Just kind of stumbling through life, awake, but never fully conscious. Lost in a haze of boredom, sadness, and apathy. Resentfully lonely. I try to connect with people. I really do. But the second I suggest hanging out or planning an event, the contact stops. The texts cease. The comments go unanswered. And the people that do reach to me only do so because they feel bad or obligated. Because somebody told them to. Maybe some people are oblivious, Maybe they just plain don’t care. They think I’m whiny and see me as a burden. Well here is the announcement: I’M HURTING.

Mentally, emotionally, physically. It all hurts. I don’t know why. It’s not just a matter of me “perking up” or “looking on the bright side”. And if the words “look to God” come outta your mouth I’ll punch you in it. There’s something wrong in my brain. Something that made me so drained and apathetic I cut into my own flesh with a 9-inch Ka-Bar just to feel something, even if it was pain. I can look at the raised line of scar tissue on my arm, all straight and pink, and I can remember feeling something other than shame, frustration, and loneliness. The cat stopped me from doing any more damage. She came in her quiet way, put a paw on my arm as if to say, “That’s enough.” Seems dumb. But that’s how it happened.

I guess what I’m saying is that I need people. I need people to talk to. Not just a quick, forced exchange at 1 in the morning over Facebook chat. I need someone to say, “Hey, I’m coming over on X day. Be ready for me.” I need people to mean it when they say “We need to hang out.” Not just say it then ignore my text when I ask you when.

I need people because I lost people. Cut them out. Deleted a bunch of family members off all the social media sites. Even blocked a few. Haven;t talked to my mother in a year. Never had a close relationship with my dad, or his side of the family. Just blackballed my brother in a fit of spite. I can’t deal with it. I can;t deal with being told “You need to…” one more time. I can’t deal with the emotional blackmail or the mental manipulation. The fake smiles and the superficial conversations.

But I’m rambling now. I just want to feel okay. Not happy. Just okay. I want to want to be alive. I’m hurting.

TL;DR: I’m depressed. I cut myself. I want to die.Please send help.

I am so afraid of trying and failing… So I never try at all…

I just want someone to tell my secrets to.

I recently began this new journey towards a happier me. This involved quitting my job and working in earnest towards a career in writing and content creation. My new chapter also involves a healthier me.

This is what I look like now. I’m not obese, but I’m a pale flabby lump. Hours of Call of Duty and Minecraft have not been kind to my once chiseled physique. So, today I took the first steps and began working out. It wasn’t much, but I plan on gradual increments.

• Pushups 3 x 10
• Squats 3 x 12
• Front Planks 1min.
• Bycicles 1min.

Tomorrow I plan on adding another set of pushups and squats. And in addition to the front planks, add some side planks.I tried burpees but my downstairs neighbor decided he didn’t like that. I know I have some hardcore workout friends on here. Any suggestions?

I got a typewriter from my grandpa. Not sure what I’m going to do with it.

       So, don’t tell my bosses at the warehouse… But I’m quitting my job. I’m saying goodbye to the dental supply business and starting a new chapter in my life. If all goes according to plan, March 29th will be my last day at my current job. And before you ask: No, I don’t have anything lined up after it. I don’t already have a cool new job waiting for me to jump ship to. I will for all intents and purposes be unemployed. Luckily, my girlfriend is amaze-balls.

       After my last post about Depression Quest I vowed to take my life back from my depression. This meant cutting out all the crap that triggers my Down Days. One of the biggest triggers is my day job at a dental supply warehouse. I cannot begin to tell you how many times an up-beat day has spiraled into me standing over the bathroom sink halfway through my shift, sobbing, trying to convince myself in the mirror that I can’t just walk out and quit. So, after a talk with my aforementioned amaze-balls girlfriend, we agreed that the best thing for me to do would be to quit and focus on my writing.

       Luckily, we are in a position financially for us to take this sort of gamble. Going from two incomes to one is going to be a bit difficult at first, but we’ve been through time when we went from two incomes to none and came better on the other side of it.

