I guess I'll begin at midnight on December 31st, 2016, or I guess 12:01am on January 1st, 2017. That's when the Medicaid I'd had since my late ex-boyfriend impregnated me with a tiny little spawn of Satan that I would not entertain the possibility of birthing, turned into company-provided healthy insurance. In simpler terms, this was when health insurance was no longer free to me; I could no longer see the therapist that I'd been seeing for three years without paying, and being that she was good, that also meant she wasn't cheap. So aptly, this was when I stopped going entirely, because while I am a firm believer in the benefits of therapy, I had always considered it a luxury that those with larger salaries than my own could truly afford. You know, without compromising my wild drinking habits and footwear addiction.
It's weird; I've got a great life. Some of that greatness truly is great, and some of it is only great on paper. The staggering contrast between those things has begun to weigh on me, and thusly, I have revisited my age-old therapy of writing it all down, because honestly I have no idea what the fuck else to do. And because I know at least for now, nobody can see, and even if they could, they probably wouldn't care enough to read the ramblings of someone who appears to be depressed for no decent reason. But I can speak from years of experience here when I say: depression needs no reason.
It's weird; I've got a great life. Some of that greatness truly is great, and some of it is only great on paper. The staggering contrast between those things has begun to weigh on me, and thusly, I have revisited my age-old therapy of writing it all down, because honestly I have no idea what the fuck else to do. And because I know at least for now, nobody can see, and even if they could, they probably wouldn't care enough to read the ramblings of someone who appears to be depressed for no decent reason. But I can speak from years of experience here when I say: depression needs no reason.
The Job.
Here's a place everyone can easily begin: the usually horrid place we only somewhat voluntarily go to every day after waking up earlier than we truly want to, in order to rarely experience any kind of non-monetary validation.
On paper my job is great. I work for a successful startup that hired me as their first outside employee four years ago, and has since grown exponentially. I'm doing exactly what I went to and excelled in college for, and I am known for being successful and extraordinarily talented in my field, especially for my age. I've won awards for my work and am well-respected among my coworkers and peers for what I do. My company makes a respectable product that combines fun lifestyle with well-thought-out intentions and executions. We have been considered pioneers in the craft beverage movement with our missions. The majority of the people I work with have experienced so much stress, change, turmoil, turnaround, and success, that we are, without a doubt, a family. I have visibly improved as an artist since working here. My work, when completed, it gratifying, and I am proud of it. My job also drives me fucking insane and not a day goes by where I don't think about quitting.
I'm blessed with the curse of being a quick worker, I spend a lot of time at work with nothing to do but wish there wasn't some snatchy micromanager who makes terrible puns, watching my every move and making sure I don't leave the office early to attempt to actually enjoy my life, even when my workload was finished at 9:45 that morning. And yet, at the same time I worry I don't do enough. Our marketing manager is SO good at her job that when she started, she took a lot more off my plate than maybe I had expected, and now she does so much that I worry how she perceives me, and am constantly trying to make sure I don't let her down, even though she voices that she enjoys working with me and considers us an amazing team. The bar manager has a higher salary than me, but I find her to be a negative and disorganized person whose impact on the company as a whole I feel doesn't compare to mine, and generally I don't think she's very good at her job, aside from her hiring ability. At times I find her blatantly dimwitted and unintelligent.
