if i want to die so much why am i so careful when i cross the road
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if i want to die so much why am i so careful when i cross the road
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last week, my beloved friend Beth texted me a video of myself that i had forgotten existed. it’s from 2018. i was living alone in harlem on an artist visa, without health insurance, recovering from a bad relationship and sinking solidly into one of the worst depressions of my life. some time prior to that i had agreed to be part of a reading series at friends and lovers in brooklyn, and being the extremely good girl that i am, didn’t even really consider cancelling. i remember the day of the event because i had a friend from london staying with me, who shook me awake with unbridled excitement to let me know she had been selected as one of forbes 30 under 30. now i don’t know about you depressives, but sleep is my greatest companion in this life and i do not like being woken from it at the best of times or for the best of reasons, and this was clearly neither. that said, i still shudder when i think about just how little enthusiasm i was able to muster for my friend, my utter confusion in the face of her joy, the complete distinctness of the planets we were inhabiting in that moment. anyway, i got out of bed and wrote something to perform at the reading that night. that’s what i’m sharing with you today, partially to support my growing interest in the depression archive, and partly coz, you know, it’s good.
trigger warning for roughly 15 jokes about wanting to kill myself. click 2 listen ⬇
Are they hot or are they white
Did I love you?
why is consent sexy
did i love you
if i want to die so much why am I so careful when i cross the road is it nostalgia?
did i love you
I yearn for a time before astrology I yearn for a time before nostalgia
i didn’t know i could drown this long without dying
did I love you?
i’m being bitten by something I can’t see
I think I loved you, but my friends would always look at me with pity when I said it and i would pretend I didn’t notice but their eyes would say how can you love someone when you don’t exist? if the person you love punches you and you don’t walk away is that love.
is love a hyperobject? i can’t see depression but i know it’s real. remember that time I ran from my house and got to yours with my hot water bottle still warm and you told me that was cute but sex with me is boring was that love?
I haven’t read a book by a white man for many years but when curryslut sent me that article about hyperobjects I did read all the random pages available on google books because I am both comforted and destroyed by the thought of something being so big that it defeats the idea of what a thing is in the first place. like global warming like the internet like love. hyperobjects. maybe no-one should write about hyper objects. everyone who writes about the internet sounds like an idiot anyway.
Sometimes when I am fucking N i ask him what does it feel like when you walk into a room, six foot three big dick cute nose snow white wrinkles in all the right places KIND EYES straight like a walking fruit pop trauma buffer hairless anus tastes like apples. what’s it like when ur dick gets hard in ur trousers why do i care anyway. sometimes i feel like he lets me steal his soul, be a white king for a night. nowhere else do i feel this comfortable orchestrating sex for my pleasure alone i am nearly 30 and I don’t feel old but I don’t wanna be alive either and a white man is the only person who has sucked my dick so maybe that’s why
is depression a hyperobject or a disease. I can’t see it but I know it’s real.
if a punch feels familiar that doesn’t mean it’s love
i went on a date with a 23 year old aries rising and she asked me if i felt old and i looked at my hands and said my body does what i need it to I guess i’m lucky which is not really an answer to that question and not really true because my body does not like to move in the morning. every morning before I grab the mask from my bedside table i feel dead which is not what bodies need to do but this is less an experience i can categorize by age and when she touched me I turned to cardboard
when older people kill themselves it is depressing because it is proof that in fact it does not get better despite the suicidal person’s diligent insitance that it might. We are the most optimistic people in the world, the chronic depressives, the suicidal, we are. So It’s a bummer when old people kill themselves. Sometimes i tell myself that with each depressive episode i have it will get easier. That if i can just push through to the next one, i’ll have more practice, that this heaviness will start to feel like a friend, like a weighted blanket maybe instead of a shroud. But what i am realising is that each time i get tireder too. What i am realizing is that if a punch feels familiar that doesnt mean it’s love. The familiarity of depression doesnt ever feel like a bonus, you know, it’s more like o fuck u again let me pretend i’m on the phone right now actually but then the little microphone hole in the phone turns into a black hole and sucks you inside it and you’re just in that place again
Sometimes i feel like the only thing keeping me from killing myself is the pressure of writing a suicide note but then i feel like knowing that about myself makes me want to kill myself even more
Some people get rid of all their shit in preparation for killing themselves but that’s not really my style. Like i personally feel like one of the big upsides of death is not having to move my stuff around ever again
When people ask me why I moved to New York from London I often say, “so I could be depressed in private” and I say it like it’s a joke, you know, I imagine it’s something a stunning and mysterious newcomer with self deprecating humour and a masculine smirk would say, but I am just a very earnest and sad person who is telling the truth.
The most depressing thing about depression is the people who do not come. Who will tweet about depression but who will not come. Trust me no depressed person wants to say this out loud but it’s true.