       Essentially this post sort of a Watch This Space of sorts. I’m planning on uploading a lot more content starting very soon. Blogs, short stories, and the like. If you’re one of the three people that actually read this thing, let me know what you’d be interested in seeing. Also, if you don’t have a Tumblr but got linked here from Facebook or Twitter, let me know that you’ve at the very least been here. It helps a lot with combating the malaise that comes with my depression. If I know people are reading my stuff, I’ll be more inclined to post more stuff!

Or: How a Text Based Indie Game Changed my Life

I suffer from depression. It is a mental illness that at best leaves me lethargic and unmotivated. At worst, it makes me contemplate jumping off a bridge, wondering if anyone would even come to my funeral. Depression isn’t something I can easily talk about without feeling embarrassed or ashamed. It’s hard to put into words what depression is like. Most of the time I feel that I sound whiny or lazy when describing it. Which, in turn, makes me feel even more ashamed and then angry at myself, and then more depressed.

Yesterday, my girlfriend and I got into a fight over my depression. I was having one of what we call my “Down Days”. These are some of the days the illness is the most severe. There are “Up Days” too. But “Up Days” are relative. Even an “Up Day” can be pretty bad. Some of the worst “Up Days” usually turn into “Down Days”. Yesterday was like that.

After we fought and made up, I put my girlfriend to bed. Then I settled myself in front of our little POS Toshiba laptop. Normally after we have a disagreement I feel fatigued and drained. But a fight on a Down Day leaves me completely demoralized. I was wracked with guilt and self-loathing over everything we fought about and it was obvious I wasn’t going to bed anytime soon. After refreshing both my Facebook and Twitter feeds for forty-five minutes and scrolling through all the Tumblr posts I’d missed this weekend I found myself and hour on the wrong side of midnight and no closer to sleep.

Then as I was going over my Twitter feed for the fifth time, I was reminded that an indie game developer I follow had just completed and released a game about depression. The game, called Depression Quest, had been stirring up quite a bit of commotion since it was released on Valentine’s Day. I figured I had nothing to lose, dropped five bucks on the game and jumped in. (The game works on a donation system. You can choose to pay any amount for it, even $0.)

Depression Quest is a text based choose your own adventure type game. You are put in the shoes of a depressed twenty-something and presented with various scenarios and interactions. These can range from being invited out for drinks with coworkers to having your mother drop by unexpectedly. Then you choose from a list of possible responses to the scenario. The game simply asks you to manage our depression from scenario to scenario. If your depression worsens certain more balanced or level responses become unavailable to you in subsequent scenarios. This game is far from fun or entertaining.

I cried almost the entire time I played Depression Quest. A twenty-five year old man sitting hunched over his laptop openly weeping in the phosphorescent glow of the screen. From the very first scenario it seemed like Zoe Quinn, Patrick Lindsey, and Isaac Schankler had hidden cameras in my apartment and made a game about my life. Everything from trying and failing to get after work projects off the ground to trying to discuss your depression with a parent that outright does not understand you or the nature of the disease. Every word was like a punch to the diaphragm.

Not only were the scenarios all too familiar. Depression Quest’s description of the symptoms and feelings that come along with the disease is the most poignantly accurate depiction of depression I have ever read. Zoe, Patrick, and Isaac didn’t merely stop at spying on me. They were in my head. They knew every ounce of my anguish, my sadness, my embarrassment. And then they laid it all out on a page in a way I had never dreamed possible.

So now I ask you. If you are, or know anyone affected by depression, please go to DepressionQuest.com and spend a few minutes of your day playing this game. It won’t be pleasant or fun. But at the very least you will know how people with depression can suffer in silence for years. And at the most you will learn that there are people just like you, who go through the same pain and anguish on a daily basis. You are not alone. You can get help. Just like I am going to get help.

