I’ve spent a long time not wanting to write this post. In fact, I still don’t want to write it.
Because it’s not silly or fun. Because it’s hard.
But I’m writing it anyway, because I have this nagging feeling that if I don’t, I’ll be lying.
I’d rather be glib right now. I’d rather tell you all about fancy homemade candy and red pandas and the time my sister and I got in a punching fight over the TV remote, but this is something we need to talk about. And by we, I don’t just mean Us—You and Me. I mean anybody, all of us.
Pharaoh. From Spanish II, from Sophomore PE. Is dead.
They announced it this morning, during 1st hour, the same way they always do with suicides, right away, so no rumors get started
It’s weird. Last year, on the exact same day, Boxer died. But he was this thin sad junior, who faded like a whisper before anyone even had a chance to notice he was gone.
[With Pharaoh] it’s not the same. I knew Boxer on sight, and most people couldn’t even say that much. I’d never had a class with him, never said a word to him, this skinny boy that no one noticed. He didn’t exist to most people.
But Pharaoh, Pharaoh was one of Those People. The ones who play varsity sports and drive nice cars and always get in the school paper, and go to all the best parties, all that. The best girls, the most popular friends, you know. And even if they aren’t Homecoming royalty, well, they still got nominated, didn’t they?
Pharaoh’s whole life, right there. The kind of boy who always gets picked first in PE, always makes it to the district basketball tournaments, always calls you “Girl,” instead of your name.
In drawing, our teacher stands in front of us, ringing her hands. “I have some sad news,” she says. “This is very difficult to talk about. One of your classmates committed suicide last night.”
And we sit quietly, expectantly. She’s looking at us like she’s never seen us before, or like we scare her.
“He was involved in a number of school activities, and some of you may have known him through church or other organizations. The counseling center is available all day.”
Then she says Pharaoh’s name.
For a long time, no one says anything. Then behind me, Dweezil mutters something under his breath, so soft I can’t make it out. It sound like shit, or else, dick. Which are two very different sentiments.
I turn to look at him, but he’s staring down at the tabletop, enigmatic. The feeling in the room is like a strange, complicated humming, electrical and mute. I tear my Poptart wrapper into tiny little strips.
This is not supposed to happen. When you think of boys dying, you think of boys like Boxer—the ones who get made fun of on the bus and ignored at home and pushed into lockers in the halls.
Not the ones who do the pushing.
Suddenly, all I can think about is this day in Spanish class last year, how Pharaoh knocked Milo’s books out of his hands and Milo’s binder fell open when it hit the floor, and all the sheets of paper flew away like birds.
*****
“I heard he shot himself,” says Sarge after school, leaning back against the wall as we wait for the rest of the soccer team hopefuls to trickle back inside from our run. Her father is a colonel in the Air Force and of the varsity starters, she’s pretty much the only one who is ever nice to me. “I heard it was a .45.”
I think about that. Real death, sudden and messy, no room for hesitation. I think how he must have thought all this was permanent, like life would never be different.
I’m going to make varsity this year, I think suddenly, but I don’t know where the thought comes from. I don’t know how to be sad—or at least not sad in the right way—and that makes me sadder than ever.
Outside, the snow is not snow, but more like very fine mist and I’m wearing my spare socks on my hands. I just ran four miles in thirty minutes, and by the end, it was only me and Sarge, and everyone else was so far behind us you couldn’t even see them.
*****
The day of the funeral, Little Sister Yovanoff and I walk into school under a giant butcher-paper banner that says Hugs Heal. In American Lit, only about a third of the class is there, but I can’t imagine all of them actually went to the service. I’m mad at them for that, and I don’t even know if it’s the truth. Pharaoh was mean to me. I can admit that and not pretend or sugarcoat it. He was really mean to me. But I still want someone to mourn him in the way a person should be mourned, and it bothers me that I can’t. All period, I make lists about him.
- Times he was the first to hurt someone: 0
- Times he stayed out of it: 0
- Times he ever disagreed with any of his friends: 0
- Times he laughed: when everyone else did.
- Times he picked fights: when everyone else did.
- Times he joined in when people were ganging up on someone weaker: every single one.
The lists are true, but that doesn’t stop them from being desolate and pointless. They are horribly incomplete.
*****
Between classes, Little Sister Yovanoff comes shuffling up and leans the side of her head against our locker. After a second, she says, “I wish it was easier to be sorry. He was never kind or considerate, though. He was mean.”
