Good Reads from Internet-Land and… Something Else.

I know I have a meager number of followers, and for that I am both thankful and humbled, as well as extremely proud of myself. I want you guys to know that I am very grateful to have the support of a readership, even if it is small. Every person counts when all you want is your words to be read. But here’s something different. I thought I might share some other cool blogs I’ve found over the past few days that are not just entertaining reads, but educational and highly involved in social issues I find affecting my life every day as a woman who suffers through a bad body image, low self-esteem, low self-confidence, and a life of depression. And… something else on that.

How to Own A Body — My friend, Emily Rudofsky (If you’re an experienced reader here, you know I pimp her out all the time, because she’s, well, utterly fantastic) has started a new blog recently that’s taking on the noble and neat task of educating people on what I’ll generalize as “body issues”. These incredibly poignant articles come from the voice of a woman who feels othered by the beauty and advertising industry alongside the general demands of society, and she’s got some emotionally and intellectually pressing things to say about that. She’s also working to address what it’s like to have mental illness and mood disorders in this “perky-ass world” (which is something I suffer from, as well) and she works to raise awareness that depression is a real thing (like diabetes or cancer, and not just something that the afflicted need to just “work harder” to get past) which is something that lingers so very close to my heart. Be a part of something awesome, read her stuff.

Ladybud — News and Editorials, Culture, Health and Beauty, Science, and reactionary journalism to just about everything else you can think of. (My personal favorite so far is Fuck Diets) She’s got quite a mouth on her, and an avid support for Marijuana law reform, so it’s generally NSFW, but she’s a smart lady writing some smart things. So I totally promise it’s worth it.

Guerrilla Graffiti Magazine — My friend Brice Maiurro (find his equally amazing poetry blog at Flashlight City Blues) invited me and some others to contribute to this online magazine he started featuring poetry, alt lit, fiction, art, movies, music, reviews, and even a few regular columns like Take It Or Leave It (an advice column) or The Listmaker by Kessa Montez. Check it out! Updates often! Full of Exquisite!

And last but not least, I recently read this article from DIY Couturier, 21 Tips to Keep Your Shit Together When You’re Depressed which was a response to someone else writing a list entitled “21 habits of happy people”.  Her response is an amazing list that helped me, and countless others I’m sure, realize that it’s not their fault their depression won’t simply vanish if they try hard enough to think positively.

Now for a touch of the personal. Over the last ten to twelve years, I’ve been chronically depressed. I was legitimately diagnosed, and I spent years in and out of different therapists’ offices. The therapists I’ve had were sympathetic shoulders, and they listened well as I talked a lot. Depression medications were suggested, and for a very small amount of time I was prescribed Welbutrin (that I was terrible at taking because I was fourteen years old and I had to take three doses a day at the same time). Shortly thereafter, I began to develop severe anxiety problems, at first over seemingly nothing. I would have crippling panic attacks that left me sobbing and terrified at random times and for random reasons. I can’t honestly say whether this was a development of my shaky attempts to treat my depression with Welbutrin. It changes the chemistry in your brain, and I never did it quite right by taking them when I was supposed to or quitting them the way I was supposed to (weaning off, so to speak). I know now that anxiety tends to come hand in hand with depression often and since I’ll never know the answer, I try not to think about it. But the fact remained, I was depressed still, and now I had anxiety problems to boot.

