i am going to make it through this year if it kills me
did you really expect me to go down without a fight?
I’m sitting across from you, lying through gritted teeth, hoping you don’t call my bluff—“I’m fine, I’m totally okay”. I’ve plastered a smile on my face so big it looks comical, wearing it like a mask. Faking happiness reminds me so much of my youth. I’ve tried writing this piece for almost two months: I wrote, rewrote, edited, restarted, cried, complained, wrote the entire thing by hand, and almost retired as a writer. The first few drafts of this were dripping in levels of self-pity that even I found inherently distasteful. I struggled to condense my thoughts. I was unsure of how much of myself to expose to you. I was worried you may look away, or worse, feel pity for me. It’s moments like this—that require me to be more courageous than ever before—that I struggle to find the words to begin. But, as Atticus Finch proclaimed in To Kill A Mockingbird, “Real courage is when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.”
If I don’t want to talk about something I’ll write about it instead; you can’t converse with words on a page. Writing provides me with a certain comfortability, permitting me to be vulnerable while avoiding the questions I can’t stomach to answer face-to-face. However, language often fails us when we need it most: it is impossible to communicate the severity of our pain—whether emotional or physical—with exactity. Witnessing (or reading about) someone’s pain forces us to the limits of our empathy, especially if we haven’t experienced it ourselves. As John Green puts it, “We’ve tried all sorts of ways to get around this axiom of consciousness…We can talk and talk and talk about what the pain is like, but we can never manage to convey what it is.”
When I am not drowning in the depths of it, I forget how painful depression, despair, anxiety can truly be. Once we’ve broken free from the shackles of pain we do our best to forget about it, if only so we can go on, move forward. Personally, each time I escape the firey pits of hopelessness I beat myself up for ‘being weak’ or ‘wasting what precious time I have in endless suffering’, finding it suddenly difficult to relate to the pain I once thought I would never emerge from. When I look back weeks, months, years later, with no experiential way to return to what was, I struggle to fully commiserate with the me who lived through it. However, this year I found myself wandering backward toward these all too familiar states of pain.
One thing you should know about me is that I seek out comfort as relentlessly as a dog seeks a bone, yet paradoxically, I often find an unsettling sense of solace in pain. If you’ve ever suffered from depression I’m confident you’ll understand exactly what I mean—though I hope you don’t, for your own sake.
I’m no stranger to rock bottom, nor to depression, and this year I found myself returning to both—much like showing up to your 10-year high school reunion: with a peculiar mix of naive, youthful dread you thought you’d outgrown. It would be dishonest to say I didn’t welcome it. I tend to embrace suffering with a warm hug, finding relief in its familiarity. Typically it rolls in like a storm—I can sense it’s coming but even if I brace for impact I never really know how brutal it will be until it passes. Edna St. Vincent Millay describes it much better than I ever will: “That chill is in the air,”—if you’ve ever suffered from depression you know exactly what that chill feels like—“Which the wise know well, and have even learned to beat. / This joy, I know, / Will soon be under snow.”
Some people get cynical while submerged in The Darkness, others get unbelievably sad or dispositionally angry about everything. Everyone approaches it differently. Me? I go numb. My body stops feeling like a vessel of potential and instead becomes a burden. It’s as sudden as flipping a light switch: everything becomes a chore—washing the dishes, saying hello to the neighbours, listening to my favourite songs, laughing with my friends. No matter how desperately I try to seek joy, or even sadness, all I find is indifference. For someone as emotional as I am, the inability to feel anything at all is the most terrifying experience. Life abruptly loses its meaning, and I can’t see the point in any of it.
The thing about finding yourself in a sudden, unexpected state of depression, is that it is very difficult to get out of, especially if you’re akin to me and tend to turn to unhealthy vices. Life, all at once, becomes a game I’ve always been destined to lose and any solemn attempts to regain control over my brain, body, and soul are futile. Over the years I’ve come to refer to it as my ‘vegetable state’: a period of pure stagnation where I can do nothing more than exist. I spend my time rumminaging through the past or freaking myself out about the future. The days I’m forced to put on a smile and enter the world feel soul-crushing and I wonder how the man sitting beside me on the subway can’t tell. I feel like a clown in women’s clothing. It’s painful in a way that I still find myself unable to describe. It is intense, all-consuming, and feels endless, the way whatever you’re experiencing in the present moment always does.
I have slipped in and out of depressive episodes all year, some worse than others, but all equally exhausting. The ever-wise John Green captures it perfectly: “Despair isn’t very productive. That’s the problem with it. Like a replicating virus, all despair can make is more of itself.” Earlier this year I came to terms with the fact that constant happiness is an unachievable state of being. Life ebbs and flows, but when you spend an entire year feeling like you’re treading water—always a moment away from drowning rather than floating—you begin to question the validity of that statement. After years of therapy, a few spiritual psychoses, and more than a handful of mental breakdowns, I’ve realized I’m often my own worst enemy (this isn’t to downplay the seriousness of depression, which can be entirely out of one’s control—I speak only from my own experience).
I tend to slip into these spells of depression when I so desperately am clinging onto the way I think things ought to be, refusing to accept them for how they truly are. Suffering—which lies at the heart of these episodes—is the inevitable by-product of my inability to release my grip on people, places, and moments that have long since moved on. Or, as David Foster Wallace poetically puts it, “Everything I've ever let go of has claw marks on it.”