“I know. He was to me, too.”
“He kicked my chair all the time in Algebra. He called me girl.”
“Yeah, he would flick spit-wads and paper footballs at me in Spanish last year. He used to take my pens and not give them back.”
“It’s sad,” she says.
And I nod because it is. More than anything, I wish he hadn’t done these things.
Little Sister Yovanoff sighs. She reaches out to adjust my necklace, and when she speaks again, her voice is serious and uncharacteristically adult. “I just like to think that he might have still grown up to be a nice person.”
*****
All week, I keep waiting for something to be revealed. To at least be better. All I want is to feel the way I should be feeling—to make this terrible, abstract thing solid, or at least show the shape of how sorry I am.
In ceramics, we’re working on hand-built containers, coils and slabs. For the last week, I’ve been wrestling with the same squat, ugly jar every day, and now I take it down from my shelf and peel off the plastic. I spend the rest of the period changing the contours, making it taller, more graceful. Making it simple. I add an angel, building the figure out of the jar’s surface the same way I made Christmas ornaments last semester.
“Wow, that looks way different all of a sudden,” says the senior boy who sits next to me. He has the Shel Silverstein drawing from the Hug O’War poem tattooed on his arm. “What color will you do, you think?”
“White,” I tell him.
The tattooed boy seems satisfied with this, like white is the natural color of angels. Pure, luminous, pristine. But that’s not why. White is the color of paper. White is the color of the cipher. White is the color you are when you are always whatever your friends want you to be.
This doesn’t change the times when Pharaoh was cruel or destructive. It just makes it more complicated. But sitting there, resting my chin on my arms and staring hard at the vase, I think I might finally be feeling sorry in the right way. Or a least, a way that I’m okay with.
I’m not pitying him, or explaining away the bad parts. It’s not like that. But I’m just so, so sorry that he would have rather been dead than be someone scared and lonely and real.
*****
I’m not a person with answers. That’s someone else, someone better at making distinctions or reaching conclusions. I wanted to tell you this story. I wanted to tell you because it matters. More than a decade later, that day—that death—matters to me.
I’ve always been the one with questions, the girl who is driven to examine and discuss things and take them apart (oftentimes even when it’s impolite or inappropriate or uncomfortable), because more than anything, I want to know the underlying truth. I want to know the how and why, but people are hard things to solve.
I’m not going to sit here now and say to you that bullies are just misunderstood, or that they’re crying on the inside. If someone is making you miserable, it sucks to be told that. It’s hurtful and frustrating, and even if it’s entirely, 100%, absolutely true, it doesn’t really help, because it still feels like saying that because someone else is in pain, they have a free pass to treat you as badly as they want.
So I’m not going to say that.
What I’ll say instead is that most human interactions are complicated. The reasons people do mean things is almost always complicated, even if the complication is just that they’re not thinking, or not empathizing, or they’re getting pleasure out of having power over someone else, or they’re going along with the crowd.
Those aren’t justifications. Knowing why something happens is not the same as deciding it’s okay.
Here’s the place where I usually ask a question or introduce a topic for discussion. Today, I don’t have a question (although, as always, you’re welcome to talk to me about anything that’s on your mind).
Today, I want to tell you something. I want to tell you that I’m too scared to post this. I am absolutely terrified to hit the button that puts my words where you can see them, I’m scared to talk about something sad and difficult that actually matters. And still, I already know that I’m going to do it anyway. Because there are people out there right now who feel the same way Pharaoh did, and I wish that were different, that it would change. Like I said, that matters.
I want to tell you something else too, because even though I’m pretty sure you already know it, I think it’s a good thing to say.
I want to tell you that you never have to be mean. And if there are times when you’ve been mean, or done things you’re not proud of, you can still wake up in the morning and not do what you did yesterday. No one is making you.
This isn’t coming from some ivory tower of enlightenment or moral superiority. To say that I know a secret about kindness wouldn’t just be unrealistic, it would be horribly dishonest. I try to be the person I wish I was—the kind, patient one—but I still get mean sometimes. I still do and say things I wish I hadn’t. Things there was no reason for except that it was easy, or I was frustrated and took it out on someone else.
But I don’t want to be mean, and I think that’s true of most people, so for everyone who doesn’t want to be mean (and remember, I’m nearly positive that’s most people), the answer is pretty simple: we don’t have to be.
