2016 in Review · 4:21am Jan 1st, 2017
Well, that sucked.
Okay, in fairness, I get why a lot of people hate how cliched it's become to call this last trip around the sun the totally worst one, like, ever, you guys. For one thing, it does nobody any good to be negative and cynical about stuff (and more importantly it makes you a really sucky party guest), and on top of that there were plenty of positives to take from the last fifty-two-ish weeks. 2016 saw incredible progress in the thawing of relations between the United States and Cuba, increased resilience within the international medical community in the face of the Zika virus, discovery of the gene responsible for ALS (out of all outcomes, who predicted the Ice Bucket Challenge actually working?), and a ton of other achievements in science and tech. On a less worldly note, we had a slew of great movies (from Arrival to Zootopia), the continuance of TV's Golden Age (Game of Thrones, Westworld, Game of Thrones, Stranger Things, holy shit Game of Thrones tho), and The Last Guardian actually came out and apparently wasn't that bad.
And lest we forget (read as: I swear on my honor as resident asshole jock here to never let any of you forget), this was arguably the greatest year for sports ever. Leicester City won the Premier League, the Cleveland Cavaliers won the NBA Finals in one of the best Game 7s ever played, and the Chicago goddamn Cubs won the World Series in one of the other best Game 7s ever. In the midst of all that, we had a Summer Olympics in which Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt cemented their GOAT-worthy legacies, a European Championship as full of great stories (see: Iceland's amazing QF run, Hungary's sweatpants-wearing keeper, Portugal drunkenly stumbling their way to winning it all) as it was of England Englanding harder than England has ever Englanded before (see: Harry Kane taking corners, Harry Kane continuing to take corners after everyone saw his first attempt, England as a general soccer/footballing concept).
Oh yeah, and there was that whole thing where Tottenham got their shit pushed in to the tune of a 5-1 scoreline by already-relegated Newcastle, a result which gifted Arsenal yet another finish ahead of them in the final table because St. Totteringham's Day resides in the "death and taxes" bracket of cosmic inevitabilities. That was fun too.
But it's with foreknowledge of and appreciation for all that cool stuff listed above that I maintain what I said at the start of this blog. For me personally, 2016 (plus the last half of 2015, technically) was wholesale the worst period of my life thus far. I've touched on my recent struggles in brief and/or vague terms here before, but it occurs to me now--as this astronomically bound existential nightmare technically draws to a close--that I haven't yet really talked about it yet in a forum so public as this. However, I did cover the real juicy portion of it at length in writing elsewhere, in the form of a final assignment for one of my last undergraduate classes in May. So, since I think I did well explaining things in that instance and also because I'm lazy/there's college football on, here's the (minimally annotated) reason this calendar year's been pretty hellish I'm unironically thrilled to be rid of this calendar year.
Over the course of the past six months [as of May 2016], I tried to kill myself four separate times. In the year preceding that, I experienced several episodes of suicidal ideation and depression, broke off a relationship four and a half years in the making, and less than a week after received a message from my former partner insinuating that my desire to self-harm meant I was inherently selfish and didn’t love her enough to deserve her. In early April of this year, I missed six consecutive days of classes due to what the Dean’s Office phrased as a medical emergency requiring hospitalization, and what was actually a voluntary admission to the crisis center at [local hospital] that resulted in involuntary detention for thirty-six hours in a psych ward in [a different city from both the hospital and my school]. There are politer words for what this year has been for me, but none of them are the most accurate one, which is four letters long and pronounced “H-E-double-hockey-sticks” by those of us who still get recess instead of smoke breaks.
Much like a tapeworm or an ex-girlfriend with—so my therapist tells me—an undiagnosed borderline personality, depression is a parasite. The popular narrative would infer that it feeds on sadness, and much like most things the popular narrative believes, that’s sort of right if you skimmed the proverbial Wikipedia article. What it really consumes is everything: sadness, joy, anger, lust. In fairness, going without the last one’s not a total disaster during exam season and the like, but in general “all of them” is not the ideal option for “how many things I feel irreversibly drained of today”. But so depression so often goes: silent and subtle, yet often deadly.
