Not a good day.

I'm more depressed today than I have been in a long time. Months, maybe. I thought going on 200 milligrams of Zoloft a day would improve me, would take this away. There's still time for that to happen, of course, but it's certainly not happening today.

I've been a little irritable all day. Usually I can tell -- for me, one of the biggest signs that a bout of depression is coming on is that I'm not interested in talking to my friends. I say "yes" and "no" and "haha" when necessary, but I just don't want to talk to them. Usually I make up an excuse and sign out.

But today I didn't notice the signs, because I wasn't expecting this to happen. I went downstairs to play my borrowed Animal Crossing game and only wandered around the town for a few minutes before closing the DS. I just couldn't focus on anything. So I lay down on the couch with my face to the back so it would be dark for a while.

Eventually the voices on the television and my brother's random Shakespeare quotes started to annoy me too, and I started upstairs. Mother reminded me that we had planned to go see a movie and go out for dinner.

"Do we have to?" I asked. "Do I have to?" My voice sounds different to me when I get like this. It gets thinner, somehow, and it's harder for me to speak.

She said she could put it off until tomorrow, and I went upstairs. I had been planning to lie down on my bed and listen to music until this passed, but as soon as I lay down I started crying. Mother came in again.

"I don't understand," she said, or something like that. "Earlier I asked you, and you said it would be fine."

"I didn't feel like this earlier!" I said, through my tears. My voice cracked and all that other embarrassing stuff.

She left. I could hear her in the kitchen, slamming things louder than she needs to do. That's what Mother does when she's frustrated. Then I felt even worse. I don't try to do this, but it happens anyway and messes with other people's plans. I can't imagine going anywhere but my bedroom right now, and I can't imagine forcing myself to. But if I wasn't like this, we'd be able to go see a movie as a family.

I ended up just crying for a few minutes with my eyes closed and I Do Not Want This blasting in my ears. Sometimes there are songs that describe your feelings perfectly, and sometimes you need to turn them up and make your own little world. When I opened my eyes, the tears seemed to burn me. I hate the way tears feel hot. They should feel cold.

But don't worry about me. In a few hours, this will pass.

The adventure of life will go on.

I lied.

I'm obviously not posting every day this week, since there's been radio silence chez this blog since Saturday. Sorry.

I don't have much of an excuse for Sunday. I can't even remember what I did Sunday, other than watch Star Driver. Star Driver is pretty much my favorite anime. It's about fabulous high school life, fabulous giant robots, fabulous magic powers, and a fabulous evil group called the Glittering Crux Brigade. So far I've managed to get three of my friends and my brother into it, and another friend is being forced to watch it.

Anyway, I do have a reason I didn't blog Monday. I felt terrible. I don't know what it was. Depression? Sickness? Something else entirely? But I was tired and bored all day, and I answered everything with "yes," "no," or "I don't know." Mostly "I don't know," and I answered a lot of questions.

Before I was depressed, I could have bad days. I could say, "I feel horrible today," and people would say "okay" and move on. Now my parents hover over me, coming into my room and asking me questions all day.

"Are you okay?"

"What's wrong?"

"Are you sick or (meaningful point at head)?"

I don't know how to answer them. Every time they ask me a question it makes me want to cry. In fact, I'm crying right now. I don't know what's going on inside my head any better than they do, but I'm too sad and passive to make them understand that. All I really want when I get like this (and by this I mean depressed) is to sit alone in my room listening to a mix of Ke$ha, Nine Inch Nails, and j-pop until it passes.

Or to die, but let's not get into that. This isn't a secret cry for help or anything. I'm not really suicidal. I think about it a lot, but I know it's just the depression talking and it doesn't get any further than a few stray thoughts. I'm not worried about it, so you shouldn't be either.

The problem is that people expect me to want comfort, and I don't. I may not know what's going on, but I do know that it'll pass. It always does. I just have to cry a little, hug my knees and think about dying, and wait until I feel myself rising up out of it.

I kind of like the feeling of leaving the episode behind. I mean, beyond just "hey I can be happy again and not a zombie!" Is that weird? It's a really... I don't know what word to use, really. It's almost a spiritual kind of thing for me. It feels like swimming up to the surface after you've been underwater for a long time, I guess. Before, the water was pressing in all around you and you couldn't breathe, but now you can see the light at the surface and you know in just a little bit you'll be able to take another breath.

That's how I felt writing this entry, actually. I'm all better now; at least, as better as I'll ever get. I'm pretty convinced no one's reading this, so when I say thanks it's to the blog itself and to the world, I guess, for letting me be happy.

Writing and distractions from it.

I was just playing my tenth game of Tetris today when I remembered I have a blog again and really need to get back into the blogging spirit. It's just hard when I have a screen full of colored blocks to fill distracting me.

I'm practically addicted to Tetris. That and mahjong. I've always loved Tetris; I'd steal people's phones to play it in middle school. I've never had it on my own phone, though, and now that I'm almost never on Facebook I don't play it there.

