The Douchebag Bible (46 page)

lie. Either you’re lying to them or they’re lying to

you. You’re rotten to the core. Why would anyone

love someone like you? You are a shit smear on the

face of the world, and the napkin is coming. You’re

going to be wiped away. The word pathetic is too

generous an adjective to apply to you. You are

beneath contempt and beyond insignificance. You

mean nothing. You have no positive traits.

Everything about you is coarse and grating and

undesirable. If you were in a movie, you would be

the scumbag janitor who spends too much of his

time staring at High School girls. If you were a

lawyer, you’d be a personal injury lawyer who

went to night school. If you were a banker, you’d be

one of the ones in prison for embezzling. If you were

a McDonalds french fry, you’d be one of the soggy

brown ones that no one wants.”

The thing that people who don't suffer from

depression may not understand is that depression is

more than just sadness. Sadness is something that

everyone faces in life. Sadness is an aspect of

depression, but far from the totality of depression.

Depression makes it difficult to feel positively

about future prospects. Depression makes it difficult

to emotionally invest in present endeavors, even

things that once held your interest. Depression

makes you miserably lonely but makes you feel

unable/unwilling to seek out human contact.

Nothing feels right when you're depressed.

Everything feels like it doesn’t matter and yet

matters more than anything. You feel too depressed

to do things and then you feel depressed about the

things you didn’t do. It’s vicious. It’s cyclic. It’s

unrelenting. It goes much deeper than mere

pessimism or sadness. It’s a form of psychological

paralysis.

You feel crippled inside. And no one else can

see it. No one sees the invisible barrier that prevents

you from being who you want to be. Even these

words truly fail to capture how it feels. Only those

who have experienced it or are currently

experiencing it will truly understand.

My advice to my fellow sufferers is this: break

the cycle. The worst thing about depression is that it

forces us to feel powerless to escape the self-

fulfilling prophecy of our own unhappiness. You

have to make a conscious effort to prove depression

wrong. When it says that you don’t have confidence,

you have to defy it. You have to say, “Fuck you,

Depression. I can do this.” Even if you don’t really

believe it, you have to conduct yourself as if you do.

Soon enough, Depression will lose its grip over you.

Don’t get me wrong, you’ll still be depressed, but

you’ll have learned to work around it.

And don’t believe anyone who tells you that

you are powerless. Find your passion. Only passion

can defeat depression. I’m sure that part of the

reason why I am so quick to anger is because I have

to wear that rage on my sleeve. Otherwise the ennui

will begin to dig its tendrils in, sucking out life,

pumping in lethargy. Fuck that. You have power.

Depression is a chemical imbalance? Well, guess

what? All of your thoughts are chemical. You can

think your way out of depression. Don’t get me

wrong. It never goes away. Your battle will never be

over. But you can confine the beast to some small

corner of your mind and spit in its face when it tries

to sing you back into a somnolent stupor.

In other words, you learn to live with the

imbalance. A man who is missing a leg can’t will his

leg to grow back, but he can teach himself to live

with one leg. That’s what you must do with

depression. When you feel as if you simply cannot

act, you must act anyway. You must say to your inner

sense of dread, “FUCK YOU. I WILL DO THIS.”

Chemical imbalance really is a shaky excuse for

being psychologically crippled. Balance is a human

notion. We’re the ones who like to think that things

need to be balanced or in a certain proportion, but

that’s just an illusion. The reality is that things are

free to vary, free to take on shapes, sizes and natures

wildly different from what we expect or view as

proper or correct.

My opinion has always been that if you don’t

like the chemistry of your brain, alter it. We have a

plethora of technologies and techniques available to

fiddle with brain chemistry. Those content to bitch

about how bad they feel are cowards, because they

refuse to attempt to change their own shitty

situations. When I was depressed—and I was for

years—I looked for ways to solve the problem.

Now, as people become more weak-willed and

wishy-washy, they denounce people who take my

approach to dealing with depression. I've tried to

council a lot of people who end up telling me that I'm

not accepting of their illness. Accepting of their

illness? Are these people fucking idiots? We don’t

accept illness. We fight it. Or we die.

Everyone has obstacles in life. Some come

from within, others are external. Some people have

anger issues, others have radical mood swings,