Trigger Warning: This is a very genuine post that will cover some depressing topics, so read of your own volition.

Usually I like making jokes and talking about movies, but I’m very stressed and tired right now and I want to be a bit more genuine. Almost daily I find myself locked in an ongoing battle between myself and my anxiety, depression, and self-loathing. College has been an incredibly stressful and difficult experience from day one. I have, at time of writing, one semester remaining. So in fiveish months my time at the University of Minnesota – Duluth will be at an end. And I feel lost, confused, and incredibly worried. I have felt myself slip into the background of my own existence, and overall gotten maybe 20% of what I would have liked to out of my time here. This semester was meant to be my time to take charge of things and accomplish what I wanted to. I gave myself too much to do. I took on two internships, two jobs, five classes, and a blog that I’m unable to market correctly.
There has not been a day in the entirety of my time in college where I’ve gone to sleep feeling I’ve accomplished everything I wanted to. Every year the time of day my body is willing to wake up on time for class gets later and later. I used to struggle to get to class at 8:00. Back in freshman year I took a philosophy class on Existentialism and my professor told us there was nothing stopping us from walking out the door and never coming back. I never learned if that was the right decision or not because I slept through most of the other classes. Now I find myself missing my 10:00 AM classes if I don’t get enough sleep the night before. I blame it on my sleep apnea, for which I now have a CPAP machine, but really it’s because I often go to sleep at 1:00, 2:00 in the morning. I never do much of anything at that time. I always swear to myself I’m staying up to get something done, but I don’t.
Most mornings I find myself staring in the mirror blankly and sadly at a body I don’t recognize. I weigh over 100 pounds more than I did when I was in high school. The weird theater kid who talked too much about comic books has just morphed into the excessively hairy overweight dude in the corner who says something half funny that nobody laughs at and then gazes out the window hoping someone would shut him up. When I fail to get something done or find myself feeling I’ve achieved something by merely going to campus and doing nothing, I ask myself how I got here. I wonder if I’m letting everyone down or if I’m just making the same mistakes day after day because I can’t break out of the monotony. Even when I manage to get an assignment done or go to the gym, I never feel as if I’m making an actual difference, as if anything has changed.
I spend much of my time watching movies and TV, obviously, and I can only assume it’s had a negative effect. Since I was maybe twelve years old I remember thinking I could just wait for an a-ha moment, for everything to click into place, and fix whatever issue I’m currently facing quickly, in a montage. I’d love a montage, you know? It all seems so easy. You punch some chickens, you run across Philadelphia while kids chase you, you run up some stairs, and then you beat up some people in a ring. That’s how Stallone did it. Admittedly, the real Stallone allegedly also poops in showers and shoves the feces down the drain. But I’d love it if I could solve my issues that quickly. Losing weight montage. Getting a job montage. Not having to show up every day to just try and be good and happy every day. That’s the part I find the most difficult, even now. When someone asks how I’m doing and what my day was like and if I like my professors and I just want to scream incoherent noises at them and run away, because something sad happened in my life a couple years ago and this means talking to you right now is the absolute last thing I want to do.
Part of me thinks it’s seasonal depression, but it doesn’t feel seasonal anymore. This funk arrived before the snow did. Last year I shut down fully. I stopped going to class entirely. This coincided with the death of my Great-Uncle, Allen Howard Johnson. He was a very good man, a very nice person who made others happier. He also absorbed himself within fictional worlds and the lives of characters rather than living his own. He never got married. After his mom passed away he stayed in that house and surrounded himself with shelves of books and DVD’s. He retired a decade earlier than he told people he did. None of these things are necessarily bad. He lived his life the way he wanted to, and he did so comfortably. It never seemed like this is not what he wanted, or he was unhappy. He seemed to prefer fiction to reality. He was a good man, and a man I wish I had spent more time with. Several months before he passed, I had had the opportunity to reach out, to have a real genuine conversation with him. My father, who suffers from Borderline Personality Disorder and Bipolar Disorder, was in the hospital. He had tried to take his own life and almost died. I could have talked to Allen then, been honest about where I was at, but I was afraid. By the end of his life I hadn’t gotten to know him as much as I would have liked to, and that saddens me deeply.
And maybe this is a selfish train of thought, but when he passed, I found myself worrying I would one day die alone myself, comforted by nothing other than the stories I read. I don’t want that for myself. I want to explore the world, to write grand stories of my own, to find a career that makes me feel happy and fulfilled, to find a person I truly love. And the only thing holding me back is my comfort zone, my perceptions of my own reality, and my self-loathing. It just feels as if every decision, every choice, is wrong. When I look in the mirror at that hairy man I genuinely don’t know why I hate him so much. I don’t want to. I want to live without the anger and frustration I so often feel. To go through a day without wanting to punch a wall or scream into a pillow because some intrusive thought has left me shaking. To not feel like I’m a joke of some kind.
At the end of the day, though these things constantly hang over me, I am able to function. Maybe not in the way I would like, but I make do. Every day I have a choice to make. I can let the weight of my frustration overtake me, and lay in bed reliving past trauma. Or I can do my absolute best to set that aside and make a bad joke that maybe one person laughs at. To write something that truly resonates with me, something I hope someone else will enjoy. To put myself out there, outside my comfort zone, and try to feel awesome. Because that is who I am. And if I keep trying, every single day, as much as I can, one day things will be different. In the meantime I must be myself. I will write about Paul Rudd. I will see my way through to the end of college, regardless of whether I’ve gotten out of it everything I would have liked to.
And when I turn the handle on the side of the toilet in the Multicultural Center on campus and realize that was the switch for the bidet and not, as I’d suspected, the knob used to tip the toilet forward and help disabled persons slide off easier (Not a thing), I will not collapse in rage and call myself a mindless dipshit. I will laugh, shrug, and use the air dryer to dry the toilet water before I go to class. Or is it clean water separate from the toilet? It must be, right? They wouldn’t shoot dirty water up- Sorry, this happened a few months ago and I thought for some reason it was a good detail to include, but now I’m thinking this should have been a post about bidet logistics.

Okay! Phew, that was a lot, huh? Sorry if that was a massive and difficult thing to read, I’m not usually so open and genuine, I was in a funk and I needed to try something new. I hope you enjoyed that or learned something. Or both, if you’d like. Not that it wasn’t obvious I have several self-confidence issues from the title of my blog. Heh. Anyway. Please let me know if you’d like me to be more open like this in the future, or if there’s anything I should do or not do, post-wise. I may not listen to you, because it’s my blog and my own fun little way of bellowing into the abyss. But who knows? The sky’s the limit. Anything can happen.