An Open Letter

I feel like living like a dog would be a completely blissful existence; there’s no point to things like self growth, introspection, or overthinking. Living life fully in the moment, just focused on napping, food, and play. While it’s unreasonable to say you can live like that, I think it’s important to try to emulate that in the brief moments we can, to just enjoy living in the moment and enjoy a random grass field you can sit in between events; this is my protest on the lives we’re forced to live.

I’ve been thinking about why artists are listened to once they die, specifically due to the lines in the song immortal by j. cole:

To die a young legend or live a long life unfulfilled? 'Cause you wanna change the world but while alive you never will 'Cause they only feel you after you gone, or I've been told And now I'm caught between bein' heard and gettin' old

I think one big aspect of it is a dead person doesn’t have interest in profit, or pushing any sort of agenda for personal gain; to me that makes what they say pure, and unadulterated by greed.

Isn’t it adorable how

based off a random good memory

a word that ties them to that

becomes their favorite

He loves history. He wanted to write a biography of John Quincy Adams. I, shamefully, knew almost nothing about John Quincy Adams, so I went online and bought every biography of him I could find. One day, he called me, claiming that we wouldn’t work out long term. He said he loved me but that we had different interests. “What does love mean to you?” I said. “That’s an impossible question,” he replied. I, however, find love to be quite simple. Love is the stack of biographies on my nightstand with a bookmark near the end.

— Julia Nicole Camp

Yesterday, on a whim I decided to go to the gym and drag a friend along. This was the first time going in YEARS, and it didn’t take long for me to be barely able to lift my arms up. Today is the morning after, and sweet lord am I sore; and I love this feeling. It feels like I’ve done something, and I can see why people recommend the gym for circumventing depression. I want to make it my resolution to start going to the gym more often, especially when I start feeling like I’m falling into a slump.

To me, Sisyphus’s struggle is to be human. Ultimately, so much in life ends up as things we do and toil at without any guarantee of our efforts paying off. In life we often struggle with these boulders, and it can be an incredibly overwhelming task to face, for me a big boulder has been dealing with depression. I wanted to write about this today because while going on my walk, I remembered how futile efforts felt due to anhedonia. Doing things like exercising, working on homework, getting sunlight, talking to friends all seemed like they did nothing and ultimately had no benefit; yet I would still force myself to do them. I think the only way to stay sane in life is to fall in love with the task of pushing the boulder, by doing something with no guarantee of success, and in some ways the unending reminder of failure. If you can fall in love with that, you can keep going.

It’s kinda funny how quickly I recover from depressions now adays, I’ve almost got it down to a science. I just worked on some assignments in advance, and got the sweet sweet dopamine hit and back to feeling like life is manageable. Kinda funny how since being conditioned into it as a child the main way I feel pleasure is completing assignments, but hey it works out nice and probably will work nice for the coming 6 years of school.

Either way I’m glad I’m feeling fine again; thank you for all the support I received from friends, both from this blog and just from reaching out. I’m glad I have you all.

I often worry that my friends won’t like me (or even less so) if they see me while I’m depressed. It leads to me self isolating, and straying away from friends when I am struggling, and often these unresolved feelings get put as either a discord status or as a blog post now. These are my cries for help, as I so desperately want someone to reach out to me when they see them, and ultimately tell me that they accept me for who I am, depression and all.

I can’t really think of any benefits to a friend having depression, but it sure comes with negatives. This feels like a fact of life to me, and so I desperately hide my depression in the public eye. I constantly will make cries for help, hoping people see it and reach out and ask “hey, are you ok?” yet at the same time I so violently fear it.

Claire, if you are reading this don’t worry about reaching out to me. You’ve been an incredible friend, I’m so glad I met you, and I wish I had more friends like you; you’ve been the gold standard of kinds of friends I’d like more of. I don’t want to put pressure on you to reach out, and since you’re the only person who occasionally reads this I hope you don’t feel like this is me asking you to.

I often think that depression is one of the worst enemies, as its your own brain actively fighting you. It’s hard to change your mindset when your own mind wants to hurt you.

Holy shit. I think everyone sees this show at first and writes it off as a fanservice show, but this was an incredible coming of age anime, and an incredibly sweet, healthy romance. I do have things I want to say about the show, but what I wanted to post about was the movie in specific.

For context, the last time I cried was when Tonia ghosted me a year ago; and I just cried 3x during the movie. The movie itself was incredibly bitter sweet, and was a continuation of season 1. But ultimately, I think the thing that really struck me to my core was how much Mai loves Sakuta. I’m just overall love-deprived due to childhood, so seeing someone love Sakuta that much cut me to my core. Typically I’m used to empathizing with feelings of love for other characters during romance shows, but to see someone love you mutually back similarly if not more, that got me. I think its easy for me to forget that love should be a mutual feeling, and the movie really does capture my definition of love: when someone is willing to do something that is strictly bad for them, in the interest of benefiting someone they love.

One other thing that really struck me was one of the main characters saying how they want to be a kinder person every day. I think it’s easy to get by day to day without any sort of goal, and to just go through the motions. But I think it’s important to constantly strive to be a better, kinder person. I’d like to be kind to the people around me more, as my favorite quote goes: “The world is not kind, therefore we must be kind in its place.”