This post is a long time in the making. I’ve been dreaming this blog into existence for around a year now, but have struggled to find the time and energy to make it happen. I graduated from a Master’s program in May, and set up the site’s layout soon after, but felt a heavy inertia to dedicate myself to penning a real opening post. A lot of pressure built up in my fingers and my mind when sitting down to write any sort of introduction, as I’m doing now, because I wanted perfection. At night, before my Trazodone sleep aid kicks in and sends me to a world of stress dreams, my mind races with the perfect words to say, and I write four or five posts in my head in my fifteen minutes of drowsy pre-slumber. And then I wake up, and I lay in bed for 1-4 hours on my phone reading articles, and then I watch reality TV and make a frozen burrito, and I pet my cat a lot, and maybe at some point I leave my house to run around the corner to get junk food, and the inertia is real again. I pop my Lexapro to make my anxiety nausea go away. I try to feel motivated to do things and feel guilty when I don't. And then I lie to my friends when they want to hang out because I don’t want to leave my house and I don’t want to invite them into my often disgusting apartment, or I force myself to go be social, which generally ends up being fun after all, but often drains me of all my energy. And then it’s night time and everything in this cycle happens all over again.
I think I have always been depressed, but throughout my life it has manifested itself in different ways. In high school, I slept until 2PM on the weekends, I rarely saw friends, and I rarely left my room. In freshman year I had a fairly substantial friend group, and by senior year I had very few people in my corner. I think back to this time a lot, when I denied my depression as something I was going through just because I was a teenager, and because teens, according to everyone, are moody people. (Now, at 24, I'm just emotional, because women, according to everyone, are dramatic and emotional people.)
My depression in college worked fairly differently. For one, I was always surrounded by friends, and was always motivated to be social. There were very few weekends when I wasn't out at parties on both Friday and Saturday nights, ruining my shoes on sticky, sweaty floors. Keeping myself as busy as possible, I held as many as three jobs at once, took between 17-21 credits each semester, and ran a 300 person club. At night, my unmedicated but sometimes self-medicated brain would struggle to decompress from all the things. A lot of the time I just fell asleep in my clothes and makeup, computer on, homework still out, waking up at 4am with all my lights on to stumble into the bathroom and brush my teeth.
I knew that, in college, I was feeling pretty fucked up and numb, and doing everything and seeing everyone was a way to ignore that. I didn't want to feel but I also didn't necessarily like how it felt to not feel. But if I wasn’t sedentary, I didn’t need to focus on any of that -- on trauma or pain or regret or shame. On numbness and emptiness and loneliness and blankness. If I was strong and busy and brave, everyone would think I was fine, and I would be fine.
And then I burnt out. I graduated college and went directly into a Master’s program. And now I feel like a piece of burnt toast in the garbage.
The past two years have been extremely difficult. My depression turned into something scary, something I couldn’t control. How I treated myself in undergrad was not healthy, but I wasn’t teetering on this edge I couldn’t step back from. In grad school, though, my feelings scared me. I felt like that lonely highschooler again, who sat in her bedroom in sweatpants all day, but now with the responsibility of bills and careers trajectories and being a real adult person-- including the pressure of feeling like I was failing at all of it.
What scared me more was how my feelings scared my partner, which is what prompted me to actually name what was happening inside my brain. Being numb sucks, because you don’t feel anything, but also, you don’t feel anything. These past two years, I felt everything. And feeling everything so much all the time is not something I knew how to deal with (and still don’t). Pushing my feelings away and ignoring them has always been my thing. Putting on a mean face and walking around like a badass bitch scowling at the world kept me safe, to some extent. But I was also surrounded by a radical group of other badass babes who were affirming and validating. In grad school, it was just me and my partner. It took me awhile to reach out to colleagues and realize everyone was also fucking miserable but just pretending they were fine. I felt so incredibly isolated. Even though I now have a few people in my corner, I still do.
