To Admire
Compiled by Erica Allen, college student from central Kentucky.It occurred to me a few minutes ago, “Maybe I should just get out of the house.”
And I thought, “To do… what?”
So much accumulated worry, I feel like I just want to sleep it into oblivion or vomit it out.
Maybe I’m hungry. Maybe I’m dehydrated. Nothing really sounds too good, and I spend enough money on food anyway where I work, in between shifts. I’m thinking of Indian food now, or maybe a big greasy Penn Station sub. Yeah, that sounds kinda good. Maybe Qdoba. Maybe I just eat here (make a veggie burger?), and then get out of the house. Maybe I should count my money first, and organize it to make a deposit at the bank, and check and see how much money I have in checking right now, and go ahead and pay off some bills in advance. I also want a new computer. I also want to fly to France to visit Griffin next semester. I need to help pay for school, somehow, wherever. I should start saving up an emergency cushion of money, for whenever I am truly on my own. Car needs air conditioning, it’s getting hot. Two pairs of jeans now with holes in the same place.
I have a dress (it’s actually my sister’s) that I like to wear when I am feeling not great. It’s a nice color and comfy jersey fabrice, with a halter top and built-in padding in the bust. When I feel like this, I don’t like to wear a regular bra.
Working, Smiling
At work this evening, I was heading back towards expo just as a man was popping through the partition that cuts to the restrooms. We did that awkward shuffle-stop expectant “After you!” “Oh, after you!” dance. Well, we walked down the aisle together, and I recognized him, he’s a regular. He: “I’ve gotta say, you’re always smiling! I bet you’re always so cheerful.”
FUCK. THAT. SHIT.
Course, I just smiled and laughed appreciatively, “I wish that were true!”
AGHHHHH.
THIS IS WHY MY PARENTS WERE TOTALLY SURPRISED I FAILED OUT OF SCHOOL B/C DEPRESSION.
It’s like they still don’t realize that I think about no longer existing all the fucking time. Because gosh, Erica’s so PERKY! and smart.
As per griffin’s insistence, i’ve been living up to my feelings of wanting to smoosh paint around. I fingerpainted an entire little canvas board tonight, and really, i think it turned it nice. mostly, it felt nice.
Season’s turning
I am thankful for leftover beef stroganoff for lunch, and our tulips and grape hyacinth, and my talkative kitty cats.
Felt pretty miserable earlier, and finally, after a small bowl of ice cream, feeling a bit like I’ve woken up. Or like, maybe not everything is entirely pointless. Or no, more like, I have a penny of energy now to pursue some sort of futile activity, so… maybe I will clean or paint. I thought about painting earlier, taping paper to my wall in my bedroom, but the thought of standing there made me want to curl up in a small ball on the floor. Now I feel more interested in this idea (of painting.)
In pseudo-productive news, I added a few new pins to my Pinterest, ha, which does actually make me feel better, in some way. It, like, reaffirms to me that I do have a good eye. I don’t know. It’s like daydreaming.
My birthday is on Thursday, and I do not have any real plans. I don’t feel inclined to insist that my family goes out to dinner that night, so I am opting for either a more lavish-than-usual breakfast for supper night, or ordering to-go Indian food from Masala. I don’t want a cake. I do want a lot of candles, and maybe flowers. I really want a tall flute of champagne with lavender. Or Hendrick’s.
My mom has told me now that she would be interested in started a compost pile. I’d like that. I like feeding those little buggies.
And Shaker Village has new little baby chicks. Oh little dears, let me love you, and scoop you up. I wonder if chickens would like me if I soothed them as chicks.
When the wind blows, now new leaves rustle. Spring is a lovely time.
It is so nice outside, why do I feel awful.
I slept in, showered, made a nicoise-y tuna salad and ate it with crackers and diced tomatoes, I made a deposit at the bank, I went to Dairy Queen and bought a couple of blizzards, picked up my brother from school, ate our blizzards, took a walk in the park—lots of minnows, flowering trees, daffodils.
I work at 6. Mom is making lasagna, and she announces it will be done at 5:30, meaning that I can’t eat it before work. Earlier, I called Hueston Woods to inquire about the price of campsites for spring break, and while they are priced reasonably, guess what? They’re all booked. And I should’ve gotten small blizzards, not the minis.
My head just feels congested and heavy. Stop that. Stop thinking about dying.
i guess one of the weirdest aspects of depression and depressive episodes, for me, is that i totally lose any sense of being interested in or even liking or knowing anything about any subject at all. i dissolve from my personality completely, and am overwhelmed by the dynamism and activity of everyone else.
