I told myself that I wouldn't do this anymore; that I wouldn't succumb to the grips of melancholia, that I had thrown that out in high school with my fat jeans and donated myself to a better cause: good, old fashioned, high quality living. I'm trying to approach my depression with a sense of humor, trying to imagine it as the Teacher from the Black Lagoon - an empty, harrowingly dark shadow that, in the bright light, actually turns out to be a overweight croc with red hair, bad lipstick, and a penchant for issuing math exams, who just so happened to swallow me hole. But here I am anyhow, trapped in the pit of her stomach, trying to hold my ground amidst the churning gastric juices and particles of yesterday's dinner.
Here, there is not much left for me. I polish my shoes. I make dinner. I cleanse and de-clutter my space. I watch sitcoms and a few worthwhile reality television shows. I read. I go dancing. Occasionally, I talk to people. I use my exorbitant amounts of free time to think about how little free time I will be left with once I return to school. I go down the checklist of glaring symptoms of depression: loss of interest - check, insomnia - double check, irritability - get the fuck away, weight gain - check plus star, et al.
What is different this time around, though, is that I am acknowledging it: I can admit its existence to my best friend and not feel like a piece of bruised, rejected fruit. Though I don't remember the ending to The Teacher from the Black Lagoon, it was a children's book, and I am therefore sure that it was a happy one. I don't write frighteningly masochistic entries in my journal, and I don't mentally vote on the most artfully beautiful form of suicide. No, that era of self-loathing, of wanting to press the delete button on my own pneuma and self is as gone as my teenaged acne and hopefully, with time and retrospective thought, will only seem to have lasted as long as I can last without hacking at my own bangs. Which is to say, not very long. And while I may not yet have the courage, the motivation, the want to roll out of bed and spear through this phase with a tribal war cry and proactive action like some Indian chieftess, I can, at least, begin to imagine myself applying the face paint, crouching in the depths of a colonial forest, on the verge of vaulting to attack this enemy.
