Part Seven

Hello again chaps, sorry it's been a while. Busy with work and the like, hopefully I'll get back to posting every five days or so rather than the current eight. Anyway, I look forward to reading your comments (and apologising to those who feel this blog is too miserable, although if you read a few posts back you'll see that it's not all doom and gloom. More positivity to come, I promise!) and catching up on the blogs I haven't checked in on recently.

Incidentally, I love the Zapata quote towards the end of this section, it's a recurring theme in my life for both good and bad reasons. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it and what it might mean to you.

As always, try to bear in mind that this wasn't intended to be split into sections, it's one document that I've decided to milk for content during my busy hours.
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Part Seven
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Even without Depression, if all I felt was a slight melancholy and disregard for life, how is that any less valid? A problem is subjective; I would never attempt to trivialize your problem, no matter how feeble it might seem to me. I understand that a small thing to one man is a big one to another. One man’s rubbish is another’s treasure, and so one man’s unnoticed issues are another’s dominant feature.
If someone as shallow and self-absorbed as me can realise that, why can’t everyone else?

I hate me, I hate you, and I genuinely, in every sense of the word, hate the world.

I hate what I’ve done to me and what I’ve become. I was born a pleasant young gentleman and I’ve become a selfish egotistical cynic.
I hate you, for making me feel like I’ve done this to myself deliberately and for implying it’s common, reversible and exaggerated. No one can suggest I’m anything but honest, even in my deceits.
I hate the world for supplying constant ammunition for cynicism. Everywhere I look there’s something obscene and worthy of my deepest hatred.

Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata said, “It is better to die upon your feet than to live upon your knees.”
Maybe it’s an extreme view founded in my ignorance and stubbornness, but I feel like I’ve been asked to live on my knees. I see things in the news that make me ashamed to be human, and yet I’m told I should contribute to society. I see men who are imprisoned against their will for their entire lives for breaking laws written and enforced by the same people that tell me I live in a free country.

Part Six

The people that are crying inside are the same ones that flip and shoot up a school or hang themselves, these things are seen as shocking when they happen. Why? They’re inevitable with phrases like “everyone has their problems” indoctrinating the minds of the vulnerable at every chance.
This idea that Depression, and it is capitalized, can be baited out and exorcised like some kind of demon in the night is wrong on the most basic level.
A notion founded in outdated ignorance and an almost deliberate misunderstanding of mental health issues has fed the cycle of hurt and heartache across the world. If we were taught that Depression was a problem in the same was that Down’s syndrome is, we would help those affected and we’d do it without a hint of resent.
Instead, the stigma of Depression doesn’t resemble the stigma found in disability, despite its debilitating features, instead resembling the stigma attached to homosexuality or Asperger’s Syndrome. Like it’s somehow a minor issue, an aspect of a person’s self rather than the governing feature.

Depression makes a person think differently, right to the foundations of himself. It’s all-absorbing, a life is ruled and ruined by it. A decision can’t be made without forethought to future episodes of misery.

Winston Churchill likened it to carrying around a big black dog, a dark burden that weighs heavily and pushes against a man’s chest, suffocating him with pure… nothing.
Sadness and misery are estimations, a roundabout way of describing the indescribable. People assume they know what it feels like, being told they haven’t felt it is like saying a new color has been discovered; unimaginable.
The blackest punch to gut, a punch of guilt, shame, hatred, anger, sadness, tiredness, apathy, demotivation and the most profound sense of doom and dread possible, all multiplied to the nth degree and wrapped around you like the dirty hands of the angriest, seediest cunt in the world; yourself.

It never leaves. The punches draw back, but you know another’s coming and you know the grip’s coming back to squeeze you again soon. Always.

Part Five

Been away for a few days, lovely to return to so many positive and thoughtful comments. Thanks guys!

Part Five

People try to justify too many things by trivializing life, condensing the enormity of something so beautiful and grotesque into manageable nuggets of clichéd dialogue from the last rom-com they saw.
“Life is what you make it,” a piece of pop-philosophy from the pat-yourself-on-the-back school of “you can be like me one day” School of Arrogance. The implication being that one would ever choose to fail.

Being lazy and apathetic is never a choice, nor is alcoholism and nor is unemployment. If somebody is expressing the idea that they’re choosing not to “better” themselves, ask why. Don’t assume they’re bad, wonder why they’re making such a destructive choice. Why would someone willingly ruin his or her life? They must hate themselves to some degree to wish such a half-hearted fate on themselves, and if that’s the case then I believe they need to be helped. Not so they can contribute more to the world, but so they can absorb more of what the world has to offer.

We may be running out of resources in the form of energies and money and love and whatever else, but the jungles are still beautiful and the beaches are still idyllic. Birds are still majestic, so why can’t a man be happy in noticing these things?
If I knew, I’d be happy, but I don’t, so I’m not. Does that make me bad?

