, and if you spoil it for me any more than has ALREADY been done, I will do a manslaughter.
Also means that I am glad I did 90% of my Christmas shopping back in November, but cursing myself that the cards and such I left so late. Because I am an imbecile. Nevermind, that is taken care of now.
What this has meant, is that I've had a lot of time to sit around, while my lungs drain in the natural (noisy) way.
I've spent a lot of time on Twitter, expanded my follow list, found some people who actually made me laugh until I was almost sick on multiple occasions, and remembered the bits of me that actually liked just chatting shit about Transformers.
I've tried to write. That's not gone well. I've spent a lot of time turning ideas over in my hands like the dude in L.A. Noire while the stupid fucking music plays in the background and having precious little result (aside from his clueless ass muttering things like "This Doesn't Help Me").
I've read a lot of books. The new James S. A. Corey "Persepolis Rising" (stellar go read it right now), Jeff Vandermeer's "Annihilation" (stellar need to read the two sequels before the movie comes out I need them in my life), and re-reading Richard Morgan's books before Altered Carbon comes out (stellar).
I haven't played a lot of video games. Mostly Stellaris. Anything first-person has been making me super dizzy.
I've listened to a LOT of music.
And I've had a lot of time to consider the state of the world, my place in it, and various other things that generally shouldn't be done while on the natural endorphin crash of being ill as hell.
And I've decided that if I can mentally survive being in that place for a little bit, then honestly I'm gonna be just fine.
I'm not gonna kid you, there's been a few very, very dark hours recently. A lot of barrels that I've seen the bottom of from the inside.
I'm okay though. I'm still here. I'm in one piece. (DA DAAAA DAAAADAAA DADADA actually that's only an injoke you'll get if you've hung out with me and my homies or if you've seen One Piece sorry)
It's just been a little rough, is all.
This would seriously ruin Christmas if I even cared about it. But I know that you folks do, or at least, some of you.
Happy Holidays, internet. Be good to each other, make smart choices, and let's make 2018 better for everyone.
It's not just a thief, though. I mean, yes, it will rob you of a significant amount, don't get me wrong. The actual action of theft occurs - but to call it a thief binds it to just one archetype, gives it just one shape.
That just isn't the case.
Some days it is just a cloud. It sits up in the sky and on occasion overcasts the sun, but it is a distant thing - inescapable but not terribly pressing. The cloud might even make everything look a little more picturesque, when it moves its ass out of the way and lets the sunshine through.
Some days it is a weight. A singular weight, that sits atop a subject or topic or thought, and pins it down, makes it hard to move. It means that shifting it from inbox to outbox, mentally speaking, difficult. You spend that much longer just hauling at it or struggling with it, even something that you frustratingly realise should be simple. It can create an aversion, quite easily.
Some days it is the black dog, that Churchill and others have famously described it as. This, too, can take different forms. Sometimes the dog just follows you, all day, hoping for your attention and slightly getting in your way. Anyone who has had a slightly elderly Labrador probably knows how this works.
Some days, however, it is a different kind of canine. It's a wolf. A predator. It stalks you. It doesn't generate gentle frustration - it causes fear, and it's a fear that doesn't come good until later. It makes the shadows longer, and even if the thing you are engaging in is brightly-lit and pleasant, you just know it is out there - waiting for the moment your guard is down.
Some days it takes the form of blinkers. You need to do X, Y and Z, and you quietly thank your depression for not getting in the way of that - but it blanks out the rest of the world. Pausing to look around isn't an option, because the only task that exists is directly in front of you, and there's no other people in this world; only the one you have to talk to at that moment.
Some days, it is the ocean. It is either a massive inescapably looming presence, an infinite icy depth that is always there at the end of the land - or it is something you are under, an immense pressure on every point of your being, just pushing down, down, below the thermal layer and away from light and warmth.
As of right now, I have witnessed a whole new shape; and that shape is barbed wire.
