One of the things I like about Suzan (not Suzanne) is her ability to say really harsh things and not make you hate her. I still can't decide if she's very perceptive or if she just makes a lot of assumptions about people and the law of averages dictates that she's eerily dead-on at least half the time.
One of the first times I experienced this was when she confronted me about not volunteering to read/anchor the news during broadcast class.
"Why is that?" she asked. "I'm curious about that. Why you never want to participate in anything and are always hiding in the shadows."
This caught me off guard because in j-school, more than anywhere else, I'm pretty damn social. Plus at this point we barely knew each other and I don't see how she
got that vibe off me. There simply was no evidence to back this up, and I wanted to fight it but couldn't because she was right.
Recently, she was writing a piece about seasonal affective disorder, and I confessed to her that I suffer from depression, and especially so during the winter time.
Instead of listening to my little sob-story with puppy-dog eyes she very dryly said, "you should see someone about that. It can be pretty shitty."
"I do alright by myself," I said, defensively.
She gave me skeptical look but thankfully dropped the subject.
She's right though. Winter time is rough, for me and those around me, as I'm sure you know if you've ever read more than three posts on this blog. I do my best to stay busy -- I make plans and set goals and make a huge-ass reading list and try to go out alot during the day -- but inevitably I end up curled under the sheets listening to some really emotional music and sleeping alot.
Yesterday I had a migraine (my other seasonal affliction) which knocked me out for a good ten hours of so. Not good. The slightest sign of illness always gives me the excuse to lay in bed and wallow.
While in bed I remembered alot of the personal traumas my friends have gone through. I'm a pretty firm believer in doing things for other people that you want done for yourself, and so, since I appreciate when friends remember that I suffer from depression and adjust their social expectations of me accordingly, I do my best to remember the shit they've been through.
I remembered especially one time I went to my friend's house in early highschool. We'll call him Brian. Brian had told us a year before that his dad moved out and went overseas for business. But that night while we were playing video games in the basement, Brian's mom stormed into the room and started yelling at him. She was mad that Brian still talking to his dad, and was trying to get him to sign some sort of letter, I think for legal purposes, that would entitle him to financial aid but sever ties between him and his father.
Apparently Brian's dad had run out on him and his mom, whom Brian's dad had cheated on. There was never any business trip overseas. He was still in town, living somehwhere within driving distance. She was pulling the guilt card, saying things like, "do you love him more than me?" And "don't you love me?" And "are you going to let him do this to your mother?"
That must be a hard thing, to have someone use your sense of manhood as a weapon against your father figure. That's a lot of baggage to unload on a kid.
Then she started calling him stupid, saying "you're so stupid Brian, you're so stupid." Which has hard because Brian wasn't the best student.
Brian's mom is a great woman, don't get me wrong. I love her and how she is with him. It was just this instance where she stopped being his mother and started being a normal person, which is something parents can't really be.
Eventually he took her out of the room and they both disappeared for awhile and when he came back finally he acted as if nothing had happened. As if it were perfectly logical that I was so engrossed with the game that I hadn't heard a goddman thing.
I could tell he didn't want me to press-on about it so I played along, and we had a lot of fun that day, like we always did, we shot a lot of people and released our agression and were rewarded for it by the tidy system of points and levels.
If only real life were that neat and easy, I'd be on to bigger and better things by now, new challenges, new surroundings, and new gadgets to help me deal with the darkness.
But I'm not on to anything bigger, I'm in bed. And it's the same bed, and this is the same blog.
Labels: depression, general
