Per aspera

There are bouncy ink drawings who will tell you that drugs can help with your depression. I assume that in some, perhaps many cases, those ink drawings are right.

My grandmother once told me, with wide emphatic eyes, that she would not wish depression on her worst enemy. I would like to go on record as agreeing with her. I would like also to go on record as being absolutely horrified that anyone I love as much as my grandmother would have enough firsthand knowledge of the beast to speak so definitely about it. But that’s my family. I love them, and they know what I’m talking about. They shouldn’t. No one should. But someone has to.

Once, when I’d had enough to drink, I let it slip to my roommates that the only reason I’m not dead is that there is nothing shittier to do to a person than to make them find your body. There was a catch in the conversation and they moved on. Because Jesus Christ what do you do when someone says some shit like that? I shouldn’t have, and I hope they’ve forgotten it. I suspect they have. People are good like that.

I blog under my real name. That was another stupid decision I’ve made.

But I am who I am. I may have doomed myself to a life without a career, or a family or any of it, but by Christ I am who I am.

The reason people developed religion, of course, is that being who you are is not ever enough.

And yet I keep getting out of bed in the morning.