            I’m really tired of sitting around this house doing nothing all day. I never write. I don’t feel like playing video games. I just sit on the computer either masturbating or staring at funny pictures of stuff. I want to be able to do something. I want a passion. I used to think that was writing. But now I don’t know anymore. The idea of writing a story is so daunting and huge. And the pressure to make it actually good! I hardly ever get past the first few sentences before I’m like “Alright. This is crap.” And then I delete it and go look at more porn. And if I never do get past the first paragraph by some miracle, I usually leave it unfinished, hinging at some critical moment. When I do get back to whatever piece months later, it is so alien and foreign to me that I can’t bring myself to finish it. I need to create though. I need to share the ideas! These billions upon billions of ideas and microconversations and little scenes that play out in my head on a constant basis. They need to be outside. Outside of this flesh and bone prison they’re housed in! But they’re so jumbled and disorganized. And I also think I suck. It takes me hours to write just TWO PAGES! Because I’m constantly going back and slaving over sentence structure and description and whether o not that character would really do or say that thing they just did/said. I don’t want to be a hack. I don’t want to write something. To put my heart and soul into it and have people tell me it’s shit. I know it’s shit. I wrote it. Even now, on a freewrite exercise, I am going back and EDITING in my head what I’ve written here. Trying to fix little errors and changing words for batter connotation. UGH! I just need to sit down and get the junk out of my head. Like a blacksmith smelting steel. I just need to smelt down all my ideas. To burn off all the slag and impurities that cloud my mind. But that’s so hard to do from inside this stupid little apartment with no one to talk to. Everybody lives so far away. And nobody ever has any money to do anything. The Xbox can’t be my only link to the outside world. I can’t just sit and play minecraft with teenagers everyday. I have to go and interact. To laugh and joke and discuss. I have to get the junk out. I have to have somebody tell me that I’m not a bastard for being annoyed with my girlfriend. I have to have someone reassure me that I’m not crazy sometimes. I have to have somebody to bitch at about how my relationship with my overbearing mother ruined my adulthood. I have to have someone to laugh with. Someone to cry with. Not just these for walls and the cat loafing at my feet. Right now it is six ‘o’clock on a Sunday night. And I’m thoroughly convinced that I’m going insane.

            Blu rounded the corner at full speed, running for his life. The shouts of the soldiers behind him grew closer. It wouldn’t be much longer before they caught up. He was wearing down. It had been ages since he had this much physical activity. His lungs ached; his muscles screamed. He promised himself that if he made it out of here alive he would run an hour every day. Maybe even two hours!

            Rounding another corner he racked his brains for an escape route. There had to be some way out of this subterranean labyrinth of tunnels and passages. How embarrassing would it be to die in the maze that you built, he thought to himself. But it had been a long time since he had walked these halls. And they all looked the same. Grey stone walls, worked stone floors and ceilings, torches every four meters; it had all been designed this way to confuse and bewilder intruders. Only now it was working against him.

            He came to a junction at the end of a corridor. A pair of wooden signs stood affixed to the wall. This was the first indication that any of these tunnels lead anywhere. To the left was the “Bedrock Garden” and to the right were the “Upper Mines”. He vaguely remembered that the bedrock garden was a dead end. But the upper mines were a mostly unexplored system of caves. They were dark, and probably teeming with monsters.  More angry shouts from down the corridor behind him reminded Blu that he didn’t have much time to weigh his options. Immediately he broke to the right.

            After a few more meters the corridor lead to the base of some stairs. From what he could remember they were cut directly into the stone and lead straight up to the start of the cave system above. As he began his ascent Blu noticed something odd. Every other step was a slab of oak wood as was his usual building habit. He thought it complimented the stone and made the climb easier than a steeper set of traditional stairs. But that wasn’t the odd part. The wood should be there, but it shouldn’t look so old. The signs he had passed earlier as well. He remembered putting those signs up not more than five years before. And while that may be enough time to forget the layout of one of the many structures you’ve built, it wasn’t enough time for wood to decay like that. Especially wood that had been worked and treated specifically to resist aging.

