When I was at the lowest spot in my depression I locked myself in my bedroom for three days and lied to everyone I knew. I called in sick to work. I told my mom I was seeing a doctor. I told my friends I was busy. I had successfully fooled everyone who loved me that I was making healthy changes and getting better. I wasn’t, but it was so much easier to hide and pretend that I was than to actually go outside and do something.
Depression is weird. I feel like a lot of people think depression means being sad and crying all the time but it’s the exact opposite. Depression, for me at least, was the complete and utter lack of emotion. I was so apathetic to everything that I couldn’t care if I wanted to. Sometimes I would work myself up to tears by thinking about how fucking miserable and pathetic I was, but almost as quickly as they came I was back to “what’s the point?”
Same with happiness. I could watch the cutest cat video on the whole internet and I would smile and laugh and the alarm in my brain would start screaming KITTEN ALERT EVERYBODY FREAK OUT
but as soon as it was over the power would go out and the little workers inside my head would take a vacation to the brain of someone who could sustain an emotion for longer than the average youtube video.
So there I am, laying in bed, my entire body recoiling in horror at the pitiful excuse of the mind that it’s been permanently tethered to. I start to wonder if things will ever change or if I’ll just be like this forever. I become vaguely suicidal. I don’t really want to end my life, but I wouldn’t be opposed to the idea of me suddenly ceasing to exist. So I hide in bed all day, every day, for as long as I can manage.
I wait for something. Anything. A satellite to fall through my roof and crush me in my sleep. An earthquake to part my street from the avenue that crosses it and swallow my house to the middle of Earth’s giant rumbly belly. A friend to kick down my door and drag me to the hospital or mental institution or maybe a secret underground lab where the government keeps people who don’t have feelings anymore.
Fortunately, none of that happens.
My friends eventually catch on to my shenanigans and despite their best efforts, are useless. They would try to get me out of the house almost daily but I would make up some bullshit excuse to get out of it.
Eventually, they stop trying to help me, and even though they weren’t successful before, their lack of empathy becomes my new favorite excuse.
It wasn’t their fault, of course. It was mine. They had done everything they could and I was not ready or able or willing to cooperate. Did I understand that at the time? No fucking way. Why I would take responsibility for my problems when I could just blame them on someone else?
In the early stages of my depression I would sometimes compare my affliction to The World’s Worst Roller Coaster!™
I knew that eventually I would get to the top, the ride being so emotionally exhausting that I would simply be ‘okay’ enough to not throw myself over the railing and ruin some random passerby’s day. I would instead begin the long and weary trek down the 312 steps towards sanity.
But I never reached the top.
In fact, my ascent to the peak of the coaster was so slow that renovations had already begun and construction on the rest of the track had started while I was still onboard. Nobody cared to notify me or maybe slam the big red button that says “HEY THERE’S SOME ASSHOLE STILL ON THE RIDE!”
As my depression continued, The World’s Worst Roller Coaster!™ slowly began to morph into an episode of The World’s Deadliest Train Crashes!®.
My train car began to pick up speed along the newly appointed rails. I passed through tunnels and forests and cold mountain ranges but no cities or towns or warm inviting parties filled with people I wanted to see or be around. My train was on a journey to God knows where, but it was going too fast for me to hop off or for anyone to hop on and help me.
I tried to make the best of my train ride by keeping myself busy (in my own solitary one-person train car, of course) but it only made me more lonely and depressed. No matter how many video games, books, movies, or internet memes I devoured I still couldn’t feel like I was doing anything right.
Eventually I realized my train wasn’t taking me anywhere good.
I knew I still had plenty of time before I needed to start worrying, but it was hard for me to accept the fact that the light at the end of my tunnel was actually a fallen-apart rickety wooden bridge over a 200 foot drop into freezing polar bear infested waters. I figured I would just hold on as tight as I could and pray I would survive the fiery plunge off the bridge and that maybe, just maybe, someone would pull my shivering body out of the ice-water.
You see, I had no desire to change anything. I was ready to ride my stupid train right to my death. I just didn’t care enough to save myself.
While riding my train, I spoke to a friend. She told me that I was running out of track and that she was afraid. She began to cry and told me that she wanted nothing more than for me to get off the train. She wanted me to fix my stupid brain and convince the little workers to ditch their vacation plans and come back home. She wanted me to watch cat videos that would make me laugh so hard my eyes would roll back into my head and my spine would constrict into the letter R. She wanted me to get back to blogging the way I had in the past and use it to build a name, and possibly a career, for myself. She wanted me to find love in someone who loved me back, rather than the useless people I had spent the last year chasing to no avail. She wanted the best for me. She wanted me to be good. She offered to do anything she could to make me that way.
