Bad apples

I was officially diagnosed with depression about five years ago or so even though I've had it pretty much most of my twenty-six years of life. There is no point to this text actually; most of the time, when people talk about their depression is to let people know that it's going to be okay and it doesn't last forever, and there's always ways to overcome it, and please don't kill yourself.
I have nothing against positive messages, they are extremely necessary, but if you have depression for as long as I've had it, you know it doesn't get better. Depression doesn't just go away, and that's something I wish sometimes people would talk about more. There are a lot of neat messages from when your depression is not so bad, for when you feel like fighting it, but not really much for when you're deep in the hole and are getting ready to be comfy there for a while. "How to get out of a hole you want to be in?" There should be a book with that name (is there? Someone send it my way).
The thing with depression is that you don't always want to feel better. Sometimes you are so deep in your own head that you don't see the point on wanting to feel better (or on feeling better). This doesn't always mean you want to die, and there is a fundamental difference between wanting to die and wanting to not exist that is not addressed when we talk about suicidal behaviors. Wanting to kill yourself is an active thought, from my experience. I haven't wanted (or tried) to kill myself in many years. I have, however, wished I didn't exist quite often. Wishing to vanish from existence is rather a passive thought. You sit there, you look around, you feel miserable all the way down to your bones, and then you decide you don't want to be. You want yourself to stop existing, which mustn't be confused with wanting to die. Wanting to die implies to have had existed, implies doing something to stop being. Wanting to vanish is the illogical and not-very-realistic idea of suddenly disappearing from existence. When I wish to disappear I'm not wishing to die, I'm not trying to kill myself or plotting my own dismissal, I'm just sitting there hoping I can stop being part of everything at least for a while.
They are both miserable thoughts, but one is listened to, and the other one is so ridiculous nobody who hasn't felt it understands what you're talking about unless you explain it with great detail--and more often than not they still think you want to kill yourself.
I can't use the phrase "not to be a downer" because I probably am trying to be a downer right this second and I can't bring myself to feel bad about it either. If you have the type of depression I have, the one that comes and doesn't go, it's just softer sometimes and then worst other times, you know there's no helping it, you have to engage in sadness from time to time because it is all you can feel.
The problem is that people will try to tell us how to fix the problem and we know it cannot be fixed. I'm not trying to kill myself and I'm a positive person most of the time, but I do have depression and there is no cure for that. Some days I remember I have to live with that for the rest of my life, and then the days when I'm feeling the worst become longer and heavier and more unbearable, because they aren't alone; this is not a single day that I'm feeling bad, it's just one of many more I've had and many more I will have. And therapists tell you to live for the good days, not for the bad ones, but the bad days are still there. I cannot just ignore the bad days. They will keep coming, and more often than you'd like you cannot be prepared for them; there is no getting ready for a bad day, it hits you on the face like a ton of bricks and it comes out of nowhere. You are fine one second and the next you don't understand the meaning and purpose of your own existence and everything you've done with your life is meaningless. 
It would have been nice if someone had told me that at some point. "Just so you know, you're going to be miserable some days no matter what you do" "Heads up, there will be mood swings and you will forget sentences from five seconds ago like they were told to you when you were two years old" "Sometimes, you will be hyper-aware of how meaningless life and everything you do actually is."
Life is not meaningless, of course. We don't know the meaning of it, but that doesn't mean it's meaningless. There are all sorts of things to do and all sorts of things you can enjoy. But here is the thing: when you have depression, the things you enjoy become a chore.
I've been in therapy for a while, and one of the first things that you have to try to get better is do things you love. Do things that make you feel good. I think there's a lot of "distracting yourself from the pain of life" in therapy.
I tried everything. It sounds like an exaggeration because obviously you never want to think you've tried everything you could possibly do to get better, but there things that must be taken into consideration: First, "everything" is a giant grey area. Second, depression makes you too damn tired, and "trying everything" is something that takes up a lot of energy, so my "everything" and your "everything" may not look anything alike.
Third. Today I feel like talking about all the things I've tried and how I'm still feeling miserable. Not only how I'm still feeling miserable but how I may have lost all love I had for doing anything. In this, it's important to consider that when we say "I can't" we actually mean we literally cannot. There is a physical force that pushes us back, and no matter how much you try, when you're deep in the hole, there is just no doing of any kind. We need to talk about this moments as much as we talk about the moment we got better, because we forget to tell ourselves that we are not always better, and we won't always be fine, and then when we are not fine we think we have failed at everything.
I do not have a recovery story. I have gotten better, in a sense; I don't spend days in bed, not showering and crying, for one thing. I call that getting better, but it's hardly becoming a functional human being. I have had accomplishments that should probably make me proud and that other people have congratulated me for, but they hardly seem like anything important to me; they look like things I was supposed to do, somehow. No matter how big the thing is, it looks like something silly that anyone else (literally anyone else) could have done with way less effort and better results. I try to look at them like they are something important, and to remember that I, me, I put a lot of effort and work in them, that I did something. That I am doing things. It doesn't work most of the time; more often than not I think I could have done something better, or that I'm not cut for the job. 
Example: I got an internship in one of the oldest literary magazines in the country. It sounds fancy, even though we all know internships seldom are as fancy as they sound (it was us sitting on our butts for nine hours a week, reading submissions). The thing is, not everyone gets these things, and I did, and I should feel accomplished, I should feel entitled to feeling accomplished, but I do not. I've gotten many things in school, for which I work hard, and still I hardly feel excited about most of them.
I was given an award for creative non-fiction piece I wrote.
I was invited to read to two formal events.
I was published in a silly magazine because apparently my poetry is decent.
I got a few monetary prizes.
All these things sound big when I write them down, and yet they feel like out-of-body experiences. Like it wasn't me the one who did the thing.
Now, when I say I've tried everything, I mean everything I could think of.
I still lost the love I had for doing things. Doing things and not having them make you feel better is nowhere near as painful as doing things you use to love and discover now you're too tired and done with life to appreciate them. So consider: if you loved something, you tried it to maybe feel better, and then you don't feel better no matter how much you do it, you try, or you love it, you end up not really loving it anymore. It's like your love for the thing is broken and there's no way to fix it. Like it failed you, or rather like you failed it by not enjoying it as much.
Then you just stop doing the thing. Because the joy of doing it is not there anymore no matter how much you try.
I used to enjoy listening to the radio, and now I don't, not really.
I used to read book after book. It was the only thing I wanted to do, it was a refuge, a place I could be. I don't think most people can understand how painful it is to pick up a book and discover you're incapable of enjoying it anymore. You're incapable of losing yourself in the pages, of paying attention, of not getting distracted. You're not capable of reading the thing, get to the fifth chapter, and still remember the chapters before that. You forget what just happened. And then you don't have the energy to read it again. You want to keep reading, but everything feels so heavy you know you won't like it if you keep reading. Reading is all I wanted to do with my life.
I tried painting and gardening, like they tell you in therapy. I tried coloring books and journals. I tried going out by myself and I tried socializing. I tried cooking (which I'm quite good at). I tried working and then not working. I tried exercising, bought a bike, went to the playgrounds. I drink water everyday and I eat fruits and veggies, and I tried taking baths and using oils. I tried meditation, which you can't really do when you're brain won't shut up. I tried yoga, and then didn't feel like doing it anymore because all the damn people who do yoga always feel like being too damn positive, when most of them are just stealing from sacred millenary practices that have deep spiritual meanings they don't really understand. I tried going to the movies. And I try writing. 
There is not a single solution and there is nothing that will work forever, and more often than not I find myself unable to do anything I like doing. And I guess because I'm feeling down I would like people to talk less about how you get over depression and how it will get better, and more about the times we will fail at getting over it. The times we will willingly go back to it and embrace it because we can't do better those days. The times we fall in the hole no matter how much better we thought we were doing. I want people to talk about how there's no cure for this, and how even if you take medications and you try your best, sometimes you don't feel any better. I want people to acknowledge that more often, so we can get used to that feeling. The us, being miserable because that's how depression works. Us, hating ourselves maybe, because we don't know how to love the things we used to love anymore. Us, crying because we don't know what to do.
I want us to think about the bad days prepare ourselves in the hope that, when they come, we may be a bit more ready.