There. That’s what I wanted to say. Also that there are people who love you. I know I do.
Brenna Yovanoff 
This is the realest, truest, most beautiful blog post I’ve ever read. And I just wanted to say thank you for posting it, Brenna. It’s not easy talking about those who die, people we knew, or about how we should be sorry, but don’t really know how. I think that’s why so many of us put those words in writing, in stories.
This past summer, one of the boys I grew up with went missing from the boat he was on. It was a perfectly clear day, little wind, smooth surf. There was no reason the boat should have capsized, but that’s how they found it. Everyone thought it was either a joke or that foul play was involved. He did drugs and drank too much. He was, according to my mother, “bad news.” We all waited. We thought he would turn up or something. And then one day, they found his body on one of the islands.
It’s hard to think about it. Even now. Mostly because we still don’t know what happened and because most of the town still thinks drugs were involved. That whatever happened, he must have had it coming.
And I hate thinking that. Because at the end of the day, he was a person. He said hi to my little sister, no matter who he was with. When someone stole my little brother’s bike, he went out and found the people who did it, and got the bike back. He didn’t have to.
Six weeks after his funeral, his older brother wrapped his car around a tree. Most people called it suicide.
…
I guess what I mean to say, is thank you, Brenna. I really appreciate you sharing your story – especially the details.
I think that’s why so many of us put those words in writing, in stories
I felt like I had a hard time with this post, and honestly, what you say right here might be why. I’m so accustomed to fictionalizing everything and just focusing on the general mood or feeling, that to actually write something simultaneously sad and factual feels very foreign.
I really appreciate you sharing your story with me and with everyone else who reads this. I think that remembering how multifaceted people really are can be a challenge sometimes, but it’s one worth trying for.
Thank you so much for posting this. It might have saved a life.
I used to work in inpatient mental health, and I worked every day with people who felt like they…just did not know how to face the next day. And the next, and the day after that. Sometimes I’d work on the other side of the center with the kids.
One night I was talking to a girl, sitting with her in the quiet room, and she asked me, “Does it ever get better?”
And my answer to that remains the same: it does. Life isn’t static. It’s never perfect, never what you see in the movies. No happily ever after comes without bumps. But it is always changing.
Anyone who thinks otherwise: Hang on. It does change. I can promise this.
Again…thank you so much for having the bravery to post this.
Life isn’t static. It’s never perfect, never what you see in the movies. No happily ever after comes without bumps. But it is always changing.
This is an excellent sentiment, and well-worth remembering. I was fairly little when I first heard someone say that change is the only constant, and I’ve always been fascinated by that idea—that we’re eternally in flux, and even if we wanted a condition to remain static, it won’t. It just won’t. And because of this, no matter how powerful or intrusive one thing is, it’s still always flowing into something else.
A beautiful and powerful piece.
I always feel strange when I get serious and focused, because so much of my life is spent buzzing around. But sometimes seriousness is unavoidable. And you know something else? I’m glad that you still read my blog after all these years.
I’m glad you posted this. It’s a raw, true, important piece. Thank you.
I never knew anyone who committed suicide at school; not anyone who succeeded, anyway. But out of my main social group, I’d say a majority had considered it, some of us tried self-harm (cutting, purposeful alcoholism) and at least two had seriously attempted it. One of my best friends had a dear childhood friend who succeeded. I’d never met him, but I wrote a poem for her about him, which was this:
friend of my friend, i
knew you not (and never will)
and yet…
somewhere,
something
unwarped by time arrives
at the place
where you fell
off,
dancing the world in a raze of stars,
dancing your eyes in a foam of tears,
dancing your heart
in a sob.
you danced,
and there
(though i knew you not)
in a welter of sorrows
your wings gave way-
a tangle of feathers
undone by fray.
