Bad apples

Caín: 

¡Por fin! Ya se me van a acabar las vacaciones otra vez y apenas me pongo a escribirte. Pareciera ser que no he parado pero la verdad es que los días parecen muy cortos y no me alcanza el tiempo para nada, a veces me acuerdo de cuando era uno pequeño y los días parecían muy muy largos y me pregunto qué demonios pasó.
¿Cómo estás? Cómo te está tratando el nuevo lugar. Dijiste que no estabas feliz con haberte mudado, ¿cómo va todo con eso? 
Espero que por lo menos hayas podido acomodarte. ¿Por qué tuviste que mudarte de nuevo? Si es muy complicado y no quieres ni acordarte no me tienes que contar.

Te escribo aquí precisamente porque me acordaba de los tiempos en que LJ tenía vida... creo que gran parte de eso era gracias al fandom de Supernatural, pero la verdad es que nunca le supe bien a LJ, es muy triste. Eran buenos tiempos, a veces quisiera volver, pero Supernatural ya se va a terminar y predico tiempos obscuros para los fandoms (?). Todo ha sido un poco extraño en el mundo de los fandoms, la verdad, ahora mismo estoy en el de Good Omens después de haber estado siglos leyendo sólo de Teen Wolf, y pasé por un momento por Venom, pero el material es poco y eso de seguir cómics nunca se me ha dado bien, siempre pierdo la secuencia (aunque ahora estamos esperando desesperadamente por la segunda película que ya comenzaron a grabar *internally screaming*). Good Omens está por todas partes, y no sabes lo feliz que me hizo descubrir que el fandom en español es bastante activo en facebook, hace siglos que no estaba en ninguna proporción en el lado del fandom en español. La producción de viñetas y fanart de este fandom también es impresionante, la calidad del arte está de locos, y ahora estoy siguiendo blogs en instagram, twiteer, y tumblr, más blogs de los que puedo contar, ni quiero pensar en cuánto nos va a durar la euforía porque Good Omens está terminado y no habrá más.

Ya me llegó la melancolía. A veces sí que tiene uno que preguntarse qué demonios pasó, cómo es que se crea tanta distancia, o tanta sensación de no tener tiempo para nada, que se te escurren los días por los dedos y ni cuenta te das, y cuando menos lo esperas hasta se acabó la década. También te extraño mucho, Caín. Extraño los días en que te hablaba a diario y teníamos mucho de qué hablar. Extraño cuando escribíamos en conjunto y nos paseamos por tantos fandoms distintos. Extraño los tiempos en los que no tenía tanto cansancio emocional y era capaz de mantener una conversación coherente por largos periodos de tiempo. Se está acabando el mundo te digo, se nos están muriendo las ganas de todo.

Dejar de escribir es muy triste, Caín... quisiera poder estar ahí contigo y que pudieramos volver a escribir. Entiendo lo que dices, que ahora se disfruta de otras cosas, pero lo que se tenía antes era tan bonito que te gustaría no haberte apartado de ello. Yo siento que ahora sólo escribo como en momentos robados, y por más que intento figurar a dónde diablos se fue el tiempo, no logro conseguir tener un horario más activo y productivo. No estoy durmiendo más, no estoy escribiendo más, no estoy haciendo más cosas en realidad ??? Será que trabajar le mata a uno el amor por todo. Me acuerdo que lo único que era diferente antes es que no trabajaba, pero lo pienso y sigue sin cuadrarme nada.
Verte sería lo mejor que podría pasarme estos días Caín, el mundo se está volviendo loco y yo tengo tantas ganas de verte. Quizá sería inútil para conversar, como ya te dije, pero si no te molesta comer helado conmigo en silencio entonces todo bien (?) xD

¿Cómo está tu familia? ¿Te conté que mi hermana se casó? Fue un problemón porque mi mamá detesta al sujeto con el que se casó, jaja. Y bueno, todavía nos hablamos pero cada vez que él si quiera se asoma mi mamá hace todo lo posible en su poder para no tener que ni verlo, ha sido todo muy entretenido, por lo menos parece que están aprendiendo a ser civilizados. De pronto tengo que regañarles porque les encanta pelearse, pero aparte de eso, todo más o menos. Podría ser peor digo yo.