I’m an INFP.
I also have just learned that INFP-ers are overly represented in the populations of people suffering from depression and people with ADD. Curious!
This is a love story.
It’s about our friends Mark and Giulia and the courageous journey they took through and out of the dark, steep path of mental illness. I think like most of their friends, we never could have imagined that the always smiling, full of energy Giulia that we had grown to love during our time in San Francisco could be going through this. It felt so sudden. So unexpected. I remember getting the email from Mark that Giulia had been hospitalized and I must have read it a dozen times. I just couldn’t comprehend what they were going through and I didn’t know what to do or what to say.
Months went by and we only got to see the outermost layer of the battle Mark and Giulia were fighting. Eventually, as Giulia began to find her way through, they did something drastic. They put their lives on hold and went on an around the world trip. We all followed their journey on twitter and their blog. I saw photos of my sweet friend with her hair whipping across her glowing cheeks, that familiar smile returning to her face.
So often in marriage, when the true test of commitment to a spouse is tested, things fall apart. I can thing of few things as devastating as losing a bright, witty, charming wife to the black hole of mental illness - to have her there physically but somewhere far away mentally.
But Mark fought. and Giulia fought. and they found their way back. Their journey is more heroic than all the fairytales and story books ever written. It’s love. at its best and worst. and it deserves to be shared.
Love,
M
Agh. This made me tear up some. My depressive thinking and anxiety make me, uh… worry, worry a lot about what sort of partner I will be in the future. What sort of partner I am now.
I wish this video had shared more.
I can’t help but notice their own privilege in how they were able to cope with the mental illness—leaving jobs to sail around the world? I mean, shew. BUT.
I worry that some day I will get really, really bad off, and this video offers me a shred of hope that we can make it through okay.
depressive realism
success, yes, in this family, in this posse of women, a lot does rest on the wrangling of menfolk in order to become housewives and have babies.
Now, you all would clearly take me for a liar if I said I had no such interest in these things. I want babies. I would love to have the luxury to be a housewife. (Or really, if I were a full-time housewife, it would be more a way of me very much avoiding my own potential harm/success/risktaking; I am very acutely aware of this as my own personal weakness and lack of courage.) But—so— I very much desire to have my own space, and a loving partner to create it with and beside me, and I have a strong affection for lovely linen closets and spice cabinets and baked treats and little… feets.
but attaining this sort of “success”—of marriage and house and children, as these are things I do want for myself (I want to reiterate these are not my universal ideals to which i judge the “success” of others by)—it is absolutely terrifying.
sometimes I feel so bad and so unworthy I went to melt through the floor, become the dirt, I am mud, I am dead and forgotten and taken for granted. I want to fail fully so badly that I am physically out of this futile toil waste and consumption so many call “life”. i want to be disgusting to you.
the last thing I want, in my utter fear and lack of courage, is to feel important to someone else. Being wanted to someone else, as through a partner’s love, is, I don’t know if you realize this, a most terrifying responsibility. My heart may be broken or defunct or lost, but I dearly do not want you to hurt if I become physically or emotionally unavailable to you, and that is an impossibility. If I lack the confidence that I will ever really, truly feel meaningfully better and lastingly purposeful, my attempts at personal improvement will fall hollow to me. I can only dissapoint and drag down and sleep.
And children? Oh lord, oh children. How even more terrifying. Another obliging force, to persist because one’s own children must need them. It feels like a very sad trap. A very sad trap for everyone.
i think my brain is obviously in peril right now, and so I should go to bed
After that period, I thought things could not get more scary than the constant gnawing fear that I was not doing what I was made to do. Sadly, this assumption was false. I was absent the day that the “nothing is more terrifying than success” memo got passed out. Or maybe that memo never got distributed because no one wanted to be the asshole that said, “I got what I wanted, and it’s scary as shit.” So, f*ck it. I’m going to come out and say it because I would have felt a hell of a lot less alone this year, had I known.
I’m telling you, you must read this post by founder of APW Meg Keene, who has just wrapped up her first year as a full-time small business owner (of APW), who just published a book, and who is planning a book tour as we speak.
And let’s talk about this quote. Sometimes this idea that success is actually very terrifying/stimulates even more ridiculous personal growth/etc etc etc is thrilling. Sometimes, when I am depressed—which I keep bumping into these recent evenings—this idea makes me want to… oh yes, curl into my bed paralyzed with despair. Sure of failure. Praying for failure. Sick in my gut of the expectations and needs of others left unfulfilled.