It was all the comfort I knew how to offer. I breathed poetry then like I breathed air, and I was depressed in a way that was too big for my body, and the threat of suicide was all around my group of friends like the pressure of a storm that won’t quite break. I don’t know now whether I ever would have gone through with dying, but I thought about it a lot, toyed with it even; not quite in an attention-seeking sort of way, but in a way where I was sad and sixteen and melancholic and nobody knew to ask the right questions and I couldn’t have answered them even if they had; and if I did stupid things that I knew were stupid that pushed the edge of it sometimes, like taking long walks by cliffs when I was drunk or trying to walk along high fences or gouging flesh out of my nailbeds or poking myself with scissors or writing tearful goodbye notes on my commute home, it was because I felt like screaming myself bloody until someone noticed and pulled me back – only part of me knew that no one would or could pull me back, because we were all dealing with our own shit and none of us really knew how much the others were bluffing or not. We were so much the cause of each other’s problems that we couldn’t get out from under it, had nowhere to retreat to except further into ourselves and each other and all the angst that brought with it; and we broke and mended and split and mended again, and somehow we all got through it. Even when people one remove away were dying, we got through. I don’t like to think how near a thing that might have been at times – not even necessarily for me, but for any of us. But we survived, and I can’t call it luck, but I can’t say it was easy or foregone, either.
I’ve forgotten a lot of things about how I was and felt in high school, lots of things I did and said and learned, but one thing I’ve never forgotten – one thing I doubt I’ll ever loose – is that flat, implacable, insomniac mix of zombie despair, helplessness, intellectual boredom, fear, alienation and unrequited love that may as well have replaced my blood for a while. I have poetry now like other people have scars. That’s my real high school diary. The prose I wrote by hand never came close.
I post this despite my fear of posting, because you were brave and so I can be, too. I promised myself I’d never forget what it was like then, would never write it off as being just a forgettable teenage experience. Adolescence can be confusing and scary as fuck, but if modern society keeps normalising teenage despair by way of trivialising it – as opposed to displaying actual alarm at the prospect of revving youth culture harder and harder towards a critical redline – then we’re not going to end up in a good place.
So lyrical- your words… I swayed back and forth as I read them..not
consciously ,but a stirring from within…thank you for posting them.. i will return later to them…jot them down in a journal..carry them with me..remember those who have left that i knew as well but didn’t know well…
in a way where I was sad and sixteen and melancholic and nobody knew to ask the right questions and I couldn’t have answered them even if they had
that flat, implacable, insomniac mix of zombie despair, helplessness, intellectual boredom, fear, alienation and unrequited love
Thanks so much for saying this, Foz—for saying all these things. I think the complex set of emotions that often colors adolescence can be tremendous and overwhelming, and also very hard to describe accurately. This is so honest and evocative, and I remember so many of these sensations you’re describing from my own experiences and my own circle of friends.
I remember depending so much on writing, both to calm myself down and to solidify my thoughts, and I always wonder what kinds of emotional outlets exist for all the people who don’t naturally gravitate toward writing or art or music. (And yeah, a lot of the other outlets that people pursued in high school weren’t that healthy.)
if modern society keeps normalising teenage despair by way of trivialising it – as opposed to displaying actual alarm at the prospect of revving youth culture harder and harder towards a critical redline – then we’re not going to end up in a good place
I think this is such an important thing to think about, because the difference between normalizing something, and simply recognizing it and giving it due consideration is so vast, and the damage of trivializing something can be so great. When we normalize things, that often seems to come with the implication that because they’re so “normal,” they’re not even worth talking about. When really, I feel like we’d be much better served to take all the anxiety and the bad feelings and the questions, to throw them all on the table and discuss them calmly and honestly.
Thanks for all this. I know that a lot of people read these comments, even though they might not jump in themselves, and I think it’s good that everyone has a chance to see what you’ve said here and maybe know that feeling sad or scared or alienated or desperate isn’t freakish or abnormal, but it is also in no way trivial.
Thank you Brenna for your brave post.
I need to learn that tomorrow is a new day. That I can wake up the next morning and change myself and be the person I want to be. Make a better present and future. What’s done is done. There’s no changing that. No matter how badly you want to. I just have to squash that little voice inside my head that tells me how deeply messed up I am. That tells me all my life will ever be is one huge mistake after the other. That all I do is hurt and annoy other people in my search for belonging.
I’ve wanted to change, and I don’t lie like I used to, but I still believe that I will make the same mistakes I did, so I punish myself everyday trying to prove to others and myself how sorry I am. But maybe if I just wake up every morning and make a point to be the person I want to be and not the person I am when I’m feeling vulnerable and unliked, maybe that’ll prove to others and myself that I have changed and that I want so desperately to be forgiven. And maybe for once, I’ll be happy.
I don’t know if that made any sense. All I know is that I am so very sorry and I want life to be different. To be better.
