July 6, 2022 = 10:38 pm - 12:18 am
Exposition
I consider myself a workaholic by nature, with a inclination towards spending my time creating... anything using a number of mediums. As my website demonstrates, I enjoy digital and physical (traditional) art, creating levels on the game Geoemtry Dash, I enjoy creating "mixtapes" (for lack of better phrasing) of songs that I come across and fancy listening to sometimes. I've always wanted to get into music - my parents having bought me an acoustic guitar as a kid and me having discovered the realm of chiptune creation with Little Sound DJ - and watercolor art - having enjoyed a class my aunt brought me to a few years ago. I enjoy the act of learning new skills and performing/doing/creating things for others. Even this very site I use as a platform to share my creations with my friends.
Over the eternal 18 years I've been alive, I have felt depressed and unable to pursue my dreams and aspirations, even if I have the ability or capacity to achieve them. Over the last couple years, I've gained enough awareness to seek out the root of my depression. Originally, I believed the source of my malaise was because I wasn't exercising enough or going outside enough. The summer before my senior year, I drove to my local nature park to walk their trails and sit under their trees to draw in my sketchbook, all of which you can find somewhere on my art pages. When school started back up, I joined my high school strength class and excelled, rising from benching barely 115 lbs to 170, and deadlifting hardly 160 to achieving a max lift of 315 lbs. I enjoyed going out into nature and exercising, and I plan to continue them in the future, however, it didn't solve my problems. I tried doubling down on exercising, joining my high school's track team briefly, but my commitment quickly fizzled out due to my terrible lung capacity/stamina, and nobody really wanted anything to do with me. So, I looked for another solution. I went to my doctor, and he prescribed me escitalopram - an antidepressant, and referred me to a therapist to talk my problems through with. The antidepressants, though it said it should have started working well after 6-8 weeks (and best after 3 months or so), they began working almost immediately. I found that out by accident, truthbetold, because I decided it was a good idea, in my depressive stupor one night, that 7 pm was an excellent time to start taking them. I stayed up that entire night. Anyway, the drugs helped me for a few weeks, then they slowly lost their effectiveness, and I lost my trust with them. Therapy seemed to help quite a lot in comparison. It helped me realize that a lot of my problems had to do with a fractured sense of self-identity and self-worth, but also that with the transition period between the end of school and work/college coming up, that there isn't a whole lot I could really be doing to fix my being.
More context behind the last sentence in the last paragraph: my home life. My family is well-off, so we hunkered ourselves down in a 2-story, very nice house surrounded by lots of property, in the middle of fucking nowhere. And I mean nowhere. If I pointed my town out on a map, you wouldn't remember it it's so small and out of the way. For our family, it's in the perfect spot between my school and my father's previous government work site, so at the time I understand why this was a perfect place to live (and it still is a very nice place to be). However, for a developing, young, introverted, autistic(?) man like myself that wants to do things and be with people, its a logistical nightmare. The center of the town I live in and the center of the town I used to go to school in are each a 15 minute drive in either direction. Between here and the center of either town, it's open road and trees upon trees upon nothing. In the town I used to go to school in, the only attraction of notice is an ice cream parlor and a couple rows of businesses that every kid finds employment at (because frankly, better jobs/activities are still another 15-30 minute drive from there). My own town has even less to do. In school, I always had trouble making friends and even more trying to hang out with them because I never shared any interests with them, enjoying robotics, single-player games, and 'intellectually stimulating' topics/discussions, whereas (I assume) a lot of the rest of the kids were either farmhands, trailer park kids with equally pitiful home lives and issues, or genuinely had better things to do. Even if I had a handful of good friends (which I did at some point ...) I lived so out of the way that it was a terrible time for everyone involved to include me in anything. My brother, to more social of us two, is feeling the brunt of this fact as he's often the cause of the destruction of plans within his friend group because they live on the other side of town.