It's like a knot of barbed wire, tangled around everything. It is perhaps informed in shape by my chronic pain issues, but either way - it's like every motion, every twist, every turn, just gets more and more tangled up in the ripping, tearing wire. The more one struggles - the worse it gets.
It also makes it hard to see. At a distance, barbed wire is difficult to spot - it defies examination, and even up close, even when one can understand that it is indeed barbed wire, actually untangling or unwrapping it seems like a Herculean task. Where would you even start?
It's a trick.
In Pacific Rim, Raleigh Becket advises Mako Mori to not chase the rabbit. Depression is its own rabbit. It wants you to chase, to delve, to study - but not with an eye to fix, to solve, to make better or understand. Depression is a self-replicating Von Neumann probe of a sensation, that seeks to break through into every aspect of what you are doing, and the barbed wire Gordian Knot is just one example of how.
You can't do what Alexander famously did and just cut it. That isn't an option. The best way to deal with the barbed wire is to just try and do what you normally would. Get things done. Not ignore it - it's impossible to ignore - but to look at it, and grunt, and shrug, and get your shit done anyway. It's not going away if you pay it attention, nor if you ignore it; but if you can get into the groove of how you do things, of how life works for you when you aren't entangled, you weaken its hold on you.
It's not a demon you can slay with a sword. This is a demon that requires diplomacy, and tenacity, and fortitude.
I wish anyone fighting this demon all the diplomacy, tenacity and fortitude they need.
Content warning: what follows discusses suicide in a frank and open and honest fashion. It may well be upsetting. Hell, I think it probably SHOULD upset you. Please be pre-warned about that before you read on.
Chris Cornell, vocalist, songwriter and musician involved with a handful of the best bands on earth, committed suicide on 17th May 2017. He was 52. It was just over two months until his 53rd birthday, which would have fallen on 20th July 2017.
Chester Bennington, vocalist, songwriter and musician primarily involved with Linkin Park but who temporarily fronted the Stone Temple Pilots, committed suicide on 20th July 2017. He was 41, and he and Chris Cornell were close friends.
In the 65 days between the two tragically linked deaths, approximately 195,000 people committed suicide - damn near two hundred thousand - and perhaps three and a half million attempted it. I'm not trying to denigrate anyone, nor am I trying to make a point about celebrity and attention. I'm merely stating a fact - or a figure. A truly devastating figure.
These figures aren't precise, obviously, but the World Health Organisation predicts that they are conservative statistics. The rate is increasing yearly.
Yes. Enough people do it that it is considered a rate.
I wrote a blog in April last year about my own experience on the topic. tl;dr - I almost became one of those 3,000 people a day that take their own lives, a long time ago, in a different place.
Nobody wants to see suicide figures that high. It's a deeply upsetting thing. Whatever the reasons, we are left hurting inside, knowing that there's more than one person per minute who is so distraught and depressed that, for whatever reason, they decide to end their own existence.
I'm not going to talk about why Cornell or Bennington did what they did. Their reasons are their own. I know why I attempted. I know why I didn't go through with it. There might be similarities, there might not be. None of us are wearing each other's shoes, even if we're all wearing the same brand. Another way I have described it is as each of us having to sink or swim, even if we're in the same sea.
It is when someone like Chris, or Chester, or Robin Williams or Chris Benoit or Marilyn Monroe, takes their own lives - or someone that we know, even vaguely, a friend of a friend - that we ask why, and we ask what we can do to help stop it happening again.
Here's the thing. Speaking from my own personal experience? The way to stop it happening has to begin a long, long time before anyone is even in a bad enough mental place to consider it for more than half a second.
The world is a cold, hard and uncaring place with islands and pools of warmth and light in it. It's a forbidding desert by default, and the oases are irregularities. Human beings are imperfect and insecure by design. For the longest time, that insecurity and imperfection has been treated in the worst way possible: by denying its own existence and chastising those that address it or try and stop it. We build a fence around the hole in who we are and we yell at people to not come any closer, especially if they want to fix it, or help us in not falling into it. It's what we as a people have done for thousands of years.