I am told to create everything I create with intense creative emotion, to obtain the quality I'm known for, but then immediately to shut off any and all emotion when showing that work to people who are not creatively-minded, and am then criticized for being close-minded and unable to take feedback when I disagree with what a bunch of non-artistic people are telling me to do. After four years of the sacrifice that comes with working for a startup, we finally got offered shares in the company, which can better bet described as a "golden handcuff," and the thought of putting up with my boss and generally stay physically put for another 5-10 years to see those shares come to fruition gives me an anxiety attack. I would work remotely, but my boss is a big-picture-obsessed maniac who believes he has the power to change the lives of everyone who works for him, but the means that team members need to be physically present in order to actually be part of the team. I trust his visions for the company, but I also know he doesn't quite understand the difference between people who live to work and people like me, who work to live. I didn't get a job to heighten my sense of being and purpose. I got a job to make money and live the life I would like to live without having to worry about financial stability. I got THIS job in hopes of cashing in on a young company's success so that I could make my millions early and hopefully not still be working full-time when I'm 80. Lately I wonder if he'd let me go if I told him that I'm not willing to change who I am as a person, at my core, the way he apparently wants me to. He says it'll be good for me; that I'm lucky to have met him at this point in my life because of his ability to "be my mentor." To me it sounds a whole lot like my preachy ex-boyfriends who can't grasp the concept that you can't just fix someone's problems by trying to turn them into you, and that no, YOU don't have all the answers either. Dick.
On paper my job is great. I work for a successful startup that hired me as their first outside employee four years ago, and has since grown exponentially. I'm doing exactly what I went to and excelled in college for, and I am known for being successful and extraordinarily talented in my field, especially for my age. I've won awards for my work and am well-respected among my coworkers and peers for what I do. My company makes a respectable product that combines fun lifestyle with well-thought-out intentions and executions. We have been considered pioneers in the craft beverage movement with our missions. The majority of the people I work with have experienced so much stress, change, turmoil, turnaround, and success, that we are, without a doubt, a family. I have visibly improved as an artist since working here. My work, when completed, it gratifying, and I am proud of it. My job also drives me fucking insane and not a day goes by where I don't think about quitting.
I'm blessed with the curse of being a quick worker, I spend a lot of time at work with nothing to do but wish there wasn't some snatchy micromanager who makes terrible puns, watching my every move and making sure I don't leave the office early to attempt to actually enjoy my life, even when my workload was finished at 9:45 that morning. And yet, at the same time I worry I don't do enough. Our marketing manager is SO good at her job that when she started, she took a lot more off my plate than maybe I had expected, and now she does so much that I worry how she perceives me, and am constantly trying to make sure I don't let her down, even though she voices that she enjoys working with me and considers us an amazing team. The bar manager has a higher salary than me, but I find her to be a negative and disorganized person whose impact on the company as a whole I feel doesn't compare to mine, and generally I don't think she's very good at her job, aside from her hiring ability. At times I find her blatantly dimwitted and unintelligent.
I am told to create everything I create with intense creative emotion, to obtain the quality I'm known for, but then immediately to shut off any and all emotion when showing that work to people who are not creatively-minded, and am then criticized for being close-minded and unable to take feedback when I disagree with what a bunch of non-artistic people are telling me to do. After four years of the sacrifice that comes with working for a startup, we finally got offered shares in the company, which can better bet described as a "golden handcuff," and the thought of putting up with my boss and generally stay physically put for another 5-10 years to see those shares come to fruition gives me an anxiety attack. I would work remotely, but my boss is a big-picture-obsessed maniac who believes he has the power to change the lives of everyone who works for him, but the means that team members need to be physically present in order to actually be part of the team. I trust his visions for the company, but I also know he doesn't quite understand the difference between people who live to work and people like me, who work to live. I didn't get a job to heighten my sense of being and purpose. I got a job to make money and live the life I would like to live without having to worry about financial stability. I got THIS job in hopes of cashing in on a young company's success so that I could make my millions early and hopefully not still be working full-time when I'm 80. Lately I wonder if he'd let me go if I told him that I'm not willing to change who I am as a person, at my core, the way he apparently wants me to. He says it'll be good for me; that I'm lucky to have met him at this point in my life because of his ability to "be my mentor." To me it sounds a whole lot like my preachy ex-boyfriends who can't grasp the concept that you can't just fix someone's problems by trying to turn them into you, and that no, YOU don't have all the answers either. Dick.
The Man.