            Something strange was going on. But Blu didn’t have long to ponder it. Out of the incoherent rabble behind him came a clear and deliberate call.

            “Give it up Blu! Just stop running and give us what we want!” The voice came from a few stair levels below.

            Blu immediately recognized it. But once again it had been nearly five years since he had heard it. Rowtag Byrne. But there was no way! Now things were passed the realm of odd and encroaching dangerously close to the territory of mind bendingly impossible.

            Once he reached the top of the stairs Blu bolted straight ahead. And stopped dead in his tracks. Not more than a few meters from the top of the stairs the corridor gave way to a massive chasm. Thirty meters across and nearly twice as deep, it opened before him like a giant maw ready to devour anything and everything that was unlucky enough to cross its path. It spanned for at least half a kilometer in either direction. On the far side, he could make out the continuation of the corridor. No way could he get over there. Even if he could build his way across, he didn’t have the materials. And where had this thing come from anyway? It hadn’t been here only a few years before. If memory served him, this corridor went straight on, uninterrupted save for a small underground stream that he had dammed up to make a pond. Welcome to mind bendingly impossible.

            He turned around and thought about his options. There was no going back down the stairs. In mere moments Byrne and the rest of the soldiers would be upon him. He could try and descend deeper into the chasm. There were ledges every few meters all the way down to the bottom. But that was too risky. He could misjudge a leap, or slip and fall. Even worse, there could be monsters down there. Blu shuddered at the thought of a zombie’s claws at his throat, or a giant cave spider’s dripping fangs coming for his skin.

            Then it struck him. Whenever he explored an undiscovered cave system, he built a safe room near its entrance. They were made of reinforced stone brick and had iron doors to ward off monsters. Perfect spot to buy him a little time. But where was it? He remembered it distinctly being before the pond but after the stairs. Desperately, he began clawing at the wall of gravel to his right. Sure enough, as he dug out the gravel, throwing it over the side of the chasm, a door began to appear. Only a little more and the door was clear. He leapt through, throwing the switch on the wall, closing the door with a resounding THUD. Immediately after, there were voices in the corridor.

            “You can’t hide in there forever, Blu!” Byrne shouted through the door. “Just give us the compass!”

            Blu sighed. He reached into the shoulder bag hanging at his side. After a moment of rummaging he produced a small iron compass. The little needle spun around wildly. On the back was an inscription:

Bestowed upon: Blu D’jin

By her Ladyship Hermera, Queen of the Aether

“Nossuntarchitectinostrafutura.”

            It seemed silly that they would want this. He had been so confused when he ran into them on one of the lower levels and they immediately gave chase demanding it. He didn’t have long to ponder it though. The sound of metal on stone jarred him from his thoughts. They were going to dig through the wall.

            Blu scanned the room. Though he didn’t know why they wanted it, he couldn’t let them have the compass. The safe room was pretty barren. The remains of an old chest rested against the wall. The wooden sides of it having long ago rotted away. Built into the wall opposite the door were a line of smelting furnaces. The wall to his left played host to the room’s lone torch, doing its best to illuminate the room. On the opposite wall he found something curious.

            In the middle of the smooth stone brick was a patch of scintillating blue. It was a panel of compressed Lapis Lazuli, a bright azure mineral normally used as a dye. Quite rare except for deep in the earth. If you had enough of it, you could compress the normally brittle mineral into blocks that sparkled bright blue. Many crafters Blu knew used it as a decoration to accent their architecture. But Blu used it for another purpose.

            In the rotted remains of the chest, Blu found a small stone button mechanism. Without hesitation he placed it against the Lapis panel. When he removed his hand the button remained, as if it and the panel had never been separate. He pressed the button. There was a faint click then a whooshing sound. A panel of stone at the base of the wall before him slid back, revealing another chest. Only this chest was in pristine condition. Comprised of pure obsidian, it hummed slightly, radiating a faint purple energy.

