“

Even if your particular depression does include sadness, it’ll only be one of many other symptoms. The others might be much more painful and salient for you than the sadness is. Some people can’t sleep, others gain weight, some think constantly about death, others can’t concentrate or remember anything. Many lose interest in sex, or food, or both. Almost everyone, it seems, experiences a crushing fatigue in which your limbs feel like stone and no amount of sleep ever helps. Then there are headaches, stomachaches, and so on.

So, depression doesn’t necessarily mean sadness to us. (And a gentle reminder to non-depressed folks: being sad doesn’t mean you’re “depressed,” either.)

Depression is not sadness; it’s an illness that often, though not always, involves sadness. No amount of happy things will make a depressed person spontaneously recover, and, usually, no amount of sad things will make a well-adjusted person with good mental health suddenly develop depression. (Grief, of course, is another matter.) And sadness, on its own, does not cause suicide.

[…]People don’t kill themselves because they’re sad. They kill themselves because they have an illness that, among other things, makes them feel sad. It also makes them feel like their life is worthless, like they’re a burden to others, like death would be easier, and all the other beliefs that lead people down the path to suicide.

There is a tendency, I think, to assume that people are depressed because they are sad. A better way to look at it is that people are sad because they are depressed. That’s why, even if we could “turn that frown upside down!” and “just look on the sunny side!” for your benefit, it would do absolutely no good. The depression would still be there, but in a different form.

”

farewell-kingdom:

Nina Katchadourian - Sorted Books

“I suddenly recalled a moment in the university library when, looking for a book, I had turned my head sideways as I walked down the stacks and thought how spectacular it would be if all the titles formed an accidental sentence when read one after the other in a long chain. Standing amidst the bookshelves in Half Moon Bay, my next move was simply to make this imaginary accident real. I spent days shifting and arranging books, composing them so that their titles formed short sentences. The exercise was intimate, like a form of portraiture, and it felt important that the books I selected should function as a cross section of the larger collection.”

(half an hour later) my roommate opened the tuck shop though because she was hungry too now i have HARIBOS!!! and the best part was i could pay for it in pennies!! im so happy 

i’m so pissed!!! i just woke up from a nap cranky as hell and i thought maybe i would go downstairs to the vending machine and get a cold drink but the 70p drinks i usually get were replaced with regular WATER and i’d only brought 70p down with me so i went back upstairs and got 30p more so i could buy another drink for £1 but when i came back down and started loading coins into the machine it rejected my pennies because it only doesn’t accept copper coins?!?!?! THEN I thought i would go to the cafeteria and get myself a fruit or something but though the cafeteria was open they’d taken away all the fruit baskets??!?!??! i’m so angry i hate waking up from naps and i hate pennies forever and ever and ever 

proustitute:

e. e. cummings, “[i like my body when it is with your]”

awkwardsituationist:

“not natashsa,” a photographic essay on eastern european sex trafficked slaves by dana popa

(documentary, the real sex traffic; film, lilya 4-ever)

(Source: 2wentysixletters)

yaaaaaaaaaay :3

i’m really happy with how well it went but dang you know now every time i get positive feedback on something i just want to do better the next time, like not just better but like UNBELIEVABLY BETTER like if i’m writing like a “university student” now then next time i want to be writing like a university graduate u know what i MEAN i keep setting really high expectations of myself i don’t know why u~u 

ooooomg i just came back from a meeting with one of my english lit. teachers about my second draft for my coursework essay and he said that reading it reminded him of stuff he used to write while in uni!! and he also said that a lot of the points i raised were really interesting, lots of stuff that made him think. then at the end of it he asked me “what’s on your shirt?” (i was wearing my holden caulfield thinks you’re a phony shirt) and when he read it he laughed and said, “and all that david copperfield kind of crap” and he laughed again and said, “it’s an amazing book” 

of course he did give me some criticisms of my essay as well, it wasn’t all fine and dandy, but overall i think it went quite well and i’m happy uwu only thing is that now i need the next draft of my essay to be fantabulous amazing holy wow good through the roof A* AWESOME 

We Eat an Apple In My Bed

mileswalser:

We’ve been kissing for months. Three times a week our toothbrushes share a chipped porcelain mug in my bathroom. As my lips reach for the juice falling from her laugh, her mom calls. I listen as she talks about Biology, her new job, asks about her sister. Her eyes drop as she whispers, No, I still don’t have a boyfriend.

On cue, I stop chewing. She looks at me, waiting for my face to flush, for me to tear from the bed, but I won’t get mad at her. She shouldn’t have to explain why we can’t go swimming in public, why I don’t own a razor, why she doesn’t need to buy birth control. She hangs up the phone; I pick up the fruit, tell her Apparently, there’s a tiny amount of cyanide in apple seeds.

She shrugs, says she can handle a little danger, but I’ve studied how her dimples disappear when she lies, and I know she’s thinking about a man she could parade around her family, who could kiss her scratchy with stubble. The kind of man I’ll never be.

She squeezes my hand in the movie theater dark but tosses it to the side in front of her friends. Says she just needs time. She walks on the sidewalk. I walk in the street. She closes the door. I kiss it goodnight. She goes home for Thanksgiving. I promise not to call.

If I were a postcard, she could hide me in her pocket. If I were clay, she could mold my body into something easier to love. If I were the guy who sells her a cup of coffee every morning. I could smile at her anonymously, safe as a stranger.

She kisses down my neck, my peel hiding the rotten fruit inside me. As I tell her about the cyanide, her head resting on my chest, she talks about cider, autumn pies. See, she says, Apples are harmless. But she saves the last bites for me, scared to let her lips wander too close to the core.

(From my new book, What the Night Demands, available HERE)

my roommate suddenly said, “do you like audrey hepburn?”

“i’ve never watched her in anything but i think she’s cute”

“i think you could do make-up like audrey hepburn, for prom” 

“ok” 

“…”

“…”

“do you want to do it? have you thought about make-up for prom?” 

“no. i don’t know. i. eh.” 

“…”

“…”

“do you have high heels for prom?”

“no, i’m, i’m not wearing high heels because my dress is pretty long and i, i don’t want to get it messed up in my heels or anything” 

“but you have to wear high heels!” 

“why?”

“because your dress is long, what if it gets dirty…” 

“i’ll wash it? i mean, whatever. it doesn’t matter.” 

“sure? you can borrow my high heels.”

“no, it’s fine.” 

“ok.” (said in a “fine, whatever” tone) 

i don’t know, i really like my roommate, she is extremely sweet and kind and cheerful but my god i have never met someone so image-conscious and fuck she makes me so conscious of my own image as well? like, it takes so much for me to even decide to go to prom and still i worry that i’ll be too self-conscious to have any fun or too worried about how i look to appreciate how everyone else looks or that i’ll think too much and end up creating barriers for myself everywhere. i mean, sometimes i just don’t want to worry about make-up or high heels or anything, ok? every time she asks me about what i’m wearing, or what i’m doing with my face for some event i get so clammy inside. and i get the feeling that she judges what i wear everyday. one time she asked, “are you wearing that to school?” right before i walked out of the room and i changed my entire outfit for that day. and i don’t know how to tell her to stop. how do i tell her “fuck off, just fuck the fuck off, i don’t want to give a fuck about how i look today or tomorrow or any other day, i don’t care what you do with your face or your body, i really don’t care and whatever you want to do i’ll support it, just fuck off away from me” without, like, making at least one of us cry?