I HATE MYSELF AND I WANT TO DIE

Por Víctor C. Drax

 

You just can’t be depressed anymore.

 

Being sad and gloomy is now mainstream. All those kids during the past decade that were experiencing the regular emotions while growing up had big allies. Tim Burton. My Chemical Romance. Hot Topic. You could be fifteen years old and cry because your parents got divorced, and listen to a song by… AFI, I guess, and consider slitting your wrists. Next day, the girl you like would give you the eye and all is fine and peachy again. They even invented a word for it: Emo. If you were moody and you had issues handling your feelings, you were emo. You were expected to dress in black, with stupid fucking symbols (like a pentagram fused with a heart; I think it’s the logo of some band called “Him”). You were branded. You were ridiculed. Go cry somewhere else, you little prick.

 

But depression (the actual, clinical condition) is no laughing matter. Unlike those teenagers, you can’t easily label someone who is depressed. There are a lot of feelings of shame and guilt and when you’re at that low point, all you want to do is avoid attention, not attract it. Let’s suppose your girlfriend sailed to eternal happiness with your best friend. You’re going to be depressed and pissed and you will talk to people about it and whatnot. It’ll last somewhere around five days, then go away, you can continue perfectly with your life, as the symptoms wane with time.

 

Depression, on the other hand, will stay and will only get worse. It may be triggered because of that girlfriend who left you, but it could also be because you’re too stressed. Or you got the wrong comment delivering a project on the job. If a disease is an entity, then depression is a parasite that sticks to you and remains dormant. It will eventually wake up, take any excuse and really mess up with your head. On day one, you’re feeling low, a little sick. If you’ve had previous episodes with the condition, you might recognize it for what it is (and not something like a flu, or exhaustion). But you will turn your head the other way, partly because you don’t want to accept that it’s happening again, but also because there’s not a lot that you can do, now that the show has started. Day two, your energy is not there anymore. You’re moody. We can all agree that people are stupid, but now they’re stupider than usual. Talking to colleagues and carry on with the day seems like such a big hassle that it’s so much better to avoid. Staying home sounds like a good idea. On day three, shit’s getting serious. Now it’s not people the ones who are stupid: you are. You’re mad at yourself and you will take any excuse to put down the enemy in the mirror. Things that you usually like now are annoying and don’t have a lot of purpose. Perhaps by now, you can recognize that you’re depressed. I mean, I hope you do; a lot of folks never identify the feelings and go untreated their whole lives. Or what’s left of them, because the parasite will only get nastier.

 

Somewhere around day six or seven, you will start having these really dangerous thoughts. What’s the purpose of continuing? Things are not going to improve; the world is not going to be suddenly fixed one morning. Why staying? Who is going to miss you?

 

I think we all know how that kind of stuff evolves.

 

We go back to paragraph one. Maybe in the eighties or even the nineties, you could approach people and explain them, but now? Boy, put some eyeliner on that shit, because nobody wants to hear about how difficult your life is. Wanna kill yourself? Yeah, right. Tell me how it went next weekend, over drinks.

 

It’s amazing how many people, in the face of someone obviously depressed, would say something like “man up.” I believe this is for the whole “emo” phenomenon; depression is a sideshow now. Not a clinical condition, not something that erodes your will over time, but a sing of immaturity. You’re supposed to be over it at seventeen, tops. With a cultural landscape like the one we’ve had on recent years, with kids wanting to emulate their suicidal heroes and the appearance of gothic-pop fashion, anyone can take a bunch of gray pictures and upload them to Facebook (and MySpace before that). Depression is no longer a disease: it’s the stuff teenagers who want to be mean use to have a social background, so they can connect with other kids and chat about the regular teenager tropes.

 

We end up with a crowd of people (grown ups) who feel like shit, who may be aware that something is not working quite well inside their heads, and who feel already stupid —too stupid to carry the whole “emo” stigma on top of it. Maybe they work a way around this and express their grief in different ways. Someone I know used to say that those things are a good starting point for art. As a guy who wrote a piece on suicide that received a fair amount of attention ( http://www.letralia.com/258/letras02.htm ; the text’s in Spanish), I can attest: art is not therapy. Therapy is therapy.

 

There are many reasons to not seek help. Why? The answer eludes me. I’ve heard them all, from “that stuff is too expensive for me” to “they will prescribe me pills and I’m not going to stop drinking alcohol under any circumstance.” That crap is just what it smells like: excuses. Eventually, you will have to realize that you can’t deal with it on your own. That you’re not one of the morons on Good Charlotte and that you do need psychological attention, the same way you would go to a doctor if you catch pneumonia. Being depressed is not stupid. It’s not fashion. It’s serious shit that warps your thoughts and your feelings and makes you see things through a distorted glass.

 

Trust me, I know what I’m talking about.