Los problemas de Venezuela son un tema terrible, no sólo para ellos sino para todo el resto del mundo, es lo que tristemente pasa con los problemas económicos, nunca afectan sólo a un grupo, afectan a todo el mundo ): Lo peor es que nadie sabe cuándo ni cómo se solucionará todo esto. A veces me recuerdo que hay que tener fe, si nada más aunque sea eso. Me hace sentir mejor aunque no me de respuestas, el universo sabe qué es lo que tiene que pasar.
¡Sólo me faltan tres semestres para graduarme, Caín! Tres semestres. También tengo miedo de lo que pasará después, pero por ahora sé que voy a tener que hacer la maestría, sí o sí, sino no puedo trabajar en bibliotecas. Tengo que aplicar para que me acepten en algún programa, pero todavía me falta investigar mucho al respecto, no sé a dónde quiero ir, qué escuela debería elegir, porque en este estado no tienen esa carrera. ¿A ti te falta mucho? A mí me ha tomado una eternidad figurar cuánto me faltaba, pero por fin lo resolvimos, me tengo que graduar el próximo año. Es un sentimiento encontrado, ¿no? Que no quieres salir al mundo pero al mismo tiempo te quieres graduar desesperadamente. Será lo que será. Tú ten fe, piensa que te va a ir muy bien y camina por la vida con ese pensamiento. No sé sabe si es verdad o no, pero las vibras positivas siempre son mejores que la alternativa. Quisiera poder traerte conmigo )':

¿Cómo todo por allá con la vida social? La mía es practicamente inexistente lmao. Mi mamá dice que tengo que dejar de estudiar tanto, pero la verdad es que ni paso tanto tiempo estudiando, creo que lo que paso es mucho tiempo pensando en que debería estar estudiando. Lo único que sí es que he tenido que leer mucho y siento que voy a desfallecer a veces.
Tu tradición de cumpleaños suena fenomenal~ nosotros usualmente salimos a comer, pero siento como que he pasado muchos cumpleaños sin hacer lo que realmente quería hacer, no sé. Un día me voy a ir a un trampolín. ¿Cómo que tu papá y tu hermana se olvidaron? D: En qué pensaban. Espero que a pesar de todo lo que tuviste que estar haciendo ese día te la hayas pasado bien y con tranquilidad. ¿Cómo estuvo tu examen? Ha pasado mucho tiempo, yo ya no me acordaría.
También espero que hayas pasado una buena navidad y año nuevo, ¿celebraron? Nosotros nos juntamos a comer para navidad pero no hicimos gran cosa para año nuevo. ¿Cómo les fue? 

¿Te conté que mi gato tiene una rutina? Todos los días a las nueve hay que abrirle la puerta del apartamento para que se salga a caminar por el pasillo porque si no se pone a gritar. Le encanta andar por el pasillo, pero a veces me saca unos sustos horribles porque luego va y se baja por las escaleras. El problema es que no es un gato callejero, le gusta andar afuera de noche y cuando a él se le antoja, pero no le gusta la gente y se asusta con cualquier ruido, así que me da miedo que si se va muy lejos se vaya a asustar y correr y perderse. Así que ahí me tienes, a la mitad de la noche caminando con el por el pasillo de los apartamentos como psicópata.

En fin, siento que ya me estoy repitiendo mucho así que aquí le voy a dejar.
Espero que podamos hablar de nuevo pronto, que tu semestre vaya bien, no sé cuándo comienza ni cuando acaba, pero que te vaya de fábula de cualquier modo. Si quieres puedes contestarme aquí en un comentario, no necesitas cuenta para hacerlo me parece, o por What's app, lo que te venga mejor.

Recuerda que te amo de aquí al fin del universo. Te amo mucho.

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.

 For my final project in my Comp II class I had to write an argument. Because I'm fandom trash I decided there was nothing else I could write about but fanfiction. So here it is, because a lot of people on the internet helped me and because it took me so long that screeeew everything, I'm gonna post it. I got an A+, so THANK YOU ALL PEOPLE WHO PARTICIPATED ON MY HOMEWORK.
Diana, I love you, bruh, you are the bestest. Laura, you have no idea how much respect I have for you. C., I understand, I see it, I know what you mean, but I still have to disagree, because you should have a book on your name as well, you are that good. To all my fandom friends, and just all the people who fandom: I love you, keep at it, you are important, you are amazing. 
The sources of all my shit are at the end, this is MLA format (or the closest I could get). Also, I have all the rights to this paper (they give them to me when I submit it to the school), so just so you know. Stealing is bad. If you're going to use anything from here, please do refer to this paper. It's in the system. Everyone will know. Just don't do it. Be awesome. 

( The Struggles of Being a Fanwarrior )