Over time, I saw myself “quitting” therapist after therapist. They never helped me, and I was constantly lost when it came to this idea of “depression”. Titles and concepts like “mood disorder”,  “depressive rumination” and “ruminative cycle”, “cognitive behavior therapy”, “group therapy”, they’ve been foreign to me for most of my whole life. I would get this idea from society around me, my family, and my friends, that depression was something you had to “think yourself out of it”. I’ve resisted drugs for a long time because I prescribed to this notion instead. I wanted to be strong enough to think differently. After eight or more years of this thought process, I am still depressed. I am downright woeful. My moods make my life almost impossible. So many things bring me so far down. Hopeless is a constant backdrop for my life. I punish myself constantly because I’m not good enough. I’m isolated, and deep down inside, I think I know this is because I’m unfriendly, I’m not smart, or I never do anything right: people don’t want to be around me because I’m not good enough to be around. I take everything personally, I feel like everything is my fault. But I desperately want to be loved and accepted. I desperately want to be a part of things, too. So, I’ve been reading stuff about me. The above blogs are a part of that. I also found this article from the New York Times (while I didn’t walk away from this with any confidence at all that my depression had upsides, it helped reinforce the idea that people take this seriously as a disease somewhere). I’ve been talking to someone who’s gone through my struggle, who’s learned recovery is an option, and has sought out the tools to get her there. And I’ve decided I need to get help. I need real help, not someone to just listen. I can talk forever, but it doesn’t solve anything. I wake up the next day with all the rumination and pity and self-loathing still intact, and my outside problems are still functional and very real. My reactions to things that occur around me are broken, and I need to fix them. Talking to someone about how much life sucks doesn’t help. Talking to someone about how hard things are doesn’t help. I don’t need confirmation, I don’t need sympathy. Trust me, I’m already very good at knowing how much things suck, and I’m very good at feeling sorry for myself.

I face a weird process, I guess. I need to find a different therapist than the ones I’ve been seeing, and I need to do research myself to figure out what options are out there. It upsets me though, that despite my long-term involvement in the psychology system, I still slipped through the cracks. I never really found real help, I was never even offered any other options. And now it has to be up to me do work hard to figure out where I can ever start. Through my reading, I’m coming to realize that people don’t think depression is serious, and these realizations are putting words to my own experience. Being told that it’s only a mood that you can “shake yourself out of” and if you’re sad it’s because you’re not doing something right in your day-to-day living habits, these are things I’ve been told by so many well-meaning people. I can’t stress enough that this is the wrong approach to depression. I already feel like I’m not doing anything right, so all this concept does is worsen my frustration with myself. I definitely already feel like there’s something wrong with me because I can’t just be happy like you do, so if I try to do the things you do to be happy and they fail, it makes me feel so much worse. But also, through my reading, I’ve found that there are people who feel like me. And it’s basically us against everyone else, because so many people address depression with same well-meaning misinformation. Well, it could be argued that when you have diabetes, you should try harder to process sugar. Oh, wait. Is that not right?

Last night I had a conversation with the person I loved who struggles every day with my low self-esteem and reactionary sadness, and I admitted I needed help. But admitting to him that I was sick, that I had a disorder that I couldn’t control, and that I had learned that simply thinking differently or acting differently wasn’t going to help felt like an excuse even to me. It immediately showed me just how deep this goes, this stigma against depression, and how much harder it makes getting help. The truth is, we have to stop thinking about depression as something that people can control by themselves. Those people tend to die before they figure it out. Often by their own hands. Society has to stop stigmatizing. We have to stop putting forward that it’s a personal accountability issue and not something that that person struggles with every minute of their whole life. We have to make it so that it doesn’t feel like a personal failing to admit that we’re hurt, we’re sad, and we need help getting past it. There has to be a better way to make options known and easy to access, so people don’t feel like they have to either learn to choose to be happy (which doesn’t work, I’m sorry) or stay unhappy and isolated forever.

Society is mean, though, so for now, I’ll just figure this out as best I can. Here goes. The first conversation I get to look forward to is with my mom. She’s watched me give up on every therapist, and I can only imagine that her interpretation of this is that I don’t take therapy seriously, or that I can quit once my latest phase in sadness ends, and that I’m turning to therapy as an easy way out of each sad phase. It’s going to be hard to be honest about this, but I can only hope she’ll believe me once I am. Because it’ll only be that much harder if she doesn’t, and not only because she handles my insurance, if you know what I mean.

I’m sorry. I know I’ve never posted anything like this before, but Emily suggested that I try my hand at my own blogging. Based on… what happens next, we’ll see if it ever happens again. I can’t take being ignored or completely denied any notice at all, I’d definitely rather keep it to myself. So if you have things to say about this, please, do. I welcome any and all feedback, as always.