I was told a few days ago that “everyone has their problems.” I was expected to buck up and smile after hearing this. One of the most ignorant and idiotic attempts at a motivational line I’ve ever heard, and I’ve heard plenty.
Yes, everybody does have their problems, but how is that a positive thing? I don’t hear that and think “wow, they have problems yet they smile and live life!”
Instead, I think “wow, they smile and live life and yet they’re still unhappy beneath it.”
That’s one of the ugliest things about this world, the perpetual lying. On top of the lies, come lies regarding the lies and then lies regarding those. If someone wants to cry, let them. Hug them while they do. Don’t make him feel like it’s the right thing to do to bottle feelings up until he implodes.

Part Four

I’ve realized recently though, with the help of my counselor, my editor, my dad, and my online friends, that I am good at talking. Whether it’s blagging a fiver from my dad, landing interviews and writing jobs that I’m completely under-qualified for, boldly attempting (although often failing) to chat up girls, or selling double glazing for Zenith - I can talk. I can lie.

Accepting this, I don’t feel my ego swelling or my heart sinking with the usual disapproving resentment of such arrogant self-aggrandizing. I feel proud.

I can do the things I want to do with this skill, such as it is. I can live on the continent; I can apply for jobs, chat up girls, sell my own personal brand and feel completely at ease with myself. Just the thought makes me feel happy. I don’t want to die when I imagine this, I want to live.

So it’s time to do it, I’ve found what might make me happy and so I’ll leave. I want to wake up when I want, sit in a quirky French café and write on my laptop. I want to harass the girl at the counter for her phone number in my broken French and smile even when she declines, and I want to blag my way into the biggest and best situations imaginable. Why would I do anything I don’t want to do? Because “life isn’t fair sometimes”? Bollocks, life can’t be summed up some second-rate quote from a straight-to-DVD drama; it’s too vast to comprehend and too small to waste.

Letter

I don't hate you, but I am angry. I'm not angry at you, I'm angry at just about everything.
Until the other night I'd only shown part of myself to you, it's still me, but it's edited.

I'm sorry, because I know I gave you little choice in anything, I know I'm difficult to speak to when I'm like that.
I'm so tired of people claiming to understand and appreciate how it feels. Whether they're correct or not, it's just not what I need to hear.
I KNOW I need to just... man up sometimes, but if I'm not doing so already then why would being told it change that? That's my view at the time of feeling those things I mean, not necessarily my view when I'm myself.

I'd had a lot to drink that evening and I'd taken sleeping pills, my pills are harsh and I tend to sleeptalk for the last 10 minutes or so before crashing completely. I wasn't sleeptalking to you, but I was certainly beyond the point of caring about you, and I stopped caring about myself a long time ago.

I hate to say this, because I DO understand that everyone has their own problems and hardships, but please don't underestimate how hard parts of my life have been.

Some thing I couldn't express to you at the time is my frustration at the phrase "everyone has shit to deal with." I still can't fully explain it, perhaps because my logic is basically flawed, I don't know, but here's my best shot:
When I'm depressed I don't care about ANYONE. I'm angry at the world for being such a hate-filled and cynical place, a place where people don't care. I know this is hypocritical, but I feel it anyway. Hearing that everyone else is unhappy on some level too doesn't cheer me up, it doesn't make me feel the world is a better place and it doesn't make me worry about them. It makes me angrier, angrier that so many people accept unhappiness like it's to be expected and that nobody cares.

This anger is what drives me in my work. I find it easy to blackmail people and hurt people and damage lives, because I can choose to stop caring when I feel like it. It's just easier to do that than have to feel the emotions related to causing pain. 

Blah blah blah, I suppose.

I'm just sorry, and I hope you can forgive me. I miss your sexy face and smartarse comments, genuinely. 

Chris.

Winston's Dog

I suppose my first post should be something along the lines of an introduction and explanation, so here we are!

This blog will be my diary, but written in the style of a pretentious twat. I was asked to do a series of diary entries for work purposes a few weeks ago, but since then they've become useless to my employer. I found the writing process helpful and the sending/posting process liberating, so I plan to continue here.

The style isn't false, I just write like a dickhead, but I did put more effort in for the sake of my employer. She's a writer, if you're wondering.

First things, the title. Winston's Dog is a stupid title, that's obvious, but it carries with it a euphemism popularised by Winston Churchill - that of Depression likened to the burden of a large black dog.

Speaking of a doctor whom he held in high regard, Churchill said, ""I think this man might be useful to me - if my black dog returns. He seems quite away from me now - it is such a relief. All the colours come back into the picture."

I always thought it was a beautifully miserable notion, and it's relevance to this blog will become more clear as time passes.

More eloquent Churchill quotes in the next post, until then I look forward to exploring Blogger.com a little more and seeing who else is out there.

Thanks for reading,

Chris.