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.