Society isn't run for the benefit of the people who live in it. It's all trickle-up, and it has been built and reinforced for that precise purpose, like a continental pyramid scheme. Realising that, seeing it in action, is a very sobering thing - and worse, such a societal structure has no place for people like me, or people like the friends I've had that have gone the same route and not lived to tell the tale. We're not productive machines. We're "faulty".
Nobody wants to talk about it until it hurts them and then we don't have the language because we spend the rest of our lives not talking about it.
You can't identify or isolate why it happens. You can't put on magic glasses and spot everyone who is going to swim in that cold sea. You can't apply a litmus test and assign them counselling if the paper turns green. It doesn't work that way, because at some point in their lives - in everyone's lives - there will be a moment when the paper turns green, or close to it. Everyone has at least one single moment, where they plunge into the water, and they need to swim - but we never talk about learning how to swim. We just mourn everyone that doesn't make it back to the shore.
You stop it by making the world better.
Suicide nets and hotlines are treatments of secondary symptoms. If we really want to get the world into a place wherein more than a minute goes by between each suicide - and I am talking about almost halving the suicide rate, just to get to the point where there's only sixty an hour, down to sixty an hour - you treat the cause. You stop life being hopeless and hollow and cold. You do everything you can to pour light and laughter into the world, and you do everything you can to put up walls against the cold ocean. You reduce poverty. You increase support, physical and mental. You listen and you talk quietly but honestly. You learn empathy and sympathy. You hold hands. You help.
Every single person that does this helps. Every single person. If enough of us do it, if enough of us believe it can be done, then we can make things change. We can make things better. We can make life something that supports hope again. Re-prime the soil, so to speak. Plant the seeds.
So when the moment comes that we hit the water, and the cold rushes over us - we look back at the shore, and we want it so badly that we swim for it. We want our place in it, not because we're meant to, but because there IS a place for us.
So let's make a fucking place.
Because out of all the things that could have driven me to tears this week, I didn't want it to be knowing that almost six thousand people would have tried to take their own lives as I wrote this blog, and that almost three hundred of them had succeeded.
Listen, speak, care, change the world. It's all we can do. Maybe it's all we were ever meant to do. Maybe if we want purpose, that's the purpose - to make a world fit for purpose, not for profit, not for power, but for just wanting to live in it one more day than we did yesterday.
We can do that. I'm sure we can.
Written in memory of Chris, Chester, and the two hundred thousand.
So then. A brand new year to stomp through like kids in an amusement park.
Last year at around about this time, I mused about what I would get up to in the brand new set of days we'd all been presented with. In truth, though, that was actually harder than I let on - mostly because depression turns the certainty of a future into a maybe, especially if it is positive. It becomes quite hard to even consider that there will be a next year, let alone to construct a plan for it.
Which, really, just makes it more important. Makes pushing against the dampening and the dark that much more critical. If we just give in - sitting still whenever the whisper in the ear demands it, tearing down the things we love every time the itching in our fingers gets too much - then we aren't living. We're existing, and I am somewhat familiar with the difference.
So what am I going to do this year that involves living rather than existing?
Well. Aside from the gig - the BIG gig, in three weeks - there should be more live music. I don't know where, I don't know how. I just want to see someone, somewhere else, before the end of the year. Not enough live music in my life. Need to fix that.
Music in general. More of it. I think it has to happen. I've been a salty bastard for too long. Time to fix that.
Nine Worlds. August. Hammersmith. Change of cosplay idea - because frankly Roadhog is going to be an absolute pig to pull off (pun intended), I'm looking into something a little more... final.
...as in Final Fantasy. As in Gladiolus from Final Fantasy XV. Gonna need a mullet for that.