Depression is needing people so badly for your survival and wanting noone to look at you at the same time and I think that’s very confusing for everyone.
If you are chronically depressed, there will probably come a time when you will tell the people around you you feel like you want to die and they will not hear you. they will tell you about themselves, and you will listen, slipping your pain back in your pocket, slowly, so as not to disturb them. Perhaps they did not hear you. Perhaps they are very busy. Perhaps they are suffering. Perhaps they don’t believe you. How do they know you’re making it up?
Honestly it makes me extremely nervous to complain about the quality of care depressed people recieve. It does not feel right, that i could fail so terribly at being happy but still demand help. I also don’t want to become that meme that’s like TRYING TO GO TO SLEEP AT NIGHT BUT THINKING ABOUT HOW I CARE FOR EVERYONE ELSE BUT WHEN I NEED IT NOONE CARES FOR ME because 1. Some people DO show up and they are normally not the people u would expect to but they do it very quietly and they save your life so like out of respect for them and fear that you’ll lose what little support you have managed to get together if you’re a bitch about it, it’s best to keep quiet 2. no-one wants to be a cliche 3. Everyone’s out here claiming to be the person who cares for everyone else but doesn’t get cared for and mathematically that doesn’t make sense. Like, some of us need to be the people who are just taking shit for that critique of care to work so then i’m like oh fuck maybe that’s me
But i guess what i’m saying is it is depressing because you’re like oh no I just used my absolute last morsel of energy to explain to the people around me what i need to stay alive and they aren’t gonna do it. It’s a very gloomy reality. The only people who have ever been helpful to me when i am suicidal are other people who have thought about killing themselves.
it’s like that poem, that i want a gay for president poem, but it’s like yeah good and i want only people who have tried to kill themselves to talk about suicide
i’ll say it again. The most depressing thing about depression is how unequipped and unwilling everyone is to deal with it. This is only a 10% drag it is mostly just a fact. It is very confusing to me, coz from where i am standing, it seems natural, that everyone would at some point have considered ending their own lives. To me that’s not even a particularly dark or morbid or shocking thought it just makes sense that as humans, as millenials, as millenial humans who love OPTIONS and love consent, considering that being born is the biggest violation of consent ever, it makes sense to me that we would get to know our options around that . but it becomes clear though, to a suicidal person, that not everyone has considered killing themselves.
It becomes clear, very quickly, to a depressed person, that not everyone experiences depression. Depression is not a bad day, it’s not being tired or heteronormativity or capitalism. It’s not being a queer person of colour. It is not even being hungry. I am tired of people saying they are depressed when they are not depressed and i feel like a monster for wanting to judge people by the quality of their suffering and i feel like a child for arguing over words,but when i am depressed i feel like i am wearing a mask and behind that mask i am a small boy made out of playdough lying face down in a puddle watching astrologers beef with each other on instagram wondering how i can drown this long without dying. Sometimes It’s not your word to use.
When i am very depressed i think about killing myself multiple times a day and you know the fear isn’t that i might actually do it, the fear is that these thoughts will last so long that they become normal
Anyway i would like to shout out the new mama mia movie because no matter how deep of a depressive state i may fall into on the subway, i can always come out for long enough to laugh at the fact it is called mama mia here we go again - so that has really been a big help.
i had my first major depressive episode when i was 22 which at the time felt very late like i was just making it up but i have always been a late bloomer. I WAS completely flat chested until i was 18, when i just literally woke up with two double Ds one day and my mum called them comedy breasts because everyone was shocked and i was very polite about it all but i noticed the top of buildings a lot more after that coz i was always looking up which is funny coz I actually love my tits when they’re in your mouth
At the airport my mum said she feels like she’s underwater at family events and i wondered if all south Asians feel like they’re underwater when they’re in a room full of other south Asians coz like we’re very good at avoidance and repression but sometimes when we all have to look at each other it’s hard to pretend the weight doesn’t exist even though it’s always there . do south Asians trigger each other just by being in the same room? if i love my body but am repulsed by yours am i still a feminist?
one of my hobbies is talking to ex-muslims who don’t care for religion anymore and i’m gonna go to hell but i love it because it’s validating and it’s hot
hey sandy do u remember that time we went on Instagram live and no one came to watch
i don’t know if it’s cool to think this anymore but sorry i actually do think all mentally ill people are geniuses tho i hate the phrase mentally ill it makes me cringe to say it, a bit like PANSEXUAL, but u know what i mean
Is getting better at living with depression the same as getting better at pretending is it the same as acceptance is it the same as giving up is it the same as making a friend is it the same as seeing something vibrant and looking in the other direction smiling
Yesterday i lay on my back on a bench made out of black stone that had been warmed in the sun and it felt like hands along my spine and i felt peaceful and i wondered if this was love if this could be what death feels like i wondered if this could be what life feels like