I often find these numb states more comforting than the effort it would take to change, grow, and become the person I’m trying to be. While inundated in these states, my brain feels like mush—everything is overwhelming, I’m burnt out, and nothing seems to have a point. At least that’s the narrative I fed myself every moment of every day. It’s exhausting because I know it’s fiction; there’s no truth behind those statements. I’m overwhelmed because I constantly procrastinate to ensure I feel incompetent and incapable, reinforcing the belief that I’ll never be good enough. I’m burnt out because I spend my time replaying everything I’ve ever done or said, imagining how I should have done XYZ differently, convincing myself that might have made me less of a failure. But most of all, I know deep down that it does have a point. My job as a human being—and as a writer—is to find meaning in life’s meaninglessness. None of it matters, which makes all of it sacred. The point is to be here, to exist, and to experience it all until the very end.
If I’m honest (which I try my hardest to always be honest with you dearest reader), part of me takes pride in ‘not living up to my potential’ because deep down I fear if I try my hardest, the world might discover I don’t have as much potential as people may think. When I was younger, my school held a poetry recitation competition where each student had to memorise a poem and recite it in front of their class, and one student from each grade was selected to read their poem out in front of the whole school during an assembly. According to a 2023 Tiny Tots Inter College Unit 2 Facebook post, “Poem recitation is an art of expression of thoughts and understanding. A strong performance is one in which the meaning of the poem is powerfully and clearly conveyed.” As a child who loved nothing more than performing—I frequently dragged my mother to community theatre auditions and spent summers at drama camp—I was elated at the opportunity to showcase my skills.
I can’t recall whether we got to choose what we read or if it was chosen for us, but there I was—all Bambi limbs and fidgeting hands—reciting Lewis Carroll’s The Walrus and The Carpenter to my entire class. The poem, composed of 18 stanzas and 108 lines, alternates between iambic trimeters and iambic tetrameters, was originally published in his 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, the sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which you may know more commonly as Alice in Wonderland. It subtly critiques entitlement, the abuse of power, and greed, though I doubt I grasped those metaphors as a child. For weeks I made my mother sit and listen as I practiced my memorization. There was a girl in my grade with whom I was in constant, though unspoken, competition, and I was determined to outshine her. Even as a child, I was striving for perfection.
Somehow, I managed to memorize all 108 lines (even now, I could probably recite most of it by heart) and was selected by my teacher to perform the poem in front of the entire school alongside the other class representatives. I can’t recall if I experienced any stage fright—I wasn’t a nervous or anxious child. In fact, I was quite the opposite. I was always hungry for attention, if only to prove my existence. Apparently, I had a knack for poem recitation because a few weeks after the performance I was invited to enter an actual poem recitation competition where I would compete against other students from across the province. I declined. My mother and teachers were confused by this decision and tried to persuade me otherwise. It has taken me many years to comprehend younger-me’s decision, but I’ve finally uncovered the mystery of my ways. It’s a pattern I’ve carried into adulthood: after tasting success, I often run away from it, afraid of failure.
I’ve spent my life running from what I truly want, afraid of discovering that I’m not good enough to deserve it. I fear that if I attempt to reach my potential, the world will realize I’m lacklustre—or worse, just average. You can’t win if you don’t play the game, but you also can’t lose. I guess I figured out early on that you can’t fail if you don’t try. Looking back at the writing I’ve published this year, I see now that I’ve spent most of 2024 rummaging through every corner of my mind, living in my head more than in reality. That’s a dangerous game, especially when my thoughts often spiral me straight to rock bottom.
So here we are, dearest reader, at the end of 2024. We’re so accustomed to measuring time linearly, by seasons, that we’re acutely aware of beginning and ends. December always marks the most important end which collectively sends us all into a reflective frenzy. As metalabel aptly puts it in their ‘not a year-end review’, “We question if we did ‘it’ right, if we did enough, if we wrote the perfect ending, if it was worth all that time and effort. Quickly, reflecting for good reasons makes us focused on everything we didn’t do.” Plagued by introspection and an inability to—for lack of a better phrase—get the fuck over myself, I spent most of the year spiralling down rabbit holes of fear.
I wrote a lot about myself, mainly because I was thinking a lot about myself. Are you tired of reading about how sad I am? I’m certainly tired of writing about it. To be honest, I’m not all that sad until I sit down and ponder about everything I can be sad about. There are many more interesting things I wish to write about than myself, and I hope to write about them soon.
Yes, I am scared. Yes, I’m unsure of what the future holds. But I survived this year, despite its valiant efforts to tear me down. I’m ready to try something new next year, I hope you stick around for it.
Really, what I’ve been trying to tell you all year, dearest reader, is quite simple: I am here. I exist. I survived.
I have no wisdom for this month, only gratitude.
It’s been a tough year, but having this outlet has made it incredibly easier. Despite being separated by a screen, and perhaps many many kilometres, when I write these newsletters I feel very close to you, as if I’m penning a letter to a loved one far away.
So, thank you dearest reader. Thank you for accepting my confessions with open arms. Thank you for not judging me when I feel most judgeable. Thank you for not looking away.
I’ll see you in 2025.
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Until next month …