Finish another book. Maybe the sequel to Bridge. Maybe something else. Don't know which. I should really fix up the rewrite of the Star Wars prequels I keep blabbering about too.
Keep up the blog. Got to be done, keep it up. Maybe hit up a few more blog-a-day weeks. That was fun. I think more subjects are required too - as whenever I write politics, it feels like I am dragging my guts through the grinder for very little payback. I know that pushing for public awareness of political reality is an endurance test, but sometimes I just don't have the endurance.
I guess it's just about keeping one's shit together, hmm?
I didn't set out with a definite subject for the year-end blog.
I did one last year - well, on the third of THIS year technically. In it I set out some things I wanted to do, and well...
DID - Finish the book. It was my NaNo project, mind, but it was heavily inspired by the thing I was working on at the time of writing.
DID - Game more. (Didn't play a lot of the games listed, but did play a lot of others besides.)
DIDN'T - Go and see The Room at the Prince Charles. Just couldn't make it work, and my health was frankly pretty shitty, so. Ho hum.
I also made it through. That wasn't a given. Like I know it never is a given. It just so happens that on more than one occasion it was a relatively close thing. The aforementioned health issues haven't helped that, and quite frankly my mental health has taken a heavy ding. And on top of that...
...well, I don't need to tell you about all the shit things that have happened, do I?
The marked victory of right-wing politics in the UK and the US - seemingly buoyed up by the slow uptake of more right-wing attitudes of those involved. Standing Rock. The constantly devolving situation in Turkey and Thailand, the refugees fleeing from war-torn places and being treated like shit the moment they arrive, and Syria. Just...fucking Syria. Just thinking about it makes me want to cry, or hurl, or both.
Attacks against our rights, our wellbeing and our freedoms have been constant. In the UK in particular, the continued austerity, combined with the leadership of Theresa May's sociopathic rush to enact every single anti-person law possible, has made living a pretty difficult thing.
Add to this the inescapable fact that 2016 has been a year that has seen so many of our legends and beloved personalities die. I speak from the heart here, as more than one of those who have passed on were heroes of mine. Muhammad Ali, David Bowie and Prince in particular. There's a lot of folk who will get snide about noticing the (actual statistical) uptick of celebrity death this year but it's there, and it still hurts.
Not just the famous ones, either. My dad has been dead four years, now - my aunt Renee died earlier this year, and my grandfather not so long ago.
It all adds up.
So when there's some sarcastic shit about "well 1665 was a worse year than 2016 because black death lol", I can't pretend it doesn't make me angry. I've seen that card played one too many times, primarily by the kind of people who benefit from not having people feel like they are suffering. You had it worse under X, so you'd best support Y. Who cares if it is bad now? It was worse then. Don't ever think about trying to get to Z to make it better, though.
...and I just...cannot fucking wait for it all to be over.
Get all the bank holidays and bullshit out of the way and get back into the life. Work, earn cash. Go get shit done. Disturbed, Avenged Sevenfold and In Flames in January. Nine Worlds in August. Leave this heap of shit in the rear and move the fuck on. Even a new dumpster fire is better than an old dumpster fire, and if we're really lucky - maybe we can start making some dumpsters that AREN'T on fire.
Fuck, I'd give it all just to hurt less. Let's go with that.
So I started writing a blog about how Right-wing governments are actually pretty much just officious attacks on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs for their "subjects", but then I got real sad, and decided I had to do something else.
Because it is very, very sad. Like, focusing on that type of thing is difficult enough when you are doing so thinking it will help. You wait for these people to make good decisions, to make things right, to stop putting people in charge of organisations that you know they will either dismemeber or devour, to stop making ridiculous decisions that are clearly just self-interest or harmful ideology, and it just...doesn't happen.
Then you turn your frustration and anger outwards. You look for other people that just saw what happened. It's like if you see something fucked up in the street and you look around, like, was I really the only one that saw that?
