saccharine, part 4: fugue state

Posted on March 13, 2018 by qrparker

Survival is so hardwired into the earliest synapses of life that it is very normal, even healthy, to find suicide disturbing. The problem with disturbing things is that, by their very nature, we prefer not to examine them. This gives disturbing things an extraordinary power to persist in the shadows, surviving through generations, affecting vast swathes of the population in silence.

4_01

Most of the people who knew me when I was depressed did not detect a major difference in external behavior. This was partially due to the massive amount of time and planning I took to minimize depressed behavior while in public, but it is also due to the uncomfortable truth that the psychological distance between a healthy and a depressed mind is much shorter than most realize or admit.

4_01a

The most insidious aspect of depression is this:

depression feels more like a solution than a problem.

4_01b

If you break your legs, you are unlikely to see broken-leg-you as your “true” self, and will likely do everything in your power to expedite your recovery.

4_02

When you break your mind, their is an overwhelming sense that you are “seeing the truth.” That it is reality, not you, that is fundamentally broken, and those who seem happy exist only in some pathetic delusion.

4_03

There is also a cultural tendency to mythologize the depressed, with no end of historical artists and geniuses to reinforce this idea.

4_04

If I had to hypothesis why this correlation exists between depression and artistry, it would be similar to the blind-improved hearing hypothesis. That is, a blind person will often have improved hearing, not because the lose of vision improves the ability to hear, but because the person will naturally focus and be more in tune with the sense they can rely on. So then, when the cognitive, social, and emotional management section of this mind is impaired, the artistic and instinctual sections are forced to take a front seat.

4_06

The problem with viewing depression as something artistic, or normal, or honest, is that many people will allow themselves to remain depressed, keeping it a part of them like some sort of character trait.

At least, that’s what I did.

4_05

(finale next Tuesday)

saccharine, part 3: the end of the world

Posted on March 6, 2018 by qrparker

(part 2)

part 4 next Tuesday

saccharine, part 2: coffee break

Posted on February 27, 2018 by qrparker

(part 1)

I went to buy coffee today. The employee took my order and asked my name. When I give people my first name, I usually have to repeat it, so I gave him my last name, which is more common.

Sometime in High School, I became obsessed with the concept of authenticity.

At that point in life, identity feels essential, but your life experience is too limited to create something unique, so every choice is both deeply personal yet inescapably shallow.
Honestly, at that age, trying on different personalities is a natural and probably healthy development. Still, I developed a distinct mistrust for any person whom I felt was leaning too heavily into a prepackaged identity.

I thought college might offer some respite from socially-mandated roles. That was what the movies promised – a place where the social facades of high school faded away. A place where people were just people, not a collection of labels.

Perhaps I was naive.
I had always considered myself a liberal, but I simply could not relate to the identity politics which dominated the cultural narrative in liberal higher education at that time. It seemed every legitimate philosophical point had to be wrapped in a toxic, exclusionary tribalism. No idea could be trusted to stand on merit. Any challenge, no matter how minor, was treated as sacrilege to be burned and censored and excised from reality.

A clear social hierarchy began to emerge. I had genuinely believed that, within the realms of college, ideas would be valued over race, class, or gender. And to be fair, in the classrooms, they usually were. But outside the classroom, a clear social shift was occurring. The more oppressed you felt by society, the more legitimate your opinion was. You need not make the clearest argument, you only had to be offended. The more offended you were, the more seriously your opinion was taken. So of course you were now incentivized to be offended, to draw fourth and nurture as much vitriol and disgust for your ideological opponents as possible. People wanted to fight racists and bigots like in the history books, but such blatant villainy was hard to find in the modern era.

So the definitions loosened.

This may reinforce the theory of my nativity, but up until college I genuinely believed there was an intellectual consensus that skin color and gender were the least important characteristics in determining a person’s worth, and any contrary notions were historical remnants lodged in the minds of the misinformed and uneducated.

It played to me like a comic farce: large groups of people my own age, smart enough to receive a college education, demanding segregation, characterizing individuals solely based on race, and the rigid censorship of any conflicting information, regardless of factuality.

(part 3)

saccharine, part 1

Posted on February 22, 2018 by qrparker

This is me.

If it helps you relate, it can also be you.

A few years ago, I was very depressed.

Have you ever been depressed?

(part 2)

Personal Failure, Part II

Posted on December 12, 2013 by qrparker

(Click the picture below to read the first part. It’s not a requirement. You are free to make your own choices.)

Now that everyone has completed the first part of my tragedy, I feel confident in giving you the conclusion. Here it goes:

I took financial mathematics because I needed a math credit and I thought the practical application of finances would lend to a practical learning environment.

I was incorrect.

I turned in assignment after assignment with answers correct down to the decimal point, but would constantly receive zeroes on assignments for doing it the incorrect way (the way the book does it). Eight out of ten answers on the first test were correct. By my math this is an 80 percent. By his math it was a 10 percent.

After the first test was graded, about half the students dropped the class. This moment would have been perfect for me to leave this professor and his ego in the math department where it belonged. No one would blame me if I left.