Reeling back into my home life, I never liked going anywhere because I never had a reason to go out. This turned me into a form of hermit, so I doubled-down on just being me and doing the things I liked to do. After a while, the scenic monotony, among other things, was making me feel desperate to be somewhere else. For the reasons above, I couldn't really, so I felt stuck. My relationship with my father wasn't helping my psyche either. It was walking on eggshells being around him at all, let alone talking to him or asking him for anything. ...I never had a great childhood around him, and the verbal trauma and the broken toys I went through don't aid in the recovery of my total trust in him. Because of how he would talk to me, I ended up fearing confronting other people (which I blame for my difficulty making friends) and I began neglecting wanting things for myself, since I was also always told no to the very few things I wanted to begin with. This would spiral into my underdeveloped self-worth, me not wanting to do anything for myself even if I had an interest and goal in mind, such as wanting to draw in my sketchbook, finishing a part in a Geometry Dash level, learning how to cook, running errands as simple as going to the bank, or even mundane things like responding to emails...
To hop on a tangent to wrap up the topic of my depression -- after some discussions with my extended family and my mother, it was concluded that I have hypoglycemia and/or borderline prediabetes - meaning that if I don't eat something every so often, my blood sugar tanks and I get really fatigued and depressed and I feel like fucking shit. Looking in the past, this makes a ton of sense, given that everyday in middle school and up to the day I started driving my own car in high school, I'd get off the bus and crash on my bedroom floor until dinner if I didn't have something to eat the moment I got home. From here on out, I will never feel guilty about making myself some food at random points throughout the day. My hypoglycemia is undiagnosed, even though I tried going to my doctor about it (which, since he only drew blood once and never put me on a long-term experiment to test for it, makes me second-guess the competency of my doctor), so I'll just have to live with that...
Tying this exposition together, why am I writing all this? What is the purpose of this page? Well, there is a happy ending to my journey with depression and creative blockage. I was accepted into Kettering University, and one of the few things I am required to do as a student of this awesomely amazing and prestigious engineering university is to work for an engineering-related firm or company for 6 months out of the year for 5 years to collect experience and knowledge in the field of engineering I'm interested in. Through sheer luck (I suppose, haha, I think my CAD skills from a high school course wowed them too), I landed an internship with CoorsTek in Golden, Colorado for my university's co-op program. Words could not describe how excited I was, and still am, to be going to a brand new place to learn all sorts of new things. (bleh that word choice/prose, so bland a pinch of salt couldn't save it)
I'm considering this opportunity as a form of spiritual and creative rebirth for me. I will be on my own, living on my own, in a completely new environment with tons and tons of new things to do and explore, with nobody to stop me. No more boring old room, no more spending 15-30 minutes travelling to the center of town for stuff, no more parents nagging me to do this or that, and no more excuses to lay down and wallow in my own pity. I'm in a whole new world, and I want to make the most of it. I'll be in my own room, so I'll be able to cook my own food, I'll be able to draw and paint with no one to judge me, I'll be able to pick up my old guitar that I never learned how to play (my girlfriend even offered me to give me night lessons over Discord!), I'll have a completely new mindset towards doing the things I want to do because there's no more pressure from my environment or parents to stop me! I can't just stop at my room - out in Golden, there's museums to see, literal mountains to climb, parks to explore, bike paths to, well, bike down, stores and places galore that I never would have seen near my forlorn podunks! Even at work, I'll get to meet tons of new people and learn dizzying amounts of real, applicable leadership and creative skills that I can take to essentially anywhere I want to go! (AND I'M NOT EVEN IN COLLEGE CLASSES YET! That's in 3 months anyway.)
Gosh, I'm so excited. So excited in fact, that I need to slow myself down or I'll have so many things to do that I'll never get anything done. That's what I'm designing this online journal to be: A way for me to document my experiences in my new world, document my creative efforts in a quantifiable manner, set reasonable goals for myself, and to develop a habit of doing things for an hour or so every day so that I am never idle. Having that routine of updating this journal every night will also help me finish some key things I've been wanting to do with my Place as well as helping me schedule my time out between adulting and expressing my creativity.
I apologize for my long-winded exposition and the barrenness of this page's styling so far. Everything needed to be said, and I promise the majority of future journal entries won't ever be as long as this. As I leave to travel to Colorado in the morning, I will make sure to spend some time at my hotel room tomorrow sprucing this page up with some color! =:D
Wish me luck!