jem on jém

[ENTRY 016]

terminal\user\jem\journal

You have no right to be depressed
You haven’t tried hard enough to like it
Haven’t seen enough of this world yet
But it hurts, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts
Well, stop your whining, try again
No one wants to cause you pain
They’re just trying to let some air in
But you hold your breath, you hold your breath, you hold it
Hold my breath, I hold my breath I hold it

No frills this week. Or tricks. Only a straight-up admission of a deep and aching tiredness. Maybe not symptomatic of writing entries week to week – as the routine has settled with me quite nicely – but a far less literal disease working its way around.

I like to think I don't get depressed as severely or often as I used to, but in the past month I’ve felt the slight brushing of my side and glimpses gradually morph into a state of which I could no longer plausibly deny or dismiss as something I can thug out.

Depression isn’t the right word, but loneliness. Saying a higher dosage than usual was administered ‘when I wasn’t looking’ gives me some credit, but in truth, I could track most of the paw prints to their interwoven origins with relative accuracy.

I like to think I’ve gotten better at rearranging the monotony slotted within everyday life to alleviate the unrelenting repetition that follows. In some ways, productively, by switching up my rotating meals that take the respective time and effort to prepare them, to changing morning ‘walks’ to ‘runs,’ to adapting to a new desktop setup designed to create a more efficient editing workflow.

These are, however, exceedingly outpaced by the amount of well-meaning but arguably less productive means to assume a sense of control wherever possible. This includes collating a comprehensive spreadsheet of every album I’ve listened to in the year so far, reading more comics every day, watching a movie every weeknight to clear out my watchlist, the list can keep going…

What I realise is that even while there’s an imbalance of perceived productivity, I don’t think much would change if the scales were balanced. It’s all a distraction, because I’m still lonely.

It’s an eerie feeling to look back and pinpoint the exact peaks and troughs of my mental state across a period with razor-sharp recall. Here’s the last time this happened, the last time I spoke to someone, the last time I felt this way – all a spectrum of emotions that, whether positive or negative, always leave impressions on me that last far longer than I’d like to admit.

So, when cooped up all alone in the mental rat race prison of my own design and bereft of social interaction in the real world, the most logical, sensible line of reasoning to move forward is striking up conversation with strangers in the much more real, much more safe digital realm.

To spare the details, I don’t love the narrowly spaced and impersonal feeling of engaging in conversation with the express intent of convincing someone that I’m a romantic candidate worth a considerable amount of their attention for the foreseeable future. Unlike some silver-tongued doctor with spurs on his boots selling a remedy that doesn’t work, I am not in love with the idea of trying to sell myself. To grab aspects of my identity – from things I hold dear to niche references I make in passing – and put them behind glass with a price tag for people to ‘just browse.’

This is what I’m reduced to when it feels like nothing works. Far from the worst depths anyone similar to me has trudged through, but I love to complain.

In truth, the experience feels worthwhile in the dwindling handful of handfuls of connections I’ve formed. They give me a legible semblance of confidence in my ability to articulate, or rather advertise, a bill of goods that can occasionally make you exhale from your nostrils while exchanging music recommendations. Incomparable to real, human-to-human tactile contact (which can kill me), but the optimist in me really wants to believe it’s a hair’s distance of a step nearly in the right direction. I guess I’m all about counting any perceptible, positive change at this juncture.

And then everything flips on a dime. An impromptu live show booking leads to a rekindling of a close friendship I thought had lain dormant in my rampant inner monologuing of self-inflicted cynical psychoanalysing of situations, gaps in conversation, what is left unspoken… To be frank, a night of just honest shooting the shit with someone I care deeply, whom probably had no idea the amount of time I had spent overthinking about our dynamic for weeks, gave me so much air I couldn’t come to terms with how I had been breathing before then.

What a stupid relief I soft-locked from myself for so long.

It made the next days so much easier when it came to making me the prettiest woman for what would become the most memorable night in recent memory. I’m indebted to anyone willing to manipulate the impossible for me, which goes beyond repeatedly asking me to ‘relax my eyes’ and ‘lock in for just a second’ while I'm being hairsprayed as cats are drawn on my nails. I deserve these friends, but I’d be hard pressed to convincingly argue the point in a real conversation.

I’ll cut it short because I can. Here’s to the last entry I’ll ever write as a twenty-two-year-old adult, and to reckoning with why the static Instagram story of blonde you is a six-hour video.

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