 I think of the rain sometimes.
The difference between Fahrenheit and Celsius is greater when you understand the distance. If you have only experienced one of the two then there is no point of reference and it's hard to understand that forty degrees can mean a hundred and four. It is a bit like that with the rain, but it is also more difficult to explain.
When I think of the rain it seems to me like the rain lasted forever. There was rain every month, the was random rain sometimes, when it wasn't supposed to rain and no one was expecting it. There was rain when nobody knew there was going to be rain because nobody bothered to look at the weather report; if rain came then rain came and there was not much to do about it. Rain was fine, nobody worried about rain unless it wasn't coming.
I walked about twenty block under the rain one time because I didn't want to wait for the bus anymore. I ended up so wet that my teeth started shivering and my skin turned purple. If I could spend all the days of my life deciding if I want to take the bus or get wet, I would pick either because both would mean there would be rain to see. But it is different here and now.
There is no rain. The winters are cold and unforgiving and it only rains at night. Now I don't get to decide between taking the bus or getting wet because there is no rain when the sun is out. There is no soaking of the streets, there is no smell of wet dirt.
I finished writing my first long story on a rainy afternoon. The drought makes me feel like there aren't enough words out there for me to express what I want to say, and I think about the rain when I'm desperate and lonely. I think about the sound of water hitting the streets made of stones rather than concrete, and the trees dancing with the wind, and the grey skies that open up to let the heavens cry. And I often wonder, what's the point of having grey skies if we don't get any water down? 
I think of the rain when I sit on the edge of my bed and there is only silence. The clock ticks and tocks and there are no raindrops. The bookshelves crack and shake and there is no thunder. Here, there is thunder without water, and it feels like screaming with no sound, it feels like heartbreak.
It is easy to think about the ocean when it rains, like waves of happiness, a memory of the water that keeps coming around. It is easy to think, "ah, that's the same water," and smile. And when it rains I feel a little bit less lonely. And when it rains, I feel a little bit more at home.
But when the winter hits, I look out the window and wait for the spring. And when spring doesn't rain, I wait for the summer. Then I wait for the fall. Then I wait again. I have forgotten when it's the time for rain, but in my mind it is always raining.