The past two years have been extremely difficult. My depression turned into something scary, something I couldn’t control. How I treated myself in undergrad was not healthy, but I wasn’t teetering on this edge I couldn’t step back from. In grad school, though, my feelings scared me. I felt like that lonely highschooler again, who sat in her bedroom in sweatpants all day, but now with the responsibility of bills and careers trajectories and being a real adult person-- including the pressure of feeling like I was failing at all of it.
What scared me more was how my feelings scared my partner, which is what prompted me to actually name what was happening inside my brain. Being numb sucks, because you don’t feel anything, but also, you don’t feel anything. These past two years, I felt everything. And feeling everything so much all the time is not something I knew how to deal with (and still don’t). Pushing my feelings away and ignoring them has always been my thing. Putting on a mean face and walking around like a badass bitch scowling at the world kept me safe, to some extent. But I was also surrounded by a radical group of other badass babes who were affirming and validating. In grad school, it was just me and my partner. It took me awhile to reach out to colleagues and realize everyone was also fucking miserable but just pretending they were fine. I felt so incredibly isolated. Even though I now have a few people in my corner, I still do.
This summer post-grad school has been one of healing. It’s been a time to put myself back together, mostly by laying in bed for most of the day and watching reruns of Hell's Kitchen or playing Fallout 4 in my armchair the rest of the day. It’s been a time to remember who I was before I was crying for an hour in my partner’s arms every other night. It’s a time to try to gain my energy back, to work on telling my feelings to fuck off and chill tf out, to talk openly and honestly with people about my headspace, and to listen to my needs. And, it’s a time to make art.
In my junior year of college, I un-numbed myself by starting a band and writing songs about sexual assault. Nobody knew that they were about that, but it was fine, because they healed me anyway. Making something beautiful out of pain was exhilarating. It was very hard to share and process those emotions, but it was also incredibly rejuvenating. It's crucial that I don't forget all of the ways in which I am so creative, and all of the ways in which my creativity is self-care. I want to make music again, but I also want to write for fun again. This isn’t something I’ve done for myself in a very long time.
In grad school, I had an incredible teaching load of 2 classes of 24 students per semester as a composition instructor. Sometimes I would spend 12 hours a week meeting with each student face to face, plus extra hours making up meetings for students who missed their appointments. I would read 150+ pieces of writing some weeks in checking my students' homework. I was paid $11,500 a year for this work. Part of that time, I was on food stamps. Hey, at least my Master's degree was free, but at what cost to my body and mind?
If it's not clear by this description, my grad program stretched me thin. It took time away from my own writing, my sharp pop culture media analyses through an intersectional feminist lens. My research, which has always brought me joy, most definitely suffered. Because it was impossible to complete all of my responsibilities for my graduate seminars, my thesis project, and my teaching load, and still have time to eat and sleep and talk to my partner, I felt like a horrible failure of a person who couldn't do anything right. Soon, I began to loathe thinking about my own writing and research. :(
“Inside My Brain” is a project of renewal. It’s a work I’m undertaking to remind myself why I want/need/like to write. It’s a revitalization project for myself. It’s validation that the feelings I have upon graduating from a demanding and exploitative academic program are real and important. It’s a project to verbalize those feelings and interrogate what burnout is as well as what causes it. It’s a reminder that the work I once loved does not need to drain my soul and stress my mind and body. It’s a space for reflecting upon the ways I haven’t been kind to myself, because I haven’t had the time. It’s a celebration of the ways I struggled to be kind and patient with myself even though I didn’t have the time. It’s a way to remember that my downward emotional spiral was real and fucking terrifying. It’s an acknowledgement of the ways I clawed myself out of isolation and asked for support. It’s the perseverance of further seeking help and support even when confronted with unsupportive people in toxic spaces. It’s my own corner to vent about these things, as well as to focus on the writing I’m actually trained to do and genuinely enjoy pursuing. It’s my comeback. It’s my possibilities. It’s my voice.
You’re welcome to join me on the ride, because this is the internet, so everybody’s fucking invited. But please be kind.