The Most Grown-Up Purchase

There's nothing as affirming as buying an expensive item that you would never have been able to afford as an adolescent: with the keys to the shiny new (possibly new to you) car, apartment, house, whatever, you have basically bought your way into being an adult.

Did I say affirming? I meant terrifying.

I'm sure my long-term readers (ha) will remember last summer's saga of George Clooney, my old laptop, in which George Clooney decided to burn and kill his hard drive, thereby effectively destroying everything on it (my iTunes library, all my schoolwork, all my writing, and 10,000 words of the longest thing I'd written to date) and rendering himself useless.

We managed to save George Clooney by giving him a new hard drive, which relieved me no end. But he's never quite been the same since, and lately he's been acting up a little. Not yet broken, but definitely a little suspicious.

So I decided that I would invest in a new laptop.

And when I say "decided" I mean "casually mentioned to my mother that I thought it might be a good idea."

I wasn't convinced, though, until I realized I'd be needing a laptop if I decide to pursue work in social media (hahahaha job hunting what).

Long story short, yesterday found me at the Computer Store (well, a computer store, not THE computer store) after having done a good amount of research (Consumer Reports) on what I wanted in a laptop and

I bought one.

It's sitting on my lap now. I'm typing on it.

Everybody, I'd like you to meet (in as much as you can) my new laptop, Meryl Streep. Named thusly because, like George Clooney, she is a silver fox.

Which is great and all, and this laptop is amazing and gorgeous, but ho. lee. CRAP., I can't believe that I bought a thing this expensive. Still. It's been 24h and I'm still a little bit lightheaded even looking at its screen. I almost passed out yesterday after handing over my debit card with all the money on it. I almost passed out when the sales associate handed me the box with Meryl. I almost passed out setting it up. I almost passed out walking around afterward with a bag with a computer in my hand. I almost passed out into the cardboard carton in which the Hot Dog on a Stick people served my cheese dog.

I got home and did pass out (read: napped)  for about twenty minutes before I went to work, and my words upon waking up were "well, gotta go earn some of that money back now."

I've never spent that much on anything IN MY LIFE. The closest three things were when I paid for half of my first laptop, when I paid for rent because my ex forgot, and when I paid for my annulment (which was a lot less gratifying and I think I was too much in shock and was probably crying dead from everything else in my life to realize that I'd forked over lots of money to no longer be married).

If I spend this much time almost passing out after buying a very pretty computing investment, I can only imagine what will happen when I get a car.

The Depressed Band-Aid Heart; or, Deck-Chair Writing.

In case you all were wondering, The Depressed Band-Aid Heart was definitely a title that Edgar Allan Poe considered for his short story. Or it would have been, if Band-Aids had been tradmarked as a brand in the forty-eight or so years that Poe was live in the 19th century. Or, you know, been invented at all.

This isn't a horror story, though. Not unless you consider late-night examinations of one's depression to be a horror story.

Sometimes it feels like the last few years of my life were a massive shipwreck, Titanic style. I want to write about it, or anything, and I keep dragging the sea of my subconscious hoping to find treasure or the Heart of the Sea or even like victims of the shipwreck (which would provide closure to families obviously) to write about, but instead all that bubbles up to the surface are deck chairs. Deck chairs, while they do have some value, are fairly pedestrian things. I'll take anything I can get when it comes to writing these days, so if I have deck-chair level ideas, I grab them. I also secretly live in Mortal Fear that I won't find anything else but deck chairs, ever, and then someone like James Cameron will swoop in on my blogs and journals after I die and find the ship itself, and make a three hour movie out of it starring an ancient, still-Oscarless Leonardo DiCaprio.

It's a valid fear.

So as I was lying awake last night on the steam of Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin wishing I could write something that awesome or just write at all, I came up with an absolutely deck-chair level analogy about the whole situation.

I've written about both my depression and how difficult it can be to write before on this blog. I still stand by both of those posts. It's even more on my mind because it's coming up on a year since I graduated, and that's when I did the whole black-hole bungee jump, which is incidentally not a pass-time I'd recommend to anyone.

Depression is probably the most effective paralytic of all; even more effective than bitterness (thanks, Sherlock). It was the convergence of school being over (and thus life as I understood it) as well as having to face down the whole ordeal I went through my junior year that tipped me over the edge. I thought I'd manage after graduating somehow; but I can honestly say I'd never been laid that low in my whole life. You all remember hearing about it: episode after episode of Supernatural, like somehow I believed that if I watched it enough, Jensen Ackles would turn into a teddy bear that I could hold onto forever and never feel bad about my life or the world again.