Now let's contrast. My boyfriend has unkempt hair, can't keep a shirt clean to save his fucking life, is steadily developing a beer belly, sometimes uses the wrong form of "your" or "you're", has visibly dry skin in his mustache and beard, and has an alter ego who comes out when he drinks too much called Flaily Man, whose on-paper traits are conveniently self-explanatory. He is messy, and lazy. He'll put an empty can on the countertop instead of in the recycling bin in the other corner. He'll leave a dish in the sink for days even though there's a perfectly functioning dishwasher next to him. He and I both abuse alcohol, but him more so, and he doesn't know when to say no or how to end the night on his own accord. He'll sometimes come home stumbling drunk, wake me up, pass out in bed, and proceed to flail all night, keeping me awake. Then he'll wake up with a hangover and spend the morning in bed accomplishing absolutely nothing. He needs to not only be reminded, but hounded, to do anything productive, and can usually only manage to complete one productive task on a day off, of which he only gets 1 a week, even if the task itself only takes 30 minutes. Sometimes he doesn't text me back. He claimed to be handy, and succeeded in installing the jankiest, most untrustworthy shelves I've ever seen, and it took approximately 15 unnecessary holes in the wall to do so. Sometimes I wish he would think to do more nice things for me, just for the sake of doing them. Right now there's a crack in my car's bumper that he knows I'll have to get down on the ground and try to push out later today when I'm done with work. Is it so wrong to wish that, just because he knows I'm bummed out about it, and to do something nice for me, he would just go outside, unprompted, and push the crack out?
On paper my boyfriend is less than perfect. And I've never, in my fucking life, been as completely, feverishly, wonderfully in love as I am with this person. Lately I'm frustrated with small things, and I wonder how much of that is just for the sake of having something to be frustrated with. I know none of these things are deal breakers. He is honest, kind, caring, funny, emotional, supportive, handsome, and has a great upward curve in his dick. In all honesty, I can't even imagine my life without this guy. I'm obsessed with him. He is widely liked as a person and highly respected as a hard worker. He is level-minded and highly imaginative at the same time. Even my fucking parents love him. He and I are so unbelievably compatible with each other and my heart swells every time I'm around him, even when he is making me angry. I want to spend the rest of my life adventuring with him, because nobody makes me laugh and love and feel fulfilled emotionally and sexually the way he does. I have never felt love like the love I feel for him and I have never felt loved the way he loves me back. So what the fuck do I do when his little ticks make my blood boil, without coming off as nagging or unsatisfied? If all I really want to see improve in the relationship is for the fucker to clean up after himself and maybe not get so belligerently drunk, and take a little more initiative in his lifestyle, then I've got very little to worry or be displeased about. Besides, the plus side of spending my life with him is that I'll get to experience first hand the maturing that happens naturally when someone exits their 20s and enters their 30s. I know it happened to me, and is unnecessarily playing an impressive hand in driving me out of my fucking mind with anxiety and depression. Maybe it'll be good to have experienced it and offer him my hand and my love to help him maneuver it, because god knows it's far worse than the monsters that lived under my bed when I was a kid. I just hope he knows how much I adore him, even now, even when I have to sweep up piles of tobacco in front of the dryer every time I do his laundry because in his attempt not to pollute the earth and throw his cigarette butts on the ground, he puts them in his pockets instead.
