#also i got lazy at some point can you tell sorry uu

[dakooftacos]

that mood when the easiest thing for you to semi-freehand draw is whatever characters are in the show you're working on at the moment

[cavalava]

personal stuff below

Hey all you lovely people, you.

Here's a warning that this is personal stuff. There's no punchline, no joke, no nothing. It's downhill from here. Also that i know there's going to be something triggering somewhere in here and i gurantee you I'll forget to come back to this warning to put the actual triggers in, but the real ones will be in the tags. But this is your warning.

I feel like i can talk here because while i know some of you, i don't know a bunch of you (even if I'd like to). I just want to get it out there, even if to strangers, before i get it out there to the people i know, because it's horrifyingly hard for me to admit to any of this. To whom it may concern, this is the reason I've fallen off the face of the Earth.

I've found myself depressed. Deeply, horribly depressed. The worst part is, i know exactly why. But i don't know what to do with that. So let's start from the top.

So 2016. December. My mom gets rushed to the hospital after she's found delusional in bed with what we think is the flu. They diagnose her as septic, eight hours in the emergency room. I wasn't home that day due to Pagan stuff, my dad lied and said she'd be home the next day, they put her into a coma to keep her alive.

Two weeks pass. They took her off the paralysis meds the week before, she starts to wake up. By this time I'm in classes again and before class my dad called me to tell me the news that she's talking again. I drag my professor into the hall and start crying and tell her what's happened but i feel like I'm lying. Luckily, she believes me. She lets me skip class to go back to the hospital, two hours away, to see my mom. From here on out I'm driving two hours there and two hours back every weekend.

A couple weeks later, i wake up in a bed that's not mine next to a man i never even got the last name of. I get a call from my dad and he tells me not to go back to my hometown but to go to Chicago instead, which is still probably two hours of driving with traffic even if it's closer. He cites that she "needs better health professionals" than my hometown hospital can give her because of her hands and feet, which have grown black due to the blood pressure meds she was on for the first two weeks. I don't think much of it but i go anyway.

I visit with her and my dad recommends that he and i go to the cafeteria to get dinner. I agree since my wallet has been drained with gas prices.

We go down and get burritos. He tells me he lied. That it's not about the professionals. It's that she needs to have her hands and feet amputated. He starts crying, telling me he doesn't even know how to tell her, his wife, my mother, the strongest woman we know, who prides herself on her looks, who wears high heels everywhere, who owns her own business, who we lovingly called "Wonder Woman" for half my life, who has finely manicured nails that were just done for Christmas, who can look any man in the eye and tell him he's not worthy, who taught me everything i know about being the human embodiment of courage. That she needs to lose her hands and feet.

It didn't click. Not until the night of the surgery. My father and her parents were in the room, waiting for her to be rolled back in on the bed. I remember her coming in, her arms and legs bandaged up, her still half drugged from the meds. She attempted to look at her hands, which she lifted, but nothing was there. My father calmly and gently didn't let her look. The world felt like it was spinning. It felt like a nightmare. That it couldn't be real. That night i sat on the edge of the top floor of the ten story parking garage and considered pushing myself off. I didn't. I tried to drive home but got fifteen minutes away before i panicked and called my friend to ask him to stay at his place. I made it there and did that instead.

A month or so goes by. I've started drinking and smoking, both habitually. My mother has been in therapy. She's set to go home early, on March 8th, 2017, rather than the next month she was supposed to. I was going to skip class on that Thursday to go see her at home, but instead i found myself in a car crash and afraid to try to drive it again. It takes me a while to get enough money to get it fixed.

I finished up the semester with only one failed class. My usually strict parents give me a break on it. I still needed to retake it for my major.

Summer comes around. I started vaping instead of smoking (I'm trash but it makes my parents happier). I met my current boyfriend. Things are good. But they're not. I'm home more, i need to take care of my mom more, i have more responsibility. Everybody tells you how you'll teach your kids to walk and eat, nobody tells you you might need to do so for your mother. On occasion, she cries and tells me she wishes she had died instead. I don't know what to tell her.

At this time, my grandfather, who had dementia and wasn't truly himself anymore, passes away. Somehow, it's relieving, but that doesn't mean it didn't hurt.

School starts up again. I have a lot of things to do in my senior year. The semester rolls forward, i find myself more depressed, to the point where i can't even peel myself out of bed most days, even to eat. I fail my class in my major first semester. I can't graduate. All i wanted to do was die. I was a failure. I couldn't do what i spent four years working my ass off for. Just let me die.

But i didn't. I kept on. I kept working. I kept going. I don't know why. I wanted to give up, and in some regards, i did. I failed at a lot of things, including two classes second semester and my sorority's presidency. I couldn't handle it all. I couldn't handle anything. I was a mess. I often drank myself to sleep at night. I rarely attended classes. Some of my professors knew what was going on, but there was nothing they could do, and it's not their fault. I had two friends die last semester. One was my friend Drew, who welcomed me into the UU church i attended, who took his own life. The other was Griffin, who i talked to often in a class that i still failed, who was struck by a vehicle in front of campus at 19. Both were so hard for me to handle.

My parents made me walk for graduation, having filled out a petition to let me walk with my class. It was mostly for my own family than anything, as they don't know anything of my failing, which just makes me feel worse. I walked, but i know i didn't earn it. I know i didn't deserve it. It just hurt more, watching my other successful classmates walk and leave me behind. I knew i shouldn't have been there. I didn't want to be there. The cap, the gown, the parade, they were all a monument to my failure. People hugged me. Congratulated me. I didn't deserve any of it. People who knew me asked why i was there. I didn't know either. It wasn't right for me to pretend like i could be with them. I wasn't with them. And part of me is spiteful that they left me there. But it's not their fault for seeking their own success. It's not their fault for hurting me, less so for not knowing how much it hurt me.

I don't deserve anything.

I don't want to graduate at all now. I'm so close but i know that I'll get even worse in a month when i go back. Why try? Why bother? I did my time and i fucking failed. Why risk wasting more time and money?

Over the summer i tried to set up a Pagan organization for my area. As per usual, my depression got the better of me and i ended up isolating myself, becoming afraid of interaction. I'm no longer part of it. I lost the ambition that i had with my previous one, i couldn't do it. I'm ashamed of that. I don't know what to do with that. I'm trying not to think about it.

Now I'm back to living neither here nor there. I'm living with my boyfriend at his parents' house during the week and living in my apartment on weekends. Neither feels like home. It's taking its toll on both of us. We're waiting for his job to get transferred, but it's taken two months longer than it was supposed to now. We hope for September, before school gets in again, but that's getting closer and closer with no sign of progress. It feels a lot like traveling back and forth from my dorm to the hospital and i don't know what to do with that either.

Not to mention i need to get a job myself. Which wouldn't be hard if i tried, but i currently don't have a car or a solid living place or motivation or anything. And maybe that makes me lazy. Maybe that makes me awful. Maybe that makes me a failure again. But i know that if i got a job I'd just fuck that up too.

I don't know what the point of this is. Maybe it's to tell you guys. Or somebody. Or anybody. Maybe it's to get it out. I'm really not sure. I just want to be normal again. I just want to live normally, to be able to get up in the morning, to be able to be who i was, to feel human again. But I'm not sure when or if that will be.

I'm sorry.

I want to be better.

Thank you for reading i guess. I need sleep.