This person had so much love for me that she was willing to do anything to help me.
I snapped.
I realized I wasn’t ready to let go.
I began to cry. I began to cry in a way that I hadn’t cried in months. I felt genuine emotion and I wanted to keep feeling it. I used to hate crying, but after weeks and months of indifference and pure concentrated lethargy, the tears felt like the best thing ever. Each salty glob was a sigh of relief. All the emotions I had repressed were leaking down my face and I didn’t know if I should smile or laugh or sob loudly. So I did all three.
I stood up in my train car and leaned over the side. I could see the bridge out at the end and I knew it was now or never. I closed my eyes and jumped feet first.
I did it! I got off the train! I didn’t explode into tiny little pieces and get devoured by polar bears! I ran back to my friend and I thanked her for saving me.
“I didn’t do anything, Rhyse. You made the decision. You got off the train.”
I was aware that I wasn’t right the whole time, but I was perfectly content to just ride it out, even though I knew it wasn’t going to end well. I had spent so long not feeling anything that I believed the first active choice I had made was all due to someone else. But it was me all along. I had made the first step to getting better.
Now I have a long walk back to civilization. My path won’t be easy. It will be a slow and arduous journey peppered with therapists, medication, and return-to-work forms, but I am ready to try, and that’s already an enormous development from the way I’ve been.
I know it’s probably weird to be reading this on my blog, especially considering this is about as much an actual ‘blog’ as cheese slices are actual cheese, but I felt it was extremely important to share my story with people who might be going through the same thing.
I am not cured of my depression and I won’t pretend that I’m perfectly okay now, but I am ready to start getting better. Knowing you’re not alone is huge. Depression weakens people by isolating them from the ones they love. Know this, if you are feeling like I felt, you are not alone. Reach out to the people who surround you, you never know who will be there to catch you.
I’ve never had something convey what depression is like more clearly than this
Promise me that youll do something today. I love you.
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WOVEN BLANKETS ROUND 2! http://www.weejapeeja.com/product/skeleton-unicorn-limited-edition-woven-blanket-by-coey-kuhn/ Thanks toWeejaPeeja I’m able to split the order on my final round of blankets and able to offer both at the same time as a final hoorah!As with the first round- both blanket variants are limited edition and once they’re gone they’re GONE! This design as a whole and any other variants will no longer be available for purchase once they are sold out. DONEZO! They’re at a higher price point that most of the stuff I offer so sorry it’s out of your budget- I just like offering specialty items at times <3 Most of my merch is super affordable though so remember to check the shop for updates. Like my new 5$ halloween enamel pins! **Last two quality photo shots are from 1st round of blankets and are just used as example. they are long sold out and no longer available. Only gold and bnw versions available** Thanks again everyone for supporting me in special projects like this!!! You help me create what I want to see in the world and that’s a wealth of gratitude I can’t express <3
The First Amendment Defense Act is the nuclear version of the so-called “religious freedom” laws that have appeared across the country, most infamously in Mike Pence’s Indiana. The Republican House will surely pass it, the Senate will pass it unless it’s filibustered by Democrats, and President-elect Trump has promised to sign it.
If it becomes law, FADA will be the worst thing to happen to women and LGBT people in a generation.
Like state “religious freedom restoration acts,” FADA’s basic principle is that it’s not discrimination when businesses discriminate against LGBT people if they have a religious reason for doing so. The most famous situations have to do with marriage: wedding cake bakers who say that if they bake a cake, they’re violating their religion; Kim Davis, the government clerk who said that signing a secular marriage certificate was a religious act that she could not perform.
But those stories are a red herring. The more important cases are ones like hospitals refusing to treat LGBT people (or their children), pharmacies refusing to fill birth control prescriptions, businesses refusing to offer health benefits to a same-sex partner, and state-funded adoption agencies refusing to place kids with gay families. Underneath the rhetorical BS, that’s what FADA is all about.
First, the bill applies to any corporation, organization, or person who “believes or acts in accordance with a religious belief or moral conviction that marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman, or that sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage.”
Notice how broad that is: any business, agency, or individual, including government employees, hospitals, or huge businesses like Hobby Lobby or Chick-Fil-A. Old-age homes and hospices that turn away gay people – yes, this has actually happened – are covered. Hospitals that refuse a same-sex partner visitation rights – covered. National hotel chains that refuse to rent rooms to gay couples (or unmarried straight ones) – covered.