On paper my boyfriend is less than perfect. And I've never, in my fucking life, been as completely, feverishly, wonderfully in love as I am with this person. Lately I'm frustrated with small things, and I wonder how much of that is just for the sake of having something to be frustrated with. I know none of these things are deal breakers. He is honest, kind, caring, funny, emotional, supportive, handsome, and has a great upward curve in his dick. In all honesty, I can't even imagine my life without this guy. I'm obsessed with him. He is widely liked as a person and highly respected as a hard worker. He is level-minded and highly imaginative at the same time. Even my fucking parents love him. He and I are so unbelievably compatible with each other and my heart swells every time I'm around him, even when he is making me angry. I want to spend the rest of my life adventuring with him, because nobody makes me laugh and love and feel fulfilled emotionally and sexually the way he does. I have never felt love like the love I feel for him and I have never felt loved the way he loves me back. So what the fuck do I do when his little ticks make my blood boil, without coming off as nagging or unsatisfied? If all I really want to see improve in the relationship is for the fucker to clean up after himself and maybe not get so belligerently drunk, and take a little more initiative in his lifestyle, then I've got very little to worry or be displeased about. Besides, the plus side of spending my life with him is that I'll get to experience first hand the maturing that happens naturally when someone exits their 20s and enters their 30s. I know it happened to me, and is unnecessarily playing an impressive hand in driving me out of my fucking mind with anxiety and depression. Maybe it'll be good to have experienced it and offer him my hand and my love to help him maneuver it, because god knows it's far worse than the monsters that lived under my bed when I was a kid. I just hope he knows how much I adore him, even now, even when I have to sweep up piles of tobacco in front of the dryer every time I do his laundry because in his attempt not to pollute the earth and throw his cigarette butts on the ground, he puts them in his pockets instead.
The Era.
Recently during a visit with my boyfriend's family in Florida, his father, who is notorious for documenting every moment of his family's life, entertained us with a slideshow of photos ranging in time from before my boyfriend's birth, to the family trip to Spain just last year. Meaning, from the 70s to the 2010s, I saw the family's every decade-based fashion decision and failure. But that was just a small aspect of the nostalgia I felt when looking through these photos. What I saw and reacted to even more so was the way life has changed for every single person as we know it based on the arrival of one earth-shattering invention: The Internet.
On the surface, the internet is a vast, incredible place. It is astronomical in its impact on the world. Now we can learn things on demand. We can communicate with people on the other side of the globe whenever and for whatever reason we want. We can evolve in almost every career-related capacity because of the wealth of knowledge it puts at our fingertips. We can have a better understanding of global events, and we can communicate about them based on territory and belief system. We can learn new languages and we can become our very own ill-informed doctors. And with the invention of the internet came the outstanding advancement of basically every kind of technology we had known. Functionality and performance of cameras, computers, and phones skyrocketed, until nobody was without. Ever.
In the age of technology, everyone's an expert, and therefore, nobody is. Now when we're bored we can pull out our pocket devises and play any number of games from the millions more that are being haphazardly invented every week. We can always have an excuse not to talk to people. We can spend hours scrolling mindlessly through the completely vapid happenings of our so-called friends, none of which bring us any sort of fulfillment because the majority of it is fake, and what's not fake just turns out to be a disgusting display of what humanity has become as a result of a) having too much information accessible to actually learn anything, and b) a perfectly socially acceptable outlet to display every little bit of information you don't actually know. Social media is just a perfect platform to lie, and how believable your lies are depends on how well you use flashy filters or use witty humor. The better the lie, the more people you have convinced that your ACTUAL every-day life isn't as boring and non-eventful as it truly is, and the more we succeed at lying to ourselves that other peoples' opinions of us and our fake lives actually matter or make any difference to our actual lives whatsoever. Because remember: we never have to remember anything anymore, because should we forget, the internet is right there to give us the answer we seek. And therefore, we remember nothing. We absorb nothing. We spend one week obsessing with the general populous over one thing, and move onto the next happening the following week, completely forgetting about the previous.
