ans99

I can tell you why it's always the quiet ones.

It's because it's always the quiet ones who've thought since the edge of forever that if they just kept their heads down, didn't make a fuss, stayed silent, bore their beatings from the world without a single complaint or sass-back—that somehow they'd be spared all of this. This purposeful insult and injury that people of the world are so damn good at inflicting upon others without a second thought. The pain of adulthood, of realizing that This is It, and the good times you tried so hard to rush through, hurtling toward what you thought was the light at the end of the tunnel—Freedom, Love, Independence, Acceptance—those times were really the best times, and you squandered them. You thought things would get better once you could decide for yourself? You still aren't deciding for yourself. You're still under the thumb of something much bigger and stronger than you are, and you're still taking orders from Father Capitalism and Mother Media. Fuck that, it's even worse than that. You're still In the Womb. You've exchanged one limited, strangled set of half-assed "freedoms" for another, and nothing has changed other than now you have to actually work your ass off and Pay for the dubious privilege of having them. Meet the new boss, indeed.

It's the quiet ones that finally fucking snap when they come to the realization that their whole life they've been on the wrong plan. The wrong path, the wrong Life. They've set themselves up a road full of disappointment, of mixed messages and crossed signals and shattered hope. They thought they were Playing the Game, but they were really just Opting Out. Because the Future is all Social now. This is a Future where Networking is more important than Skills, where people collect other people, where only the familiar is seen as Refreshingly Creative and Worth Anything. Where if you do not have powerful, connected friends, in this world, if you do not whore yourself out with the fervor of a one-breasted Vegas hooker with thirty kids—you won't even show up as a blip on anyone's radar for longer than ten seconds. This is the Future of the Easily and Often Bored.

Some will change. They'll Act Out. They'll shoot up a school. They'll get Quirky. They'll create Enemies that Never Existed. They'll dabble in the Obscure. They'll find a niche, if they're lucky. But the world is rapidly running out of niches.

Some will find it difficult to change. They'll Go Through the Motions. They'll Escape from the World. They'll take it out on their families. They'll spend day after day in a Soul Sucking Job until everything that made them Them is gone. They'll tell themselves they never wanted to be Famous anyway. They'll say Life is Good. They'll shoot themselves in the face.

Everyone normalizes, in the end.

yoinked from sophie's tumblr is a link to a fantastic article about the portrayal of depression in literature, particularly children's literature. the writer, kit whitfield (whom i am now irrevocably in love with) explains what depression feels like so accurately i'm kind of crying as i read this because it is so horribly true:

Depression is, by its nature, a disease that makes its victims overreact to the world. Unless you give some serious justification for it in fiction, it's hard to portray well or sympathetically; the Wikipedia article on Sydney Carton, for instance, describes him as 'indulged in self-pity because of his wasted life', which is hardly sympathetic. But Carton's depression is mysterious: there's something wrong with him, but he can't say what, and in the absence of an explanation, it seems frustratingly incomprehensible that he'd be drinking away his potential and reject good advice and encouragement. From the outside, depression looks like an easy fix: just drop the moping and do what you need to do. Of course, saying that to someone in the throes is about as useful as telling someone autistic that they just need to be more sensitive to other people's feelings: it looks like won't, but it feels like can't. Depression is an implacable force - or at least, implacable to more or less everything except medical treatment - but the implacability comes from within, and from without, it looks like someone is doing it deliberately unless their illness happens to be tied to something that's easily understood. If it's not, then it baffles anyone who's fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with the effects. You need some way to make the baffling seem plausible, the mad seem believable.

this is the story of my life. this is the story of everything. thank you kit, and sophie.