I wake up at 10:26 AM with Doritos crumbs stuck to my chest and a dead vape I paid too much money for under my pillow. I itch my balls through the Fruit of The Loom boxers I’ve had for far too long, make my way to my bathroom, and make my toilet seat look like a Ben Simmons shot chart as a boner fart escapes from my asshole Shawshank style. As I go to wash my hands, I briefly look at my reflection, then head back into my bed. There’s a lot about Fall that’s great. Wearing flannels on a porch while putting back some Voodoo Rangers, getting assistance home from a Halloween party by girls who somehow found a way to make Squid Game into a slutty costume, and having Scott Hanson assuage Sundays’ living nightmares while you dry heave over the toilet. But with the highs come the lows, and the depression that the cold weather brings in is a real bitch.
I open up my laptop to an excel spreadsheet I should’ve finished last night, ruffle through a few emails, and toss on a Mark Normand clip that never fails to make me laugh. I have class in half an hour, it’s only a seven-minute walk, but I can’t get out of bed. Physically I’m fine. I mean, it’s not like I’m in peak performance, I tweaked my ankle a bit kicking an eighth-pound ball back to a kid at the gym last week, but I’m fine. I’m feeling as hopeless as a white female side character in any horror movie ever. And there’s no guy with a gaping scar on his left cheek holding a chainsaw to my neck. It’s just my mind- it’s my own demons.
The predicament at hand is a tough one. My family pays a lot of money for me to attend to these classes where I retain nothing in my quest to get the world’s most expensive piece of paper, but I just can’t do it today. Relatively speaking, I’ve got a great life. Three days ago, the receipt I threw away from the vape shop down the street would keep some kid living in a Guatemalan village fed for a week. And that’s the worst part. Not only am I my depression’s bottom bitch, but I have to feel guilty about it too? Raw fucking deal. As I prepare a sandwich with Turkey that I pray to God is still good, despite the fact it smells like Trisha Paytus’ discharge, I decide that I need to fight this. I’m not going to allow myself to mire in my own misery without doing anything productive about it. Missing class is “okay,” but I, like many of you, am the Andre Igoudala of dealing with mental illness. I’m a fucking veteran. So I take two bites of my Trisha Paytus pussy sandwich and build enough courage to call one of my friends.
Three years ago, I had what I believe to be one of the most important conversations of my life. After polishing off half a bottle of whiskey, I blew the lid on years of emotions I didn’t feel comfortable telling anyone else to a kid; quite frankly, I didn’t know that well at the time- and I’ve tried therapy multiple times. I don’t know how or why it happened, but it did. And because of that single person making me feel understood, I now voice those feelings to all you bartards reading this. I consider him sort of like my sponsor for Depressions Anonymous. I walk out of bars at one in the morning to field his phone calls; he stops watching fifty-seven-minute YouTube videos about MK Ultra to answer mine. We talk for forty-five minutes about life and his Mom’s newfound fixation on Succession, among other things. It’s not going to make the weighted blanket of pain go away, but it helps a lot. In fact, that call is the only reason I make it to my four o’clock class.
When I get back from my last class, I throw my backpack on my bed, crack open a beer, and argue with my roommate over whether or not spending one week in Chernobyl without a mask would be worth having sex once with Livvy Dune. And as we sit there watching the Red Sox get destroyed, I smile. Because today, I got an uppercut by overwhelmingly dark feelings, but I fought back.
Most people in life will go on with their day with blissful ignorance. They’ll sit around regurgitating sports takes better men have come up with, they’ll blindly follow politicians, and they’ll go to sleep at night thinking that they actually did something when they posted that black square on Instagram a year and a half ago. They will post pictures apple picking and waterboard you with Ted Lasso. But the sad boys out there…we will understand things that they don’t. So if you are out there struggling, I implore you to reach out to a friend the same way I did. If you feel stuck in life if you’re confused as to why the world’s most mediocre people are making millions of dollars on Tik Tok, and if you’re frustrated because you’re not getting the Hinge matches you want to… it’s okay. You are normal, and you are loved. And if you aren’t feeling this way, check in on your friends, you really could make a difference.