 Dear Mr. Shaun David Hutchinson, 

A little bit over a year ago I read your book "We Are The Ants" and I decided it was the best thing I had read in a long time. It speaks to me in so many levels, I had to go back, read it again, highlight all the things that made me cry, and separate all the end-of-the-world chapters. It is not often that, as a reader, we come to find books that make us feel this way, and I cannot thank you enough for that. I don't think I liked YA before this, so I'm going to blame you on that. 

I'm trying to say something specific here, I swear, I just need to put my brain together. You see, I've had depression since I was very young. I thought about killing myself a few times before I was even twelve; I want to believe you will understand why it is important to me to say this. Sometimes, when we are depressed, we think nobody understands. We think, "so what's the point?" And it takes someone telling you that they don't see the point either to make peace with yourself. To understand that, no matter how many bad days there are, there are always good days too. It's hard. But you know that already. 

I'm not a teenager anymore, and I've come a long way, and had a few traumas myself, to tell you that your book was not just a book to me, and no matter how much other people didn't like it, how much it didn't matter to other people, it mattered to me. 

After I read "We Are The Ants" I decided I wanted to read everything else you'd written, and I came across "The Five Stages Of Andrew Brawley."
This is what I was trying to get at. Here's the thing: my favorite part of We Are The Ants is that it doesn't focus on the fact that the characters are queer; it's just something that is, and it's okay. The thing about Andrew, it's that somehow it ends up focusing in this fact. 

When I was around the age of ten, someone in my family told me this story. We come from a small town in Mexico, but I never got to see much of it. In that town, there used to live a gay guy that I never met. He decided to be openly gay. He wore woman's clothes and talked 'funny' and wore make-up and had long hair. He was gay. For me, when I finally understood what it was to not be straight, he was a hero. 
One day he was walking down the street, and I'm not exactly sure why or how it happened, but someone decided it was a good idea, an acceptable idea, to throw gasoline at him, and set him on fire. They burned him alive. He had to run and jump in the town's fountain. He survived, and he kept on being gay, but I will never forget that it was okay for someone to set a person on fire just because they were gay.
He wore the scars for the rest of his life, and for everyone who saw him, it was something that was inevitable. What did he expect it he was gay?

Today, gay people can get married almost anywhere in the world, and they have rights, and if you set someone on fire you will most likely go to jail. Today, it's easy for some people to forget that it was not always like this, but I don't want to forget. For some reason, I don't want to forget. There was a guy in a small town in Mexico who got set on fire because he was gay. It hits you like a slap on the face, doesn't it? When you are old enough to understand that these things happened. This things still happen sometimes, somewhere. That people still get killed because they're trans, because they're gay. That we still cannot come out of the closet because we are afraid. 

Rusty reminded me of this, and I cried more than once thinking about him. I don't think a lot of people would understand why I cry. I told several people, when I was reading the book, "they burned him alive," and nobody, nobody could understand what this meant. They burned him alive just because he was gay. and it makes me cry every time. They burned him alive because he was gay. 

I'm still not sure if I'm disappointed with the truth of the book or not. I honestly can't tell what would be worse or what was more horrifying, but I can tell you that I'm grateful for you to tell the world about this. Whoever read your book needs to know: There was a guy out there, who got burned alive just because he was gay. And whether we like it or not, it's something we don't have the privilege to forget. 


As always, thank you for writing. 
Love and respect.
-Abel. 