Thank you so much Brenna. I just want to thank you for being so open and welcoming. I’ve probably shared way too much with you, but I’ve always felt like you really listen and you really mean it when you say you want to know about people. I always look forward to your posts during the week. They take my mind off of things, and even if they do bring up emotions, they help me think them through and it helps me learn to explain myself better, or at least, it let’s me vent. I just wanted you to know that I admire you and that you have helped me so much. I can’t even put into words how much you’ve helped me. So again, THANK YOU.
I need to learn that tomorrow is a new day. That I can wake up the next morning and change myself and be the person I want to be
I think this is a wonderful goal, very worth aspiring to, and also that you shouldn’t stress too hard if you find that you still forget a lot (even now, I forget on a regular basis). Also, you’re already well ahead of the curve when it comes to self-reflection, I think :)
I didn’t make a conscious decision to change anything about myself until I was about 19, and I realized that I didn’t like how I was treating my sister. That was really the first time I’d ever considered how much control over my own actions that I actually had, and that whatever I did wasn’t just a foregone conclusion. Being impatient with my sister wasn’t some innate condition, but something that was made up of a billion tiny choices, and each one counted and was actually pretty easy to identify. It was still hard to break bad habits, and some of them took a long time to let go.
I still believe that I will make the same mistakes I did, so I punish myself everyday trying to prove to others and myself how sorry I am
I don’t know if this will help at all, but I just want to say that the process of changing can be really hard because it’s uncomfortable (or to use an analogy that’s particular to me because I’m really bad at dancing: learning steps to a new dance). For awhile, no matter how much you tell yourself to do things a certain way, it’s still a huge effort—sometimes just to get something even half-right. But after awhile, it gets to be second nature. Also, being forgiving with yourself can really be a challenge, but it’s important to remember that forgiving yourself for things is not the same as letting yourself off the hook, or being unaccountable, it’s just having faith that you can always move forward.
I’m really glad that you read and comment here, and I think that being able to communicate thoughts and feelings, even when they’re uncomfortable, is really important. I do like to know about people, and sometimes that feels a little selfish, a little like reading a book, or doing a jigsaw puzzle, learning a poem or solving a riddle, but mostly, I just really love people. Because they are wonderful—YOU are wonderful!
Thank you so much Brenna. You are an amazing person! Thank you so much for taking the time to reply. I appreciate it, and I’m sure everyone else does too :D
simply wow..How would the conclude 16oo experiments? The teamwork of those 400 scientists is impressive. Do you know if there is any result that is comparable is Eii&;enns#8217ts relativity?
This is a lovely, important post.
Nobody is perfect, and nobody is simple. I hate bullies, and I have so much contempt for the kind of people who go along with things, even when they’re wrong. But I try to remember to have pity for them too, or if I can manage it, compassion. Because no one casts themselves as a villain in their story, and it’s sometimes hard to be the person you wish you were. It’s sometimes easier to just stop trying.
I’m not always nice. I can be impatient and biting. And I don’t like myself when I am like that. I can’t imagine how much Pharaoh must not have liked himself.
I’ve wanted to die. I spent the entirety of my 13th and 14th years wanting to just stop existing, but it wasn’t because I hated myself. It was because I was raw, like an infected wound, and everything that touched me hurt. I just couldn’t imagine existing anymore. But I never hated myself. I didn’t even hate the world. And I recovered, thanks to my mother who saw what was happening and (literally) dragged me to the doctors and a therapist. She saved my life. And life just keeps getting better.
I think that my misery would have been so much worse if it was full of hatred, or disgust, or guilt. I think it would have been worse, and I am incapable of imagining worse. I am not trying to excuse bullies, but I think that in a lot of ways they are as much victims of the world around them as their pray are victims of them. Why was a young man allowed to behave in such a destructive way? Where were the people who were supposed to help him become someone worth being? Why was he alone?
Thank you so much for this response. I’m so glad that you and other commenters are sharing your stories here, because I think it’s just incredibly important to talk about all the ways that life—sense of self, growing up, social interactions—can be difficult, and how that still doesn’t mean that things are insurmountable. There’s still so much time and so much room for things to change.
A lot of what you’ve said here about bullies is exactly what I was really struggling with when it came to making sense of Pharaoh’s death. I think ambivalence is really difficult in and of itself, because it can feel so wrong to be pulled in so many different directions at once, over something that’s clearly a tragedy.
The accident of finding this post has bretngihed my day
…as far as SCOTUS is concerned I believe if it is not brought back to the center the democracy itself is in jeopardy.frjim, we agree. If the court skews any further left, our country is on an irreversible downhill slide.
