Serious Business: Depression and how it isn't a day camp

Depression is a bitter, fickle, cruel demon.  The thing that I've noticed is that unless someone actually has it, most can't seem to tell the difference between depression and sadness.  Which can be an even bigger bullet to the chest from the person suffering from depression. Being told "cheer up, it gets better" doesn't work. 

The difference between actual, chemical depression and regular extreme sadness is that usually, with sadness, eventually people bounce back. People find things to bring them joy again. When it comes to depression, it can take a very long time, and lots of medication and therapy to even carve a dent in it.  And sometimes? Even that doesn't work.

Let me try to paint a picture of what my depression is like. Imagine for a moment, complete and total darkness. Imagine your heart feeling so heavy it feels like it'll just fall out.  Imagine wanting so desperately to cry, because it'll cause some feelings of relief, but you can't. You can't cry. All you can do is scream , and even then it may not be enough. Sometimes the feelings are so dark they're numbing. You hurt until you can't feel anything anymore. And then you're forced to hurt yourself just to get the satisfaction that you can feel again.

While some may do it for attention. People who get so depressed they harm themselves do it because they can't feel anything else. Imagine being glad to even feel pain. When pain is the best thing you can feel. The most real thing. When pain is the only assurance you're even alive anymore.

Now imagine this darkness again. This never ending darkness. Imagine it feeling like it is constricting around your body, blinding you, suffocating you. You can't see, you can't breathe, you can hardly speak and it's so dark.  

Everything hurts. Your heart, your head, your lungs, your stomach, your joints. You feel ill, even though, logically, you know you're fine.   Your appetite does weird things. You can be always hungry, seeking comfort in pleasures of the palette.  Trying to find happiness in things that you know taste good. Or if you're like me, you reject most foods completely. Even food you know you enjoy.  And when you do eat, you feel so nauseous, you tend to throw up. And then you feel sicker because now your body is responding as if you are actually ill.  Depression is different in everyone. The depressed bingers are no less in pain than those who can't bring themselves to eat at all. They're not selfish lazy fatties. Imagine living in a world when you think the only thing in the universe that could make you smile is food.

Imagine being someone who at one time enjoyed many things and had lots of hobbies. Who loved going out and doing things. Hiking, swimming, drawing, going to movies, being social. Now imagine suddenly hating everything you once enjoyed. Imagine not being able to bring yourself to find the motivation to do anything you liked doing. When even picking up a remote control for the TV feels like a chore.  No matter how hard you try, nothing makes you happy.  And it becomes harder and harder to bring yourself to even make the effort.

And sometimes it gets to a point where even doing the things you need to do feel like more of a chore than they should. Things like eating, bathing, going to work, contacting the outside world.  When all you can bring yourself to do is sit there and stare off into space, lost in your own mind.  When your only thoughts are the worst imaginable.  Because everything is dark and life doesn't seem worth living anymore. Nobody cares. You're a speck of dust. You could disappear and the world would keep turning. You don't matter, and you know it very well. 

And when you reach that point and there's still nothing to help you find the light in life?  It becomes easier and easier to find the will to throw it all away. To end it. The world is a dark, suffocating place. No one cares. You don't matter. Why keep living like this? Death seems like the sweetest release.  Death seems like a much better option than to continue treading blindly into the suffocating, numbing, darkness.

And that's what makes depression so difficult and so real. Sadness you can bounce back from. Someone loses their cell phone and falls off their bike, if you give them a cookie and they smile and you can make them laugh you know they'll be okay. It's when little things happen and you start questioning if you'll ever see that person again that there's a problem. Regular sadness is brushed past. It's a hump many people can get over and get passed. Depression sticks with you. It lingers. It drags you down.

And the worst thing you can tell a person is "try to look at the good things". Or "Your life's not so bad, what are you upset about?" Or even "you brought it on yourself snap out of it". Those things only serve to make a depressed person feel worse. Depressed people know, logically, it's probably not that bad. But that's not how they feel. When even the littlest things feel like major life-altering disasters. That's depression. And it's a big deal.

I'm not saying tread lightly around the depressed or treat them like lepers. All I ask is that maybe now, more people can imagine what it's like. What it feels like to have that lingering within you every day. Maybe be more respectful?  People are people, and people have feelings. And with depression you feel a lot of the worst until you can't feel anything at all. 

If you want to do something, try to be the light at the end of someone's tunnel. Because when someone's trapped in such darkness, sometimes they need help finding the light again.

SEPTA is Evil, Baseball is out to get me, and Snow has psychic properties

So all this snow nonsense going on up in the northeastern United States reminds me of a couple instances from my time in Philadelphia last year.


To those of you who think highly of mass transit - nowhere is it as great as New York City. Philadelphia tries really, really hard. But Septa still pales in comparison.

Now on a normal day, I found Septa to be pretty tolerable. It got me where I needed to go in a decent amount of time. And usually I could get on and off my train or bus with minimal disturbances from other passengers. There would be the occasional crazy homeless person, or the hipster chick who obviously didn't shower, the obnoxious parent/child combo, or the weirdo flashing his penis everywhere... but I'd found them to be few and far between. And usually I could avoid all that by pretending to be occupied with my phone or MP3 player.

However, you never realize how much Septa means to you until they decide to go on strike. In autumn. When while it's not freezing yet it's still really cold - way too cold to tolerate walking up to 30 blocks to get somewhere.  So you're stuck either hitching a ride with someone, or walking, or finding some other means of getting where you need to be. And then you realize just how fucking great Septa is while all this is going on.