To continue bastardizing Vonnegut, nothing was beautiful and everything hurt. For the first three months of this semester, I hid it pretty well—starting on anti-depressants in January brought my baseline up from the fog I waded through for most of the fall semester, and a Microsoft-sponsored regimen of Destiny and FIFA melted what bits of my brain hadn’t yet been chewed through. In the meantime, I went to classes and kept up appearances, as much for my own sake as anyone else’s. In place of run-of-the-mill happy thoughts, there’s a lot to be said for faking it until your head just throws the towel in on getting you to shut up.
Starved for outright deference to them, my depressive thoughts got devious. Attendance, ultimately, is rote—it’s easy to show up to a class and fill a seat, maybe even take some notes and participate in discussions, but my capacity for normalcy ended there. Resilience in the face of depression is like England in the face of Nazi Germany: there’s a sinking feeling that you should be doing something more concrete about that problem, but it’s not bad now and a passive stalemate is better than all-out war.
Instead of explicit self-harm, I settled for a cognitive ceasefire. I got to go without active thoughts of killing myself, and in return received nothing else to fill the space with. In response to topics and speakers that at other times would’ve fascinated and inspired me, I had an all-encompassing assortment of nothing: no connections, no good feelings or bad, no words to write about them. In a way, sociopathy would’ve been something of an improvement: devoid of outright concern for anything else, I probably at least would’ve cared about myself.
Gaming the system remained as simple as ever. A slate of case studies and presentations passed without incident, and job applications were filled and—in keeping with industry standards—for the most part summarily ignored. By all objective accounts, I was a functioning senior on the cusp of graduation, and thinking about anything subjective within that process was what got me up on a desk in October with a bedsheet tied around my neck. So I didn’t think. I didn’t feel, or strive for, or engage in anything. I maintained. I survived.
Hell is not, as the saying goes, other people; it’s being surrounded by people and not being one yourself. In retrospect, I’m sure it was obvious. My friends certainly noticed something was off, and have thankfully said as much when given the opportunity. My family has been with me every step of the way, even as they tried to figure out what being with me should even entail. I bonded with classmates over the oddest things: Leicester City’s 5000-to-1 Premier League title run, a rekindled friendship from high school—bolstered, as fate would have it, by my ex-girlfriend’s continued social dysfunction—and a vibrant discussion over lunch of the ills of capitalist society. In fits and spurts, the person I was before all this resurfaced. Day by day, the stalemate persisted.
And then the fight ended the way most do: all at once, and against the run of play. After an interview day with a [local city closest to where my parents live]-area company ended without a job offer, a few unprompted offerings of support was all it took for my mind’s internal alliance to shatter. I became convinced that I was a burden, that everyone could see through the act and agonized over the effort of maintaining their own for my sake. It’s impossible to impress rock bottom upon someone who’s never been there, so it will suffice to say that I hope you’ll never understand it, or how those twenty-four hours in April ended with me in a mental hospital instead of an email from [the Dean of Students] adding me to the College’s most iconic, infamous list. The rest is history, and ideally won’t be repeated.
(And then, in a couple different ways, it was. Go figure.)
Thankfully, things haven't approached that illustrious peak since. I got a bit frazzled over graduation weekend, rocketed 90 degrees downhill on a cruise ship in June (fun fact: the middle of the Atlantic Ocean with no cell reception is a really bad place to reeeeeally need to talk to your therapist), and then, uh... then November 8th happened. Let's say--kindly--I haven't been taking that as well as I could be, although (baby steps, y'know) it's not me I'm upset with so much as my country as a united entity and humanity as an ideological whole. To make a long and overly complex story short, I relish intellectual political discussions and have been fortunate to engage in many with members of my family, and this entire election cycle not only was the antithesis of intellectual thought and good-natured communication on both sides of the ball, but concluded with someone paramountly and proudly unintelligent set to assume the presidency in three weeks. Call it liberal tears or semi-autistic impotent rage, but my ass has been thoroughly chapped since Election Day and shows little sign of softening back up given literally (I am not even slightly kidding) every word out of the President-Elect's mouth.