Instead I took it as a challenge.

Academia had usually provided little challenge for me, and in the rare instances where I was challenged, a few dedicated study sessions pulled me out of even the most dire of situations. Hell, senior year of high school I had less than half attendance and still managed to pass all my classes. I think technically I shouldn’t have been allowed to receive credit due to my absences, but they let it slide on account of my consistently high grades (and I think it would have required paperwork they didn’t want to do.) I would have even received honors if I attended the mandatory meetings (I didn’t, and they kicked me out.) Before I took financial mathematics, I had never failed a test.

Now I’ve failed four.

By last month, I was mathematically failing this class. By this I mean that even if I were to magically receive perfect scores on every subsequent assignment and test, I would still not have enough points to pass the class. The amount of people attending the class on any given day had dropped from the initial fifty or so to about eight.

So why did I continue to stick around even when, mathematically, I had no way of succeeding?

I’ll tell you:

It’s called a grading curve.

Yes, in order not to feel like terrible teachers, sometimes educators will employ this magical device to curve the grades. F’s become C’s, B’s become A’s, and A’s stay the same because fuck you if you’re getting an A when everyone else is failing.

You see kids, if everyone is failing, than failing is the average, and an average is a C, not an F, you silly, silly children.

I chatted up the few remaining students, and most of them seemed to be failing or at least close to failing. A beautiful grading curve was inevitable.

Now, I’d like to tell you that even though I wasn’t the strongest or smartest, even though all the odds were stacked against me, I stuck it out. And because I stuck it out, working hard, studying into the wee hours of the night, turning in failed assignment after failed assignment, my god-damned determination paid off in the end.

I’d like to tell you that.

But I can’t.

Because it didn’t.

I fucking failed and I just have to live with that.

And so do you.

~Fin

Winter

Posted on November 21, 2013 by qrparker

This morning I awoke to discover my environment had been murdered by icy white particles from the sky.

I’m safe in my room, curled beneath a heavy blanket, holding a cup of instant coffee. I huddle close to my overheating laptop like it’s some futuristic fire. There is a certain serenity in the snow outside my window.

Back in middle school, when it snowed, kids would still wear shorts. Their legs never seemed cold. I shivered beneath three layers.

In high school, I drove to school on icy roads that made my wheels spin. The icy roads stretched out towards infinity, with sidegaurds so small you wonder why they even put them up. People slid off the road all the time. It was so easy to do.

It was the day I was to be confirmed into the Catholic Church. The roads were pure slick and my mother was scared. We had an old green van with worn-in tires and two-wheel drive.

I was stuffed into this ugly brown-yellow suit all boys are forced to wear to at some point in the lives. I was sick with either pneumonia or strep. All I remember was I felt like death and my lungs hurt and my face was hot. And that I really, really wanted to be confirmed.

The road grew worse as the world grew darker. My mother’s voice was terrified. I took out my rosary and began to pray, silently. I knew that if God were to choose a moment in my life to actually listen, it had to be this one.

I understood why he’d ignore a prayer for me to be thin, or for me to have friends, or for somehow one to lead into the other.

God had his reasons.

But this was different. This was about him. This was about entering his church. If there was one moment in my life where’d he choice to intervene, it should be this one.

When my mother lost control of the vehicle, everything slowed down. God made sure I saw every instant between the road and the ditch, and made sure there was nothing I could do to stop it. But I didn’t stop praying.

It wasn’t the last time I’d prayed, or even the last time I’d prayed and believed someone was listening.

But it was the last time I prayed and believed anyone cared.

I never made it to my confirmation.

~Fin

I Drop Truth-Bombs on Canada

Posted on November 19, 2013 by qrparker

I hope you’re in a shelter, because I’m about to drop some drone-bombs on the middle-east of your ignorance about Canada.

A year or so after I started college, my entire family decided it would be a great idea to move to Canada now that I was trapped in America for three years. Was this abandonment? I definitely assume so.

So off they went in a plane, and landed in the city called Burnaby, which is kind of like a suburb of Vancouver – two towns which mean nothing to be because they’re not in Real America.

When I went to help my family move into the Great White North, many stereotypes about the Canadian people were quickly dispelled. The most important one I will discuss here today.

For some reason, everyone in Real America thinks Canadians are super nice and polite. We need to stop telling them that. You know how you’re not supposed to tell kids they’re special because then they grow up thinking they’re just inherently special without doing anything of value or even being a half-decent person? That’s what we’re doing to the Canadians.

We’re allowing Canada to become a nation of self-righteous assholes, and I am NOT going to allow them to steal our thunder. So let me set the record straight right here and right now:

Canadians ARE NOT nice.

Canadians are NON-CONFRONTATIONAL.

There is a HUGE difference.

Yep. They’re not nice. They’re just as evil as all of us. The only difference is they’d rather kill themselves than insult you to your face. I hope too many innocents weren’t lost in my drone-strike of truth, but if my president is to be believed (WHICH HE IS, ALWAYS), this is unavoidable.

~Fin