Lacking any real depth of my own, I wear a cloak of intellect and pretend that it makes me interesting. I’m no better than someone who walks around downtown with an iguana on his shoulder.

I picked and chose the traits I saw gained people the most admiration; bravery, honesty, intelligence, skill, compassion, and wits. Using these threads, I put together a patchwork cloak that I threw over my dusty overalls.

And it’s worked. It’s worked remarkably well. It has opened doors and I have successfully manipulated everyone’s opinion of me. Who am I? I’m the man I show you. I’m wearing a disguise.

And I’ve been wearing it for so long I’m losing track of who I am and who I’m pretending to be.

It was a persona I crafted from a young age. It was before I knew there was an Ian to worry about. Like a papier mache ball, I put together found pieces. But the inside was hollow; I never took time to develop it.

Was it the shame that drove who I was into the dirt? Was it fear? Perhaps I actually have no personality to speak of?

With the added stress of money, I’m finding myself unable to keep the cloak on, like it’s twisting in a strong wind. I slip in and out of it. I swing wildly from mis- to philanthropic. Cynical to compassionate. From craving solitude, to needing to touch and be touched.

I can’t keep track of these two lives I want to live, and they are almost diametric opposites.

So which tendencies do I give into?

And which me is the disguise, and which is the core?

My self-esteem has deflated like an old tire.

Not with me. Not with anyone around me, specifically. Not even, necessarily, with the world.

Just… life went wrong.

when I was a kid, the narrative was “college.” Go to college, graduate, and everything will be ok. Only people with good jobs went to college; if you didn’t go to college, you probably make fries for a living. All I’ve wanted since I was 5 was to go to college.

And now I’m here, and I’m pissed. No one lied to me; they didn’t know better. No one was trying to deceive me, and no one was stupid. Things just changed somewhere between 3rd and 14th grade. Now, college is becoming more and more useless. I enjoy learning, but paying 25,000 a year for the privilege of sitting in one spot for four hours and listening to a PhD Fellow explain the difference between buon fresco and freso secco, red body and block body, koh and mastaba.

The world isn’t what I was promised, and all that time spent grooming me and prepping me to enter into the world was wasted, because that world doesn’t exist anymore.

No one gave me the real skills; no one taught me to survive. They taught me to go through the motions. They taught me the practical side. They said “when someone asks A, you say B. When someone does C, you do D.” But what if someone asks X? Or does ф? The answers to those questions aren’t in my toolbox.

I often feel like a kid lost in the mall; I have an idea of where I’m supposed to go and what my goal is (find my mother), but I don’t even know where to begin, and everything around me is loud, colorful, in-your-face, overbearing, and frankly a little frightening.

The world’s a scary place, and I’m not equipped to deal with it.

I hope the zoloft helps.

Why don’t I want more for myself? Why don’t I burn with passion and ambition anymore?

For a long time, I couldn’t tell what was more frightening; the prospect that this is me, at my best, or that I have squandered my potential this far.

But this isn’t me at my best. This is me coasting.

I’m afraid this is me giving up.

We’ve got each other and the strong desire to survive, and I think that’s all it takes.

But the universe knows how to sort its problems out. It all comes down to entropy; the unstable moves toward stability.

Today, I made the choice to seek professional help for my mental issues. I lifted my leg up and forced myself through whatever barrier was in the way, and as hard as it was, I feel nothing but… victory.

And that was the Universe’s point. I was trying so hard to get my life together, without getting my Life together. “You can’t take care of others if you can’t take care of yourself” it said to me. But now that I’ve made the first step towards happiness, everything else is falling into place.

I have a job interview on Friday, a volunteer opportunity on Saturday, a script I love being written with a good friend, the most beautiful, amazing girlfriend that could ever conceivably function, an apartment to live in, and continuing good (physical) health.

I already had everything, but because I was missing the first step (fixing my depression), I couldn’t see it.

This kerfuffle with my transcript has me rightly worried; if I need to obtain another copy to give to PSU, chances are incredibly good they’ll contain my most recent grades, which will lower my GPA below acceptable acceptance standards. I’m not sure how to go about rectifying this situation. Step one, I suppose, is to visit the registrar at school. I can figure it out from there.

I was blindsided with the news today that my family is planning on moving back to the old house. The reasons for this are obvious, of course, so I need not enumerate them. What I will espouse, however, is my unsettling dread that I am a major cause of this financial situation they’re currently experiencing. All the more reason to find work.

I’m still trying to cast about and find something I enjoy doing enough to not mind doing it for a living. As much as I love writing, I’m such a perfectionist that it’s an exercise more in latent frustration than a real use of my time.