See what that slideshow made me nostalgic for was what little life of my own I was lucky enough to experience before the creation of the Internet. When I knew that dialing 434-5475 would call my best friend Mandy Carmichael's house, but whether or not she'd actually be home or available or who would even answer the phone was unknown. When I would cure boredom by playing make-believe with my Legos, or just fucking going for a walk outside, or playing in the dirt in my yard, climbing trees and pretending I was a magical kitten with princess super powers. When getting somewhere unknown involved knowing how to read a map. When little brothers would go roller blading together, and when my family would play board games together. When entertainment, ACTUAL entertainment, not this fake sugar-coated shit, was so much easier to come by, and our expectations of fun and satisfaction were so much lower and therefore so much more attainable. But [sadly] as a [non-identifying but technically belonging] Millenial *shudder*, the Internet and I have come into adulthood together, and every little fucking idiosyncrasy, imperfection, brush with trauma, and personality disorder that I learned, the Internet, were it a person, would have experienced too. That means that when I was going through puberty, so was the Internet, and now, at full-grown adulthood, me and my ol' pal the Internet are just trying to figure out how to deal with all the excess baggage we developed, both mentally and physically. And all I want to do is shed the weight of it, but we've reached a time in history when an Internet-free diet is simply not acceptable, even when we know it kills every part of us that once mattered when it came to being a human, just living your life.
On the surface, the internet is a vast, incredible place. It is astronomical in its impact on the world. Now we can learn things on demand. We can communicate with people on the other side of the globe whenever and for whatever reason we want. We can evolve in almost every career-related capacity because of the wealth of knowledge it puts at our fingertips. We can have a better understanding of global events, and we can communicate about them based on territory and belief system. We can learn new languages and we can become our very own ill-informed doctors. And with the invention of the internet came the outstanding advancement of basically every kind of technology we had known. Functionality and performance of cameras, computers, and phones skyrocketed, until nobody was without. Ever.
In the age of technology, everyone's an expert, and therefore, nobody is. Now when we're bored we can pull out our pocket devises and play any number of games from the millions more that are being haphazardly invented every week. We can always have an excuse not to talk to people. We can spend hours scrolling mindlessly through the completely vapid happenings of our so-called friends, none of which bring us any sort of fulfillment because the majority of it is fake, and what's not fake just turns out to be a disgusting display of what humanity has become as a result of a) having too much information accessible to actually learn anything, and b) a perfectly socially acceptable outlet to display every little bit of information you don't actually know. Social media is just a perfect platform to lie, and how believable your lies are depends on how well you use flashy filters or use witty humor. The better the lie, the more people you have convinced that your ACTUAL every-day life isn't as boring and non-eventful as it truly is, and the more we succeed at lying to ourselves that other peoples' opinions of us and our fake lives actually matter or make any difference to our actual lives whatsoever. Because remember: we never have to remember anything anymore, because should we forget, the internet is right there to give us the answer we seek. And therefore, we remember nothing. We absorb nothing. We spend one week obsessing with the general populous over one thing, and move onto the next happening the following week, completely forgetting about the previous.
See what that slideshow made me nostalgic for was what little life of my own I was lucky enough to experience before the creation of the Internet. When I knew that dialing 434-5475 would call my best friend Mandy Carmichael's house, but whether or not she'd actually be home or available or who would even answer the phone was unknown. When I would cure boredom by playing make-believe with my Legos, or just fucking going for a walk outside, or playing in the dirt in my yard, climbing trees and pretending I was a magical kitten with princess super powers. When getting somewhere unknown involved knowing how to read a map. When little brothers would go roller blading together, and when my family would play board games together. When entertainment, ACTUAL entertainment, not this fake sugar-coated shit, was so much easier to come by, and our expectations of fun and satisfaction were so much lower and therefore so much more attainable. But [sadly] as a [non-identifying but technically belonging] Millenial *shudder*, the Internet and I have come into adulthood together, and every little fucking idiosyncrasy, imperfection, brush with trauma, and personality disorder that I learned, the Internet, were it a person, would have experienced too. That means that when I was going through puberty, so was the Internet, and now, at full-grown adulthood, me and my ol' pal the Internet are just trying to figure out how to deal with all the excess baggage we developed, both mentally and physically. And all I want to do is shed the weight of it, but we've reached a time in history when an Internet-free diet is simply not acceptable, even when we know it kills every part of us that once mattered when it came to being a human, just living your life.