            Quickly, Blu threw the compass in the chest, closed the hidden cubby, and detached the button from the wall. He had just thrown the button into one of the furnaces when the wall next to the door crumbled and gave way. A very angry looking man in chain armor, wielding a diamond headed pick axe, stood in the resulting breach. Two seconds later six more soldiers had filed in and Blu found himself pressed face first into the row of furnaces.

            “Give us the compass, D’jin.” Byrne demanded.

            “Why do you want it so badly?” Blu asked. “It’s no good to you. It only works in the Aether.”

            “I’m aware of that fact. And that’s exactly why I need it.” Byrne replied. “Now, hand it over.”

            “I don’t have it.” Blu said.

            “Excuse me?”

            “Do you have dirt in your ear?” Blu responded defiantly. “I said I don’t have it.”

            Suddenly, Blu was flipped around. Before he could even look into Byrne’s eyes, the young captive received a metal gauntlet to the gut. Then another. The wind was knocked right out of him. His legs crumpled. Instead of falling to the floor, Blu hung limp by the arms between two of the larger shoulders.

            “Now you listen to me you little whelp.” Byrne drew close to Blu, speaking directly into the latter’s ear. “You know as well as I do that if I reach into that little bag of yours I’m going to pull out nothing but a big handful of air. Now you can do it, and give me your compass, or I can just gut you like a fish and sift through the contents after they spill out when you die.”

            Blu looked up. He looked straight into Byrne’s eyes. The eyes of a man he had grown up with far, far away from this little room, deep under the earth on the brink of a dark chasm. They had mined and crafted and built together as children. They had played and frolicked under warm sun, huddled together during the cold nights. Now that boy he had known all those years ago stood before him, ready to kill Blu over a bit of metal.

            “Why are you doing this Rowtag?” Blu coughed. “We grew up together.”

            “That was a long time ago Blu. The world we grew up on doesn’t exist anymore. The people we were then don’t exist anymore.” Byrne replied.

            “Sir.” One of the soldiers interrupted. “I found something.”

            The soldier reached his hand into the furnace on the far left of the row and pulled out the little stone button. Byrne grabbed it out of the man’s hands.

            “You know, Blu,” Byrne began, turning the button over in his hands, “I used to know a little boy who loved playing with redstone contraptions. Intricate mine cart tracks, traps and pitfalls… And he had such an affinity for hidden passages and chambers. His builds were just riddled with them. And he always used Lapis as the trigger block for all these little mechanisms. I suppose that little boy is all grown up now. I wonder if he’s changed his building habits?”

            Blu could only sputter in horror as Byrne affixed the little button to the Lapis panel. With a malicious smile, Byrne gave the button a press. The hidden panel at the base of the wall slid open revealing the glowing obsidian chest.

            “What do we have here?” Byrne feigned surprise.

            One of the soldiers knelt down and opened the chest. After a second of rummaging he looked back at Byrne and shrugged.

            “Nothing here.” The man said.

            “What!?” Byrne shouted. “Get out of the way!”

            Byrne thrust his hands into the chest and searched around frantically. He too came up with nothing.

            “What kind of trick is this, D’jin?” Byrne grabbed Blu by the front of the shirt. “Where did you put the compass?”

            “I used to know this little boy Rowtag.” Blu replied smugly. “He was the sloppiest builder.  He always took too many risks. Like leaving an open wall right next to a dark chasm where monsters were guaranteed to be hiding.”

            Before any of the soldiers could raise an eyebrow at Blu’s bold remark, they were distracted by a sudden loud hissing coming from the gap in the wall next to the door. They all recoiled in horror as a large, mobile clump of moss and cave debris charged into the room. No one had a chance to scream before the creeper exploded, destroying the room and killing them all.

itmustbehalloweeninthesea asked: Just like ol times!!!

Pretty much! Except less whining about girls and my parents and more actual writing! ha ha