...and guess what. Yeah. You were. Or at least, you were part of a very small minority. In a crowd of fifteen hundred, you and those two over there are the only ones that even gave a shit that yet another nail has been put in the coffin of life potentially getting better.
Then you try and MAKE people care. You point, you shout. But there's too much other noise. It's not even like it is shouting over pop culture and other random bullshit anymore, either. There is too much shit going on that it all gets collapsed into the same packet of hard-to-deal-with unpleasantness, and people put it on the back burner and ignore it, until it goes away.
(Or until it cripples their economy, robs them and people they know of their livelihood, and turns us all into the broken and battered puppets of an abusive state. But you know jk lolz.)
It's like finding a needle in a haystack, except the stack is made of needles, and the one you are looking for is just slightly more radioactive than the ones around it - which are almost all radioactive as well.
...so instead, I am distracting myself!
Here's some music that I am listening to a fair amount.
Rag'n'Bone Man - Human. This guy's voice is killer. I can't wait to hear more from him. Soulful. True. I love this. He's got this timbre that just hits all the right buttons.
Sublime With Rome - PCH. Oh this is feel-good to die for. So good. If you want to dance, this will make you dance. Big Sublime fan, so when I heard Eric Wilson and Rome Ramirez were collaborating, I had to track some down.
Erra - Drift. Djenty harmonic tech-metal. This song in particular crosses my playlist a lot, usually just before or after Skyharbour and Northlane. I don't like dumb music. This is far from dumb music.
White Denim - Ha Ha Ha Ha (Yeah). You'd swear this was recorded back in the heady Motown days. Toe-tapping hip-swinging. Another voice with guts behind it. It just FEELS good, on the ears. Got vibes out the wazoo.
Florence + The Machine - Stand By Me. Yes a cover. From the beginning of Final Fantasy XV. It's the best cover of this song that I've ever heard. Right in the feels, over and over again. I've listened to it twice a day since the day I first heard it. I can't help it.
On top of this I have been reading The Expanse books by James S. A. Corey, which are thoroughly good science fiction.
...and that's what has been keeping my head straight. That and my friends and coworkers. A lot of shit has gone down recently, both geopolitical macroshit and personal microshit. So I have to thank those close to me for helping keep me on a level.
So when I've got my shit together - maybe in the new year - the aforementioned blog will happen. Until then, it's just a case of staying above water.
(It's the penultimate seven-day marathon blog! Will we make it? I think so!)
As of right now I have the window opened for two reasons - to enjoy the cool breeze, and to take in the distant sound of the carnival.
We have a local carnival here. We have a few in fact, one for each of the major towns. As a kid I used to love carnival season, seeing all the colorful floats and people in costume and marching bands. These days there's a lot more samba bands than marching bands, and it seems to be a lot smaller. That is probably just kid-scaling. It was a thing of wonder and beauty, a sensation of community before I could properly convey what it felt like.
These days I don't have a lot of time for the carnival. It is physically difficult for me to stand in one spot for two hours. I mean I can do it, it just hurts like hell, and it is super-hard to enjoy anything when you are in a significant amount of pain. Also I think I am just a lot more miserable and scroogy about the entire thing. Having seen Notting Hill once, coming back to Ryde Illuminated can be a bit disheartening.
You know what, though? I like that it happens.
I like that big mobs of Island folk who are otherwise not talking to each other on a daily basis can get together for a while and see other Islanders prance about and have fun. I like the fact that, for a while, we get a little bit of community. The backbiting and rumour-mongering stops, and we just listen to music and look at pretty lights. We just enjoy life for a while.
Some of us do anyway.
I don't know what I would do without music, and listening to music in the distance, listening to it come to so many sets of ears and be freely heard by the populace - that's a thing of beauty. Music is life. The beat is life. Even if it's a samba band. Even if it's a bunch of drunk pub regulars dancing around to Jive Bunny on the back of a flatbed, as I remember from my youth.