Just to be clear: I'm not even talking about a sexy teddy bear (is there such a thing as a sexy teddy bear? Is that a fetish? I wouldn't be surprised, but I also do NOT want to know. I DO know people call their significant others "teddy bear" sometimes and that's not even what I mean). Just, like one of those giant teddy bears you win at carnivals, but with way better eyes.

I really, really hope he never reads this blog.

Some writers can write through depression. Some writers have written their best works while being absolutely depressed and also probably completely hammered. I am not one of those writers, and I spent months beating myself up over the fact that I'm not Ernest Hemingway.

Here's where the analogy comes in.

Let's run on the truth that everybody in the world is the walking wounded. At any given time, when you meet someone, you just assume that they've been dealt emotional blows and either have experienced or are experiencing some sort of emotional pain at that moment. And to deal with that emotional pain, they've probably put band-aids on those (metaphorical) holes in their hearts so they can walk around during the day and function while the hurt heals. Some people have hearts that are just covered in band-aids, some people have one or two, depending on how much emotional hurt they're dealing with.

Being a writer is being willing to peel off those band-aids while the wounds are raw; or to not even put band-aids on them in the first place. You're not afraid to confront the pain into character experience. Sometimes you're even okay to open up old wounds if it means you can give believability to a story.

Some of you are probably thinking, Writers are masochists! and I say to you, absolutely. Some of us are. Well, most of us are. Some of us are healthy people with healthy lives. The rest of us are secretly envious of the functional people and are convinced they've sold their souls.

I was so depressed last year that even thinking about pulling off the band-aids to let out more pain just sounded unbearable. The problem was, a gaping depression wound had opened up in a really tough scar tissue area of my heart, and for that reason it was much harder to pull it closed.

And I mean, I have followed a lot of advice of Writers Who Have Made It. I've tried to practice, I've tried to establish a routine. I've tried writing what I know, which was in fact a terrible idea: about a month or two ago, I started writing a memoir of what happened to me that junior year of college and ended up shaking and crying at two in the morning from excess of flashbacks and I haven't touched it since. I will come back to it eventually, because it is a really promising skeleton, and even if it turns out it's not something anyone wants to read, I need to tell it.

I've finally gotten to the point where I feel healthy enough to pound stuff out on here, and for months I obviously didn't. I don't really trust the feelings of stability, because there have been times in the last year where I've felt like maybe the sunshine was gonna break so I could go trawling in my subconscious for good ideas and ended up curled up in a ball on the deck because I saw a piece of wood that looked like an alligator.

I haven't had an idea for a fictional story that I could carry successfully since my senior thesis/play. I miss that. That was the last time I worked for two weeks non-stop ON FIRE. Ann LaMott talks about how good that feeling is, when that kind of inspiration strikes, and she's right. I'm not a surfer, but if I was, I'd probably make an analogy about how it's like riding a the perfect wave. I'm not a base-jumper, but if I was, I'd make an analogy about freefalling. It's a bit stunning, and not much is in your control: the words just keep coming out and ideas that you didn't know were hiding come out of your fingers sparkling, and even though you know probably a good portion of that is absolute sh*t and you'll have to go back and edit and research and eat your vegetables, right now it is holy and anointed because you're blazing.

It's a good feeling. Maybe the best feeling. If I had to pick the feeling of a first kiss and the feeling of being carried along by a giant tidal wave of inspiration, I'd pick the latter. Every time.

I've been doing a sidestroke against the current, carrying along this ten-pound anxiety-ridden seriously depressed patched-up heart for the last year, trying not to let any salt water get in the open parts. Having a depressed band-aid heart is a lot like having a child made of cement with a death grip on your hand: you can pull and pull all you want, but you won't move more than an inch at a time.

Reading back over this makes me think I'm really good at making excuses for my malaise and my lack of productivity, and also really good at describing them. I'm currently healthy enough to think that's part of the trap that depression sets for me.

And I've decided that I'm publishing this post, overblown prose and six bad analogies and all. Because I feel like it. It's cheesy and everyone at my alma mater who is a writer would probably sneer at it. I'm very well aware of that.

I don't care. I'm finishing this analogy about my band-aid heart because I'm still alive to write about it. Because I'm still dealing with it. And because I'm guessing there are other people out there who are sad and beating themselves up that they can't set up a writing routine or write through their depression like Ernest Hemingway. Frankly, I'm still pretty upset that I can't myself.

And then I have to remember that Jane Austen herself went through a depressive period when her father died and didn't write anything for like five years, and then she wrote and revised and produced lots of brilliant books. She clearly had a depressed band-aid heart, and she managed to heal it enough to have fulfillment in her writing. And I'd rather be more like Jane Austen, anyway.

Vive la deck chair.