Septa decided to go on strike during one of the worst quarters of my college career (so far).  Normal people who were in my predicament probably would have just skipped class and stayed home. But see, this was a really terrible quarter. I'd already skipped more than my allotted time due to way more important things - like sleeping in or wanting to go shopping. Or just plain not wanting to put up with the bullshit going on in that class on that particular day. So this week I really needed to go to class to prove that despite my attitude I'm actually a very serious student. Look, I even did extra homework and everything!

The first few days were alright. My college, the reasonable people that they pretended to be, canceled classes due to the number of students who commute not being able to attend classes anyway.  But eventually the strike got too extreme even for them, so they were forced to go on with classes as usual.  And of course it would be the students' fault for not being able to attend. Because we're all adults and therefore resourceful enough to find a way into a highly congested city at 8AM without fail. (An even more congested city as with mass transit down, there were three times as many cars. Traffic was a royal nightmare, and I don't even drive.)

So I did what any other college kid would do. I walked. I left at 6:30 in the morning and walked the 20-some odd blocks to campus every day during that strike. Because I was too much of a chicken to ask for a ride, and way too poor to get a taxi service. I think I got quite the workout. 

You can probably guess how happy I was when Septa gave up on their strike and the subways went back to running. I could sleep past 5 again!

As for baseball...

Baseball and I have a terrible relationship. The sport itself hates me. I'm convinced of this.

Because no matter where I live, ever since entering college, the local team has made it to the World Series.

If you've ever seen a local population's response to their team entering the World Series, you'll get me when I say this: Baseball is evil.

It's evil and it brings out the worst in people.

I live in Philadelphia for two years. Both years, the Phillies made it to the World Series. And then I move to Dallas and the Rangers make it.  Baseball is out to get me.

But I don't care about the Rangers. They didn't personally affect me this time around (thank Earth). No, but I've got a personal bone to pick with the Phillies.  Philadelphians take their baseball VERY seriously. So seriously that is the team loses? They riot. And if the team wins? They riot even more.

Now imagine all this while Septa was out of  commission. Yeah. Chew on that thought for a while.  I walked to campus with a lead pipe.

Though the year before I watched the festivities from atop a streetlamp. That was pretty cool. I saw a car get flipped over and someone set a newstand on fire. All in the name of the team's victory of course.

And here is where I talk about snow and how silly it is. Snow is also something that is out to get people.

Because last year I lived through snowstorm after snowstorm. And it always snowed on Wednesday night, thus canceling my class on Thursday.  It could've snowed at any other time and I would've been alright with it. But I actually liked my Thursday class! I worked hard for that one! Why couldn't it snow when I had a double on Tuesday? Or even Monday? I'd have liked an extended weekend.

But without fail, always Wednesday night. I'd look out my apartment window Thursday morning and it would look like this:

And I just knew there wouldn't be class. My alarm clock got a lot of mornings off that quarter.

See, normally, when you're a student and you find out class in canceled for snow, you react like thus:

No matter how old you get, that joyous feeling of "Yeah! No school! Snow day! HOORAY!" never goes away. Without fail, you will feel happy about it.

However, when you've had a snow day on the same day every week for three weeks, and there's now an unnavigable ocean of frozen whiteness outside your apartment of which you're lucky if you can even swim through....  Yeah, it's not so happy anymore. Snow sucks when you can't even go to the grocery store down the road to replenish your hot cocoa supply. At this point you just want the snow to fuck off so you can get back to business as usual.

And when the snow finally does go away and you find out that even though you had to miss almost a month's worth of classes, you still have to do the really big final?

No picture on Google could ever properly express how we felt.

In a war against snow you cannot win. No matter where you live. Snow will always get the best of you.  It will make you miss your favorite class for a month if you let it. It will keep you from your friends, from fast food, and from hot cocoa. It is evil.

And fast forward to now, where I am living in Dallas and we're lucky to even see some flurries. This area wouldn't know real snow if it smacked it across the face with its frozen over dick.

But that's okay because if it were to blizzard, if the DART line were to shut down, and the Rangers made it to the World Series all at the same time... At least I'll be prepared.

Condoms, Red Sour Patch Kids, and How To Survive At 2PM

This post is about none of those things. Well, maybe how to survive at 2PM. It's almost 2 here and I'm still alive, see?

I suppose I could very well make it about condoms. Just saying the word "condoms" sets the tone, doesn't it? There's a lot I could actually say about this subject. But I also feel that might be too much for a first post. I'll hold off on that until another day.

As for red Sour Patch kids... I really like them! I like most Sour Patch Kids, actually. Except the yellow ones. Actually, I've yet to meet a person who likes yellow-flavored anything. If you're out there - congratulations, you might be a bit weirder than I.

How does one properly introduce themselves? My reason for starting a real blog (and note, by real blog, I mean not a LiveJournal. I use one of those and it's been growing increasingly lackluster. I want to become a serious blogger, damn it!) - anyway, my reason for starting this blog is that I have noticed I say some pretty weird things on the internet. In places such as Facebook, Twitter, and IM conversations with people I know. Why not compile the weirdness someplace public? Hello, blog, how are you today?

In the name of humor, in the name of promiscuous nerdy girls everywhere, and in the name of my love of carbohydrates - this blog is now officially open for business!


You're going to have to guess about me and my personality for a little while. I don't give away all my secrets at once.

Or maybe that's just what I want you to think.