But a couple of weeks ago I realized "the Internet has brought me many things, such as everyoneisgay.com and randomkittengenerator.com! It can probably bring me Tetris!" So, thanks to the wonders of the World Wide Web, I was able to type "free online Tetris" into Google and find a site that let me play it as much as I want. The same thing happened with mahjong.

Games like that are huge time-wasters. They keep me from doing things that are actually productive, like working on an idea I've had for a while now. I'd like it to end up as a short story or a novella-length piece, but since the only thing I have in the way of a plot at the moment is a collection of notes that are mostly caps-locked rants about soda shops, I'm not sure that's happening any time soon.

I'm pretty fond of the idea, though. It's some type of vaguely-defined sci-fi thing where everyone lives in little white cubes and has a rigid schedule to follow every day. The most exciting thing about it is that real life is used only for eating and sleeping: everyone starts to spend most of their lives in virtual reality at the age of fifteen.

The main character is a dude named Kai who's just turned fifteen and gets to go into virtual reality for the first time. He's also depressed. (All my characters recently seem to be, I wonder why.) The problem with that, aside from the whole mental disorder part, is that his futuristic society is horrible at dealing with depression. Virtual reality lets you think yourself better, and since you only leave it to care for your body, the government doesn't think they need to do anything.

But depression can stop you from taking care of your body. Depressed people often overeat or undereat, and they have a lot of trouble sleeping. Since the people in this future have to meet certain health standards to be allowed into virtual reality, anyone who can't meet those is blocked from virtual reality. So you end up with depressed people who have no way of getting therapy, medication, or even the fake relief of virtual reality. Most of them commit suicide and are erased from the system for good.

Kai doesn't end up like that, though. He meets a boy in virtual reality whose name is Fior. (I think Fior is a gorgeous name, but I wouldn't wish it on anyone in real life.) Kai and Fior become friends and do that whole little thing where they lean on each other and learn to help each other through life's struggles. Then Kai tries to meet up with Fior in real life and finds that according to the system, Fior doesn't exist.

My notes at this point say "LOL YOUR BOYFRIEND IS A ROBOT" and then end.

Wow, I rambled about that for a long time. I don't really talk about ideas I have much, though I like to. I'm too awkward to talk to people about these things. Besides, I feel like it's not as interesting to hear someone talk about their story as it is to actually read the story in question.

That's all for tonight. I'll probably be in every day this week, since it's mid-winter break, or whatever the kids are calling it these days.

Hi.

My name is Libby.

I am a completely unique person, just like everyone else. The shape of the DNA inside my cells, the number of strands of hair on my head, and the shape of the little birthmark on my leg make me different from all the rest of the six billion of us around.

I also have my own personality, which is good. Otherwise I'd be a robot or a clone or something, even though robots and clones in sci-fi always seem to develop personalities and then use them to angst for the rest of the book or movie. Well, clones also end up stabbing their originals, and robots end up experiencing this strange emotion you humans call "love" for the first time. See, even clones and robots are different.

The other day, I was at a meeting of our school's QSA (that's more inclusive than GSA). We did an activity where everyone got seven pieces of paper and had to write down something about their identity on every one. I don't remember the exact order, but I remember the seven things we wrote were: our names, our genders, our sexual orientations, our races, our religions, our ability status (disabled or not, including mental disorders), and then a wild card for anything we wanted to write.

Then we went around and removed the card we felt was least essential to our personalities for six turns, until there was only one card left.

My card was "depression and social anxiety."

Not only are those things I consider the biggest factors that shaped me into who I am today, the depression is the reason I created this blog. This is the third blog I've had in my short life. The first ran for about a year, from late eighth grade to mid-ninth. I finally stopped updating it in the middle of a period of depression, though I didn't know it was depression at the time. All I knew was that I'd lost all my motivation to do anything but sleep and see my friends occasionally.

Because of that, I started a new blog over the summer. It was part of my plan to prove to myself that I still had drive, that I could set a goal and finish it. So I started to write a thousand words a day. Originally, it was just going to be for the summer. When school started, I told myself, "If my homework gets too bad, I'll cut down to five hundred," but it never did.

I wrote upwards of a thousand words every day for a hundred and ninety-five days. In that time, I wrote 217,944 words. They were rarely organized into any kind of plot. On good days, I wrote fifteen hundred words about the same set of characters. Other days I wrote little two-hundred word snippets about anyone I had an idea for.

Then there were the days I was too depressed to write, so I forced myself to open up TextEdit and write down how I was feeling until I had enough words.

I don't want this to be a blog about depression, but I'm afraid it'll end up that way. Depression affects my life in ways I don't think most people understand. I am happy most of the time, especially now that I'm on meds, but I'm not sure I'll feel the need to blog when I'm not feeling down.

Who knows? It's just an experiment.

Before I leave off for the night, I should probably explain the title I chose. It's part of a line from my favorite poem, "somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond" by ee cummings. You can find it here if you want. The line my title comes from is "the snow carefully everywhere descending;".

I picked it just because I love the way it sounds out loud.

Try saying it.

Ciao.