Thank you. So many poems!
Thank YOU for reading!
Thank you so much for posting this Brenna. It must have been hard to do it, as I know what its like to experience bullying. This post was one of the most inspiring and real posts you have ever done and I am incredibly thankful for that. I look forward to more of your high school posts!
Hi, Jenny—I’m glad to hear this post spoke to you, and also continually sorry that topics like bullying and suicide seem to have such a broad reach! I always feel like the important thing is just to be able to talk about the difficult things, but of course, they’re just so difficult to talk about, sometimes. Anyway, thanks for reading and for commenting. It means a lot.
I can’t believe it’s taken me two months to try to catch up on some of my blog reading and that is one of them that I missed. What an honest and meaningful post. Thank you for being brave enough to hit “post” and put this out into the world.
Now on to your other posts….
And thank you for coming and finding it in the archives and then taking the time to comment! Also, I am in no position to judge anyone for “catching up” :D
(Considering that I am just now catching up with all the everything …)
My life is about my future, one that, some days, I think will never exist.
Grades are a way to get into college, and college is a way to get into life.
And, as the smarter of two children, I am capable of so much more.
I think that, in some ways, I am very similar to yourself, because, I have an unshakable belief that if something does not interest me and I do not believe that it will be useful in life, I will blow it off. And my parents hate that; they believe what is written above, and they always tell me that I need to try harder. I can’t. And on top of this pressure and that of starting High School, in early November I broke my arm and effectively ended my gymnastics career. And then in December I hit rock bottom. I tried cutting myself (not that badly though, kitchen knives are remarkably dull), lay on the floor a lot, wrote death-filled short stories, songs, poems, Etc.; and reread the Shiver series over and over for the purpose of empathizing with Cole. Oh God, most of stuff seems so stupid to me now, but on the bad days, I will still do it anyways. I had the whole depression deal going, and well as an obsession with gothic music and clothing (this still exists) , and I did think about suicide, but I told myself, like I do with every important decision in life [though I admit, this is not because I am wise, but because I am mortally (yes, I see the irony here) afraid of awkward situations] I needed to wait to make sure that I am certain and for a less inappropriate time. That said, during the month of January, I did believe that I would not survive to be an adult, and honestly, the only thing that stopped me was the thought of failing. Once again, I waited for a more appropriate time.
Come February, I started having days when I was depressed and wanted to die like before, and days where I was depressed and hated myself for being depressed. I discovered that exercise made me feel better, and I think that while this realization helped me, it also made things worse because I knew what it felt like to be alive again, and that made the in between days hell. The problem was, and still is, though to a lesser degree, that there was some strange pleasure I gained from feeling empty, and though I did not long for it on the rare good days, the in between days (which were the most common at this point) still made me hate myself and simply want to go one way or another, and often I would opt for the sorrow, because that was easier to hold on to. I am not sure if it is completely normal to use mild pain as a tool for focus and breaking my depression, but it is what I did and continue to do, and I leave no marks. I held on through February, tried to make some sort of effort in math class, and only played with a knife twice.
March brought me some hope, in the form of acceptance to a very prestigious boarding school that will actually teach me something interesting, and also in some iron supplements that might actually be helping or might just be a very nice placebo effect. I started actually feeling fear again, which was nice, and I became glad that I was still alive. I think that it was on one of the very good days that I noticed that one of my best friends was experiencing nearly the same sort of depression that I was, and while we have never discussed it, she became aware of this as well and we try to help each other out on occasion with simple courtesies such as pointing out a reason to live whenever the other says that they want to die, and such.
Now I can sometimes make it through a week without feeling too bad, and I struggle to survive for the future school where I will truly learn, and where I will be given a new start far away from everything that reminds me of this last winter. I still feel it though, at times like now, writing this story that is by no means over yet, though I wish it was. I feel it when I write, when I lose myself in thought, or music, or simply read a post like this one you have written here. I feel it when I lay in bed at night, and when I try to imagine my future, and when I read books for hours and know the characters better that anyone real. My depression is still here, but I am slowly illuminating the shadows with the future I see ahead of me, the one where I will do what I like most, the one I want to live for.
I am sorry if my grammar is terrible. It was very hard for me to write this, and I only actually did so because this post is three years old and no one will actually read this. I cannot bother to use proper sentence structure. it is just good to put this out here.