I wrote this about a year ago, and it still holds up. Happy mens mental health week.
Shooting point blank, the last year and a half or so has been rough for me. Whether it was the multiple panic attacks a day that sunk me into hopelessness, the litany of relationship problems I’ve battled, being in debt, lingering family issues, or the rest of the things a white kid who took a sailing class as a child might complain about, I used to play the MyCareer mode of life on All-Star and now we’re looking into the Superstar range. It’s great that we as a generation emphasize discussing mental wellness and strategies to improve it, but I think a lot of the time one person’s wisdom becomes an overused trope that loses its meaning. Think you are not alone, your feelings are valid, if you broke a bone you’d go to a doctor…why not go for Depression… basically anything you’d see in a middle school guidance counselor’s office that reaks of helping neglected children process their parent’s divorce for fifty grand a year plus dental. It’s really important for me to absorb every experience I can about mental health. If a comedian I like talks about their struggles on their podcast, I’ll listen right away, if the girl I met on Spring Break four years ago writes a lengthy Instagram caption about depression, I’ll give it a read, fuck it, I’ll be three pages deep in a vsco trying to debate whether or not the girl my friend has been fucking has nice boobs and catch myself tearing up. Specificity with mental health is KEY because if you can understand some of other people’s advice or trials, you can identify yourself with other individuals that you might consider wildly different from you on the surface. If the psychedelic girl that is kind of slutty and Brittany from Kappa Kappa cunt both hate their Dad, they aren’t as different as they seem to be. I could write an encyclopedia on what I’ve learned this past year and a half, but I’ll stick to one point: don’t kill yourself.
Relatively speaking, easy for me to say. My scoutmaster never touched me, my parents are still together, and my high school had a panini press. But that doesn’t mean that the chemical imbalances in my brain aren’t the same as the kid that left home at fifteen. Just because your a kid from the burbs doesn’t mean that you’re going to live a cookie-cutter life. Lil Wayne once said, “life is a bitch, and death is her sister.” Because life is hard as fuck. At eighteen we are all expected to compete for jobs that don’t make us look at the clock all day, while also providing our hypothetical children with better opportunities than we had. By twenty-five, we pay for our own god damn phone plan just so AT&T can buffer when we are trying to watch Lana Rhoades take two dicks at once. BUT, from listening to ANYBODY that has survived a suicide attempt, you’ll learn that as soon as they hit that water, or the pills digested in their stomach, they regretted their decision so fucking much. In any universal scenario, suicide won’t cure your problems. You might argue that it does, but there’s no benefit in ANYBODY no matter who they are or what they’ve done to go from air in their lungs to a Sapranos ending fade to black. If you’re playing a video game and you unplug your TV because for whatever reason DJ Augustine is torching your ass and you have nine turnovers, you’re just going to have to play him again, and you learn that trying to cheat the consequences for your shitty teammate grade was not worth it at all. Not because you wanted to keep getting fisted by DJ Augustine, but because you didn’t want to have to restart your PS5 and deal with the bullshit that comes with your TV reloading, you just wanted to restart your game.
This past year and a half, I’ve been on the ledge of a cliff way more times than I’d like to admit. At one point, I started drinking myself to sleep just to get sad, pull out a knife from my desk, and think about cutting myself so I could leave college and go home, or that the people I never told that I was struggling to would check in one me. But I’d never do it…and eventually, I built up enough courage to do what seems impossible: I reached out to the friends that love me and the family that has to.
I’d like to think I’m doing exponentially better right now. I haven’t had to take a drug for anxiety or depression for seven weeks now and sure, I have terrible, terrible days, but I get through them and so will you. Maybe I’ll never make it as a blogger, but that’s okay. The four people that reach out to me and tell me that a blog or video made their day are so much more valuable than any straight-edged dick that shits on me. I’ve spent the last six weeks playing beer dye and shooting the shit with my best friend, and while that’s awesome and I feel great, life is going to come after me sooner or later, and I’m grateful for that. Life is herpes and hairlines, watching sad sports franchises break your heart over and over, and overcooking rice. So, if you are on that ledge, I implore you, give me a chance, give your friend a chance. give the Indian dude jacking off on Omegle a chance, give your pet a chance. Just make me this promise, even if I fucking hate you. Please be courageous enough to talk to somebody before you take your only life (sorry Hindus).
