Mad Gastronomer

red3blog:

So.

[TW: Depression, Suicidal Thoughts]

If you’ve tried to view my blog and Tumblr and Twitter over the last couple of days, you may have found yourself unable to. I was setting everything to private with a means of walking away. I’ve been dealing with severe depression for a few years now that has been getting much worse over the last year and especially in the last few months. Honestly, I was walking away because I was just giving up. Not with any plan in mind, but just giving up. In part because I felt like all I’d ever do is inspire people to hate me. Either as a disappointment or as a travesty. More people to be happy when I die and I felt like I have enough of that as it stands.

More, though, walking away was giving up because this is really a life line for me. I know that’s going to sound really stupid to a lot of people, but I just don’t care. Its not even just writing that is a lifeline, but listening to the people who I follow and the people who follow me. I’ve been dealing with these issues with no real IRL support system at all. I’ve not wanted to talk about any of this (and probably won’t after this post, if I’m being honest) because I’m so scared of making people mad at me and tell me to shut up. Tell me my problems don’t matter. Tell me I don’t matter. I do that enough to myself and I didn’t want to deal with that because I was worried about what a spiral it would put me on. This means so much to me. I didn’t want to endanger it. But things have been getting harder and harder for me lately and I started to bottom out anyway. I just didn’t feel like I was going to be alive for much longer and part of me didn’t want to create more people who’ll celebrate when I’m dead and part of me wanted to let go of that life line.

I was just going to quietly shut everything down, but I got the anon I posted earlier today and it just made me very self-destructive. I apologize for that, but I felt like it was just confirming everything I felt. I start walking away from all of this, all of you, and the first person to notice just wanted to kick me while I was down. I usually respond to trolls with indignation even at my worst, but this time I just couldn’t. I just felt like people should hate me and kick me and mock me. I didn’t post it to so people could reassure me. I posted it to drive people away.

So, why am I writing now? Why am I slowly restoring my blog (seriously, Tumblr has to make it easier to take a blog private)? Well, after spending the second night in row mostly in bed, I thought to check my blog stats. I’m not sure why. I’ve gotten a lot of traffic from hate sites recently. Maybe I just wanted to be hated. Anyway, I found the stats for the person who left the anon earlier and something started to not feel right. Most of my stats aren’t specific enough to be very useful, but the IP Address of that message was actually for a specific company and location and it sort of rung a bell. Suddenly, the cadence of the anonymous message sounded familiar. After a very small amount of research, I was able to confirm that a certain someone sent the message. This was no longer anonymous hate, but very familiar hate from a sadly familiar individual.

In a way, I’m grateful. While kicking me while I was down made things worse for me, realizing who was kicking is actually making things kind of better. If nothing else, its a reminder that some of the people who’d be happy to see me dead and gone are people I’d like to withhold such satisfaction from. I’m not better by any stretch of the imagination, but its something. I don’t know about other people who struggle with depression, but I find myself feeling angry a lot of the time and usually its anger I can do nothing with. When I can actually direct that anger to something with a purpose, it makes it a little easier to deal with.

So thanks, Shannon Russell. For being a cowardly fuck and an asshole. Knowing a class act like you is going to be there to celebrate me succumbing to depression is as good a reason as I’ve got to not do so.

(Yeah, I’m being a little flippant about this, but that feels like the best way to cope right now; I won’t police your reactions to your depression if you do the same. Also, this is not agreeing to the feud this individual is so desperate to start with me. That’d be decidedly against the point.)

EDIT: As much as I appreciate the replies, please don’t feel obligated to do so. I wanted to write this just to try to work though some of my feelings, but I feel very awkward feeling like I’m asking for any support from anyone. I really don’t merit it. I also should stress that my feeling like walking away was more from feeling like a disappointment than feeling like I was inspiring the ire of people like the certain someone. If anything, that helped bring me out a bit.

I’ll now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

Dude. I have bipolar disorder. I haven’t been suicidal in quite a while, but I’ve been pretty damn depressed. I understand, I’ve been there. And I want to tell you that you absolutely deserve support. So.

When I’m frustrated as hell about FA and feel like it’s all useless and hopeless and I’m just making people hate me, yours is one of the blogs I read to feel better, to feel strong again. If you need to stop blogging to take care of yourself, then please do so, absolutely. But know that your blog means a lot to me.