I can hear those distant drums and I know that there are kids laughing and cheering and hoping that the ambulance at the end never comes, that the traffic never starts running again, that the parade of colour and light and sound just keeps running and running. That this thing that the entire town knows about and acknowledges and even kind of likes would just...never end.
And that's something that we can all kind of understand, right? We've all found those moments, those events, that we have wanted to continue long after dark. That we've wanted the sun to never rise on, because the sun leads to waking up, and responsibility, and work, and being the same as we were before this thing changed us forever and made us smile like we meant it.
The really tragic thing is that, quite often, we don't realise that we're in that place - that we're there, nestled in the warm arms of just feeling right and happy and secure and hopeful for once - until we wake up the next day; and just like waking up from a beautiful dream, we clutch for it helplessly, desperate to save just a little piece.
The memories are our reward. When we can look back and smile. And the time comes wherein you realise that there's certain things you won't get to do again. I speak personally in this regard - I know I won't hit up another music festival or go sleep in the desert under perfect stars. I can't. My body won't take it. But I do remember the time I did the things I did. I remember main stage at Reading, singing Under The Bridge with thousands of other people. I remember Brighton, and standing ten feet away from Adam Duritz as both of us burst into tears. I remember being driven home from a Poison show in Denver in a yellow Mustang. I remember sitting on Ryde sea front at midnight with the rest of my graduate friends, kings amongst men, yelling our challenges at the future with gusto.
I remember being seven, and sitting on my front garden wall, as the carnival came past - all those marching bands with buttons and instruments brightly polished, all those people in bright costumes, all those flatbeds full of dancing fools.
Drums in the distance, reminding us of when it was good, and that - just maybe - it can be good again.
(The third of seven blogs this week! This isn't so bad! Famous last words!)
WARNING: Below this point, there will be a LOT of spoilers, if you aren't caught up with Steven Universe - at the very least to the episode Mindful Education, Season 4, Episode 4.
Here's a nice picture of Garnet to provide some space between warning and spoilers.
Okay so. I REALLY like Steven Universe. To the point that Steven was my first (albeit lazy) cosplay ever, which I wore at this year's Nine Worlds.
I even had the cheeseburger backpack.
I love this show for a lot of reasons. It is smart. It is sharp. It is funny, without being cruel. It is understated in the epic scope of the overarching plot. You don't even know there really IS one until late in Season 1.
The music is wonderful - both the incidentals and the songs the characters themselves break into with just enough infrequency that it feels like a treat every time. As I understand it most of the cast were chosen in part due to their singing ability, and Estelle - voice of Garnet - does a killer job at bringing life to her as a character, both verbally and chorally.
I love the characters; I love the parts of me that I see in some of them. I love that they are whole. Even if someone seems like a stereotype at first, you get to know them in the ten-minute snippets of life in Beach City. Even characters that seem throwaway and background gain a life of their own, which teaches you a valuable lesson - even people in the background have a story and a history.
Which brings me onto what I love the most about Steven Universe: the lessons.
It teaches us things. It teaches us important, valuable things, that I think everyone should know. It teaches us about love, of all sorts. It teaches us about insecurity and how it is okay to feel it, but to not let it hold us back. It teaches us about strength, and weakness, and moments of each. It teaches us about consent, and about respect, and about devotion and obsession - and the fine line between the two.
I don't know a lot of people who have watched the show who haven't felt their heart break at least once while watching it. In order to do so, you'd have to be a robot with no capacity for empathy.
Listen to Pearl singing about Rose - about how she can't believe that Rose would pick the human over her, and now she's gone, and why can't she just...move on? Who hasn't been there? Who hasn't met someone that turned their entire world upside down, like Ruby and Sapphire? Who hasn't seen someone going the wrong way about something and silently pleaded for them to realise, like Pearl in the song this blog is titled after? Who hasn't fucked up so monumentally that you would do literally ANYTHING to make it better, like Amethyst?