So the question stands: where do we (and I, for that matter) go from here?
I guess we just keep going. I mean, I'm tapped out of other ideas, to be honest. In my personal case, 2016 was a shooting gallery of events spaced out every couple of months that shook me deep and threw off every bit of progress I'd made rebuilding my productivity in terms of writing. (So much for being "back", huh? Haven't done a bit of work since Election Day, and have frankly found myself less motivated to get back on the wagon at all than ever before.) As far as the new year goes, all I can hope for is that it's a little more predictable. I'd love for politics to settle down and be boring and pointless again, I'd love for everyone to calm down a bit and stop giving the terrorists of the world exactly what they want (although as I write this, there are reports of a mass shooting in Istanbul with multiple dozens of casualties, so that's probably a pipe dream), and most of all I'd be stoked if my head and my heart would get back on the same page again. More than anything else in the world, I love crafting a narrative and composing it into a story to match, and to this day still get an incomparable degree of satisfaction from sharing my passion with others. And more than anything else it's done, that's what 2016 took away from me.
That's all I have to say about that. Goodnight to 2016, and with all of my heart and every fiber of my being, good fucking riddance. See y'all on the flip side.
Amen to that.
Man, you must be really terrible at anatomy if you whiffed trying to shut down your own vital organs four times.
Seriously, though, I've been close to where you were before, and the memories alone make my blood run cold. I've found that laughter really is the best medicine for pulling out of the unending spiral of self-anguish that is depression, hence my bad joke. Just make sure to surround yourself with kind, supportive people, and everything should work out. Until Trump starts a nuclear war, at least.
I think we chatted about this a bit at Bronycon, but you're doing all of the right things. Outside circumstances aside, it sounds like you're able to put this in a healthy perspective. And being able to take that perspective is a huge step.
But all in all, yes. Let 2017 hopefully be better than 2016.
Witnessing.
Sorry you had a rough year. I hope next year goes better for you.
As far as climbing back on the wagon goes - ultimately, that's only your choice. But I find it enjoyable to write, and enjoyable to read, and enjoyable to be here. I should spend more time on those things, because they feel like I've got something to show at the end of the day.
Maybe you're different. But that's why I keep at it.
As far as Mr. Small Hands goes - seriously, you don't have to watch the news. Just turn it off. It won't hurt you to do so.
Man. I'm sorry I didn't know this was going on. D: For what it's worth, I'm glad you're still around, and I hope you keep that up.
Sounds a little bit like what my 2015 was like. Shotgun under my bed, slug in my pocket, my dad knowing something was up, and two hours later being hospitalized. Feeling like you're a burden is the most painful feeling I can think of.
But here's the thing about being a burden/parasite to others: if you're very concerned about becoming one, then you aren't one. People who are "parasites", so to speak, do not care. They aren't afraid of being a burden to others, because that's their modus operandi. That's not who you are, man. Don't let fear of becoming a burden make you think that you are one just because you have trouble landing jobs or still live at home, or whatever. That's what most college students end up having to do, and it's not our faults that stuff like this takes a while.
For example, I have a friend who took three years before he got something other than a couple of retail jobs, but now he's been employed for more than 2 years at a place working with radar engineering at an entry level position, and he's making decent money and likes what he does. He only just moved out of his parents' house last year, and it wasn't because he wasn't trying to move out, either.
Sorry for rambling, but I'll leave it at this: I'm glad you're not dead. I'm glad you have people who care about you, including people on here, because you deserve every one of them.
But yeah, fuck 2016.