I came across a Teen chat room the other day. Sometimes I still forget I'm not sixteen anymore, I'm not gonna say I went there to see what are the teens up to these days, because I didn't, but that's what I found.
It'd seem 'people our age' don't care anymore what the young are up to these days, like it wasn't just yesterday, or last month, or last year that we were still teens; like it wasn't the other day when we weren't still allow to get drunk (but we did anyway); like we are already allow to not mention our parents anywhere, because we are oh so grown up. But to be honest, we should know that is time we don't forget what we did before we turned thirty. Let's not forget how it was, let's remember how much we hated what adults did to us. Why did we even want to grow up?

I came across a Teen chat room the other day, and between 'ANY GIRLS FOR CAM' and 'YOU WANNA SEE A BIG COCK' lost around, they were talking about politics. The teens we think are too stupid to understand what is going on in the world, were talking about politics, because contrary to popular belief, they know. They know who is going to be twenty when the people you choose for the government are in the power taking stupid decisions.
It is them. And they know they're fucked. They may as well be more fucked than we are now, and whether you want to accept it or not, we are pretty fucked. How much did you have to borrow for school? Who did you have to beg to give you money? How many of you were lucky bastards, and how many were just bastards?  

I guess the point is, when you see teens talking about politics, out of nowhere, in a chat room of all places, you know there's something really wrong with the world. 

I finally watched The Great Gatsby. The new one with DiCaprio and Spiderman, not the old one. And there was a reason I hadn't watched it, I knew there was a reason. I mean, I'm not DiCaprio's biggest fan, I like him just fine, like any other person with eyes and ears and access to movies who can see the damn man has talent, and we all cursed all those times they didn't give him his Oscar; you see, I didn't exactly mean not to watch the movie, but it wasn't my priority either, it was just a movie that I thought, well, hey, I should watch that one, what with it being a classic and DiCaprio being there and all that.
So, it was in the back of my mind. Watch the Gatsby. But there was a reason I hadn't.

When we get bored, my sister and I go to the store, or the mall, or the bookstore, or the library, and we buy things that we really don't need but we kind of really want to have just to say we have something.
And so we were at the store looking at the movies, and I wanted to buy Mad Max, because is that kind of thing you just ought to have and I needed to watch it again (and again and again and again in the near future until I get sick and I can't make out faces anymore) and while doing that she saw this movie. The Great Gatsby. And she had watched it before, at school, because she's at high school and they always make you watch this kind of thing when you're there. She liked the damn movie, and she was set I had to watch it. We bought it. Along Mad Max, Spotlight, The Lorax and The Danish girl. And I shouldn't have damn it, I shouldn't have.

You see, we watched The Danish girl, because Trans cinematography and all, and then we waited and waited and didn't watch anything else until just two nights ago. And I hate my life so much, what the fuck.

There was a reason I hadn't watched The Great Gatsby, and it wasn't quite that I'm not a big fan of old movies, or remakes, or remakes of really old movies, or that that Spiderman Guy would never stop being the Spiderman Guy, or that I haven't read the book (which if there was a reason I hadn't even watched the book, where did you think I had read the book); I knew it was going to be one of those damn stories, that somehow change your fucking life forever and you just want to kill someone or cry forever, or kill someone while you cry forever, but at the same time, it leaves you so raw, open and exposed, you just... go to sleep with a sad smile in your face and hope you won't remember in the morning. That kind of story. The kind that makes you feel it was real and really a part of your life.

Or maybe is that I have emotional problems and my brain is fucked up.

Now I have the feeling I need to read the book because maybe there's something missing. Maybe I'm missing something.
And it is that kind of movie that leaves you upset because you can't be fucking upset with any of them. It's quite fucked up.

We have deep conversations at night when we can't sleep or we're thinking too much. You see, I don't like romance. If you ask me if I want to watch something, the last thing in my list is going to be romance, specially if it's sappy romance; I can do sometimes with romcoms, and sad romances, but my mood has to be very special, I have to be really bored or really, really want to watch the movie for a different reason. Romance is not my go to kind of thing, there has to be something special about the romance, something different, really different, or cliché, or just, something. And I'm not gonna say The Great Gatsby is a romance, because it could be, but I'm not gonna say it because it also could not be. But it sure as hell makes you think about love. 

I won't stop thinking for the next hundred years how Tom never loved Daisy like she loved him, and how Daisy never loved Gatsby like she loved Tom. What Daisy felt for Gatsby was a dream, and what Gatsby felt for Daisy was a fantasy, and Nick is the only one that matters. 
And I don't want to talk about love but after all, after everything, I really wonder if it's truly this hard to find someone who can respect you as a person. Because that is my definition of love. Everything else is madness.