The songs add so much to the show. They sum it up in so many ways. Even the seemingly throwaway songs - Connie and Steven's jam song, or the snippets of the song Rose Quartz sings at the end of each episodes - gain meaning, gain traction.
It is the most recent song, however, that I find myself thinking about the most; a song about thoughts, about being hung up on them, about being afraid of even thinking them because they hurt. It's a song that poignantly, pointedly and accurately deals with anxiety - with things we have done wrong in the past and how we deal with them.
It's called Here Comes A Thought, and unsurprisingly, Garnet is singing it to Stevonnie. Because of course their relationship / fusion is a scary thing, and of course Garnet has been through the same thing more than any of the others. It makes perfect sense, doesn't it?
Steven Universe. A comforting cartoon for people living in a flawed world. But that's okay - if every pork chop was perfect...
Fair warning, folks; what follows deals with mental health issues - specifically my own. Yet more specifically, depression, anxiety, and suicide. If these things upset you, or if they make you uncomfortable - either due to their nature or their relevance in my life - then I'd suggest looking elsewhere.
Everyone still reading...we okay? We okay to get real serious?
Okay, now...
For full disclosure: when I was in college at age 18, way back in 2001, I tried to kill myself.
It didn't take, obviously. Partway through the process I ruined a couple of perfectly good towels and called an ambulance.
There's a few reasons I did this. None of them were good enough. None of them are justifications. At the time, though - at the time they were all that mattered. That's how it always seems, when you're at that point. Nothing else is visible. Your world becomes a very dark tunnel.
It took a long time to recover. Not physically - now I have two very fine scars that are basically invisible unless you know what to look for. Mentally. I had suffered from significant anxiety problems beforehand, and they only got worse; for years, I pretty much sequestered myself away in my room, only emerging briefly every now and then. To compliment this, for as long as I knew how to assess myself and my feelings, I have suffered from depression.
The accepted wisdom is that if you think of committing suicide, then you really ought to get help immediately. I confide in you, dear reader, that this would be impossible for me; because however briefly, ever since I did it once, I have thought about it regularly.
Does this affect how I live my life day-to-day? Well no, not especially. Nowhere near as much as my physical health (which long-time readers will know is pretty fucked, and not just because I'm fat). It's just a thing, that pops up in the back of my skull every now and then. For me it's as much a part of life as that urge to slap someone for being rude, or to shout at someone for doing something stupid, or to buy something I clearly can't really afford just because it looks neat.
Human beings are animals, and animals have urges. One way in which we can be better people is to not give in to the urges we feel. The urge to immediately strike back when wronged, or to hurt others when we are hurt, or to pursue a brief insubstantial high in exchange for a long-term low. I'm not saying that the life of an ascetic is a good one - but as I often say, moderation in all things (including moderation).
If you look at life this way...then the call to end it, no matter how soft, is another harmful urge to be controlled. We all face shadows and darkness, and we all have mechanisms to cope with it. Some mechanisms are better than others - harmful in and of their own right - but the important thing is that we don't give in.
Here's where I could spout any number of insipid platitudes that I've seen all across social media, but honestly - that's not very me, is it? That's not very me at all.
In truth the reason it is important is simply because life is here to be lived. There's no purpose outside of that which we give ourselves - and my purpose is to keep going. Happiness happens. I have felt it, I have seen it, and I believe in it. Happiness makes it worthwhile. Some days are easy, and some days are hard - but I never regret surviving the day I almost didn't.
Between then and now I have grown so much. I've seen so much of the good (and bad) side of life. I've met people that have changed me, almost always for the better. I've seen things, read things, heard things that have made every day worth it. I've seen my favourite bands play live, I've seen the sun rise over mountains and the stars over a desert. The days that have seemed the worst have ended up containing moments of utter joy, crystalline and near-perfect, embedded in the shit of mediocrity.
It's hard to remember that. A lot of the time. I only see it right now because I am making the deliberate and concerted effort; that doesn't mean it isn't there, always there, waiting in between the shadows.