And notice that it applies not just to religious beliefs about same-sex marriage, but also to sexual conduct in general. Translation: contraception, sex education, treatment of STDs – all of these are part of the bill. If a national pharmacy chain wants to refuse to fill prescriptions for the “morning after pill,” if a company wants to fire someone for being pregnant out of wedlock or becoming HIV positive, if a public school wants to stop teaching sex ed – all covered.
And finally, since “moral conviction” is added in there, it doesn’t matter that Jesus never mentioned health insurance coverage. No actual religious grounds are necessary; just some moral conviction that the only allowable sex is sex within a heterosexual marriage.
What does “covered” mean? Essentially, FADA prohibits the federal government from doing anything about any of these acts. Specifically, it lists revoking tax exempt status (as it did for Bob Jones University because of its racist policies, in the case that started the whole “religious freedom” movement) and refusing any federal grant, contract, or certification.
But then the bill adds “otherwise discriminate against such person,” which actually means anything at all, so long as the government is taking some adverse action. (“Person” includes companies and organizations, remember.) For example:
- The current government policy requiring federal contractors – 20% of the entire U.S. workforce – not to discriminate against LGBT people will be immediately revoked. Contractors can legally fire people for being gay (or transgender).
- A governor can order that, in his state, no clerk anywhere may certify a same-sex marriage, and the federal government could do nothing about it.
- If a restaurant or hotel posts a sign saying “NO FAGGOTS ALLOWED,” FADA prohibits the government from “discriminating” against it by initiating an enforcement action under public accommodations laws. Gay couples may be refused hotel rooms anywhere in the country.
- If a company refuses to let a person take time off to take care of her same-sex partner in the hospital, the government cannot pursue any action under relevant employment laws.
- If a state-funded adoption agency refuses to place children with legally married same-sex couples, the government cannot withdraw its contracts with that agency. (This was a key request by Catholic adoption agencies, which receive the bulk of their funding from the government.)
- An employee at the Department of Veterans Affairs could refuse to process a claim for survivor benefits for the same-sex spouse of a servicemember.
- All schools and universities can discriminate against LGBT people, regardless of Title IX (as long as they link that discrimination to a view about marriage, which is quite easy to do). Universities may turn away gay applicants, deny LGBT clubs, and fire all gay faculty and staff members, with no penalties from the federal government.
- Any hospital may refuse to provide contraception, reproductive health care (including consultations of any kind), or health care of any kind to unmarried people or gay people, and not lose accreditation.
- And yes, however unlikely, your boss could fire you for having (straight) premarital sex, and no federal agency could come after you.
Oh, and then there’s that third point to consider. FADA has one of the strangest “pre-emption” clauses of any bill I’ve ever seen. Normally, federal bills either pre-empt state ones, or have a “no pre-emption” clause, saying that state laws take precedence. FADA has some of each, stating that “Nothing in this Act shall be construed to preempt State law, or repeal Federal law, that is equally or more protective of free exercise of religious beliefs and moral convictions.”
In other words, if a state has a non-discrimination law against gay people, FADA supercedes it, prohibiting any federal action based on that law. But if a state has a law that protects the religious party more, FADA doesn’t supercede it.
Under that language, state level actions against anti-gay corporations, organizations, and individuals would not be prohibited – but the federal government could offer no assistance, and indeed could not do anything at all, even if the anti-gay party is in clear violation of state law. In other words, states with more protections for women or LGBT people – you’re on your own out there.
Overall, FADA makes LGBTs officially second-class citizens of the United States – more like those in anti-gay countries like Putin’s Russia. We may be fired, barred from entry, denied services, denied health care, denied education, and denied legitimacy in ways that straight married people (and probably most straight unmarried people) do not. My fully legal marriage isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on, because no one anywhere has to respect it, not even a government employee.
As you can see, FADA effectively overturns Obergefell without anyone having to file a lawsuit, because it creates a loophole as large as the right to marry itself. Any governor, mayor, or clerk could proffer a “moral objection” to same-sex marriage, and stop all employees under his or her authority from registering gay couples or certifying gay weddings. And even absent such action, any employer or business can act as though the marriage simply does not exist.
But FADA goes much further than marriage. It attacks unmarried women, who may be denied health care by state hospitals, employers, and insurance companies. It makes it impossible for the federal government to do anything in a host of discriminatory situations. It turns back the clock not just two years, to before Obergefell, but twenty years, to a time when simply being gay was criminal.
And it has the support of the House, the Senate, and the President-Elect.
everyone who posted/tweeted ‘we survived reagan’ can go fuck themselves
me: god my entire life is a disaster im such a mess holy shit im gonan fuckign lose it
me, literally 3 minutes afterwards: I feel so good today!! I’m just so happy that things are going well in my life and that I’m not stressed out or anything.