I DO like working with my hands a lot, and it’s something I’ve recently given a lot of thought to. My favorite hobbies are building IKEA furniture and LEGOs. There may not be a way to to turn that into a career, but if I can afford to feed that hobby, I think I’ll be happy with anything.

I wish I wasn’t so apologetic about who I was. I enjoy being alone because it means I can unwind and just be myself, do the things I like doing without fearing judgement. Why can’t I just bring that same level of ease into the real world? The traits I have are not undesirable traits, but I am so weak and unconfident in my behavior that they become exaggerated parodies, the annoyances I was trying to avoid.

I’ve been getting a lot more into politics again. Campaign season does that to me I guess. I’m also starting to glean a lot of economic information; enough to form an opinion on things like income inequality, poverty thresholds, unemployment, corporate taxation, and capital gains tax rates. I’m supporting people for President that 14 year old me would be appalled at. A LIBERTARIAN? That was a dirty word when I was in high school.

The best part of waking up is Samantha in my bed. Every morning for the last month has been the best morning of my life. My plans to ask her out just… aren’t working. Nothing seems worthy of her. Nothing seems like it carries the right amount of weight and gravitas. I want it to be as special and memorable as her.

I can’t waste too much time, either.

I cut myself off in mid-release today (release, of course, being screaming in spitting, angry, violently sinful rage into a phone), but it was too late. Everything I’ve been holding back for years had seen the light, and they all wanted out. Today, apart from every practical disaster, was reliving bad memories and steeping in old regrets, old hatreds, old sins. It was every sorrow and fear and anxiety all bubbling bubbling bubbling in my throat. It was the recognition that my dream last night highlighted an all-too-real fear that I harbor (inappropriately and irrationally), and the dream before that was the culmination of 22 years of fearing to love and trust. If it was a dream. Now I’m… not so sure.

I had a lot I wanted to say. About myself, mainly. It was going to be a post where I critically analyzed my own flaws, like a watchmaker examining his work. I used to cut for attention; not to relish in the glow of people looking at me, but to call attention to help I needed but was too afraid to ask for. But these blog posts… these blog posts are the worst form of self-abuse I can think of. When I cut, my intention was never to hurt myself. But reading some of these old posts… my god. It’s like reading a burn book, or some kind of suicide note.

My words have always been my blade, but I never noticed until just now how readily, willingly, and unknowingly I used it on myself. And the worst part is, I thought I actually believed all of that stuff I wrote. Reading through it now, I remember sitting there, the weight of my own undignified self-loathing weighing me down like a dead body, and feeling nothing but… nothing. Just empty and meaningless. I believed every word that passed through my fingers.

But I see it for what it is. Irrational, illogical hate-speech. Lies, half-truths, and twisted mental gymnastics designed for the sole intention of inflicting harm upon myself. Notice that these journal entries are only written when I feel I have done some unrightable wrong, or commited some grievous offense of a social, romantic or academic nature, or whenever I just feel depressed about my life. Instead of picking up the filet knife like I used to in high school, I turned to my fingers and this wordpress, where I unleashed all of my hate for myself onto myself.

Writing it down is worse than thinking it; when I’m writing it, I’m forced to think about it in my frontal lobe. To openly acknowledge these failures. To contemplate how best to describe these failures. To invent new, pretty, and loving prose all about how much of a failure I am. New and creative ways to describe the immense depression that I feel, and it all served only to further my own depression. And when I’ve thought it, I need to write it. It needs to pass through my brain, into my speech center where I hear the words, down through my fingers which move and type them, into the computer where I’m forced to read them. Every single action I am doing when I am writing these hate-filled diatribes is dedicated to the sole action of reminding me how awful I am at everything I do. All in the disguise of “emotional release”.

I thought my words were my saving grace. I thought that writing these thoughts down was just keeping me treading water. Little did I realize that they were also what was keeping me from getting back in the boat.

Now that I recognize how I manage to keep myself in this cycle of depression, I think it’s time to take steps to end it.

Starting with this journal. No more venomous rants. I’ll keep them up, for posterity’s sake, but it’s time to put an end to that. I’m changing the format of this journal. I’m going to start following the Roosevelt model; major events of the day and relevant commentary.

Maybe today was what it took; glimpsing the edge of what’s going on inside of me scared me enough to push for change. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m at a solid [7] and my listed Marvel superpower is Objective Introspection. Maybe it’s the love of a beautiful girl.

But I feel… renewed.

I guess it’s because I don’t know what to say. I was expecting to be more affected by it, troubled or at least perturbed. But to me, it was just another doctor’s visit and not a huge story arc of my life. I wonder if I just intentionally gloss over big deal moments, or if I’m just better at handling crises than I thought.