All of this was prompted because a friend of mine posted something the other night; a picture that stated simply, "I am glad that you survived".
It is sometimes a hard thing to deal with depression as a vaguely nihilistic person.
You see a lot of motivational posts all over social media. A lot of these posts talk about purpose, meaning, so on, so forth.
It's great that people can find things like that helpful or soothing or actually motivational, you know? It's nice that the things can actually prove to be useful to folks, because everyone copes differently and everyone needs a different way forwards.
For me, all the motivational stuff makes me feel a little nauseous.
Like...I am sure some of them (if not most, if not all) are made by people who don't necessarily need the motivation they provide. They always strike me as hollow platitudes. Like there is something inherently mindlessly optimistic about it all, like someone that's never lost a limb telling me how it will feel, or someone who isn't drowning smiling calmly and telling me that it'll be okay, just picture the oxygen entering my lungs.
More than that, though - more than that is the notion that there's something beyond, and if only I believe in it, then it'll give me the strength to do the next thing. Which I can't do. Because if the recovery is built on the belief in something that can't be proven, then there's nothing to keep it all from falling down when you have that moment of doubt. All that can hold it together is your belief, your unshakeable belief...
...and you are better off devoting that to yourself.
"You were not born to just pay bills and die," one of them says. That's true. In truth? You weren't born for anything at all. You were born because of point A leading to point B, and the cell separation at point C, and the birth at point D. You're not here FOR anything. You're here BECAUSE you were conceived.
My function is to keep going. I wasn't put here with a purpose. Happiness is the one thing that should be pursued without question - though not at the cost of other people's. What else is there? All life demands is sufferance. We owe it to ourselves to make that as easy on us as possible.
Something my dad used to say, when he was very, very sick. "All I want is a peaceful life." I think that is what all people want, in a way. More than to be wildly succesful, more than to be vastly wealthy or permanently entertaining; we want to be able to breathe, to take time and to have that time to ourselves.
We spend a significant proportion of our lives doing things to try and achieve that peace. The average citizen of the UK works 1,677 hours a year. We go through school, we try and normalise, we go through everything that is expected of us just so we can get to a point where we have warmth and shelter and a lack of hunger. Then we have to keep it up - we run on the spot to keep that place. We put ourselves through daily experiences that lead to heart conditions and buildups of stress just so we have somewhere to go and sit and not be stressful anymore.
That's the life we have, the cards we are dealt. All we can do is try and change it to something better, and find our peace and our happiness as best we are able.
I've mused on this over the past week. I've had occasional hard times, mentally; now and then, average everyday bollocks has been difficult to surmount. Each time I have come to a similar conclusion.
Depression is a thief that steals a multitude of things from those that it haunts.
It steals time. Minutes, moments. Sometimes entire days. It turns them grey and samey, making them flow together until they are a single indistinguishable mass. It's not that they don't happen; they are just spam time. Void. The bits of the movie that happen off-camera.
It steals opportunities. Chances for career advancement, personal betterment or just plain fun. They can be rendered into hollow victories, hours spent waiting for the other boot to drop. They can be turned into ordeals so horrifying that one questions why one bothered in the first place, turning a positive event into a hugely negative one. That is, if it even lets you go or try at all.
It steals friends and acquaintances. Nobody wants to go and make friends when in the grip of a downswing - and it's hard to do so even if you can work up the wherewithal. It can push people away, too - makes unmissable social events harrowing and untenable, and often, other people's tolerance can be pushed to breaking point.
It steals people - those who don't survive it. Those who are trapped inside their own houses or their own minds. People that could have been our best friends, enriched us, made us better. Snatched away.
It steals dreams. When just getting by each day is hard enough, the notion of the future is a hard one to grasp. It all seems to be so unobtainable.
Depression is a thief.
What's worse is sometimes you don't even know you are being robbed.
