Today is the first of November. We just rolled the clocks back, which means here in New England, we are a month or so away from the sun going down before 5 pm. This usually goes well for me, especially with my depression.

I am 51 days away from graduating; my grades are somehow excellent, and on the outside it looks like I am cruising. We call that faking it until you make it. I had to take an extra class to graduate at the end of this semester, so I am busy and stressed. I also took classes in subjects that interested me, which has led to literature courses with shitloads of reading. I should’ve taken some softballs, but here we are.

Needless to say, when I am not doing schoolwork, I have just kind of been staring at the walls waiting for bedtime. There is lazy, which I am, and then there is depressed-lazy, which I also am. The difference is I don’t even do things I like. I don’t play games, or write, or spend enough time with my dogs. I just watch the walls.

Sometimes, it feels like they are closing in on me.

I have completely neglected my obligations regarding getting into a master’s program. I am starting to think that I am not built for the moment, and it scares the shit out of me.

Every day I recite a mantra of hard work, which has brought me pretty far. I have Emerson quotes and fortune cookie fortunes hanging at my desk. They all promote hard work, which is the key for those of us who aren’t smart. Grinding can get you places, and I have proven it.

“He does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance but a hundred chances.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

All the cute quotes and little motivations that I surround myself with don’t matter. I just cannot push forward at the moment. It’s infuriating, and I am honestly disappointed in myself. This disappointment and stress have managed to bleed into my dreams. While I have control over the waking realm, my dreams have completely betrayed me. They say if you smoke weed, you don’t dream, or at least don’t recall them. That’s bullshit.

My wife says the dreams are from “PTSD,” but I am unfamiliar with the acronym. She always praises me for the work I have done tackling my mental health, but it is starting to slip through my fingers. Just to give you an idea of what my nights have been like for the last couple of months, I am going to let you into my dreams.

I have been waking up terrified and in cold sweats. I keep having this dream where my mom actually isn’t dead. Even though she’s alive, she ignores all of my phone calls. When I finally catch up to her in person, she acts like I am not even there. Like I’m the one that’s a fucking ghost. My dad showed up in a dream and was aggressively pissed at me about something too. Usually, much like in real life, when he shows up in my dreams, he’s relaxed. We are also usually at the Italian American club, whose bar I have mapped out in my brain to this day. Lately though? He is really angry with me. He was not like this in real life. We were very close before my mom died on us. We grew apart after that, and then he died two months later, but on the whole, we had a wonderful relationship. I have also had dreams where my wife gets cancer and dies on me, dreams where I die on her, dreams where my dogs die, and more.

What the fuck…

I’ve been so fucked up lately that I was watching an old made-for-TV Menendez brothers movie from the 90s and had a weird memory pop up during a scene. In the scene, their father is forcing one of the kids to swim. The kid is completely panicked, feels betrayed, and is swallowing water.

People think you can just shake off depression and go on like nothing is wrong, which is why you fake it till you make it. Nobody gives a shit about how you are doing, no matter the circumstances. People think being sad = depression, but there is a lot more to it. You can’t run from it by doing fun stuff. It just hangs out in the background, like a pair of eyes that you can feel staring holes through you.

I spent 20 years of my life making pizzas for a living before pursuing another path. Once I decided on my future, I zeroed in on it. Now that I am close, I feel nothing.

Aside from becoming a renaissance man, I have always had a secondary goal. It was always a moonshot, and I just tossed the idea around in my daydreams. Now, with my wife’s business and my current trajectory, the impossible may someday be attainable.

I want to buy back my childhood home. I might actually be able to at some point.

As I said, it was always a joke, but now nothing is funny. I am flying toward a world that I don’t belong in. I am surrounded by people smarter than me. I have a certain savvy that many people seem to lack, however, which allows me to pretend. It’s the type of savvy that comes from learning after decades of fucking up. I am getting close to a life that I never thought was possible, but my arms are turning to jelly, and my fingers are slipping off the ledge.

Hopefully, the Godot project I am working on, one of the countless pieces I write to submit to places but never send out, or the great American novel that I am writing, will hit. Then I can avoid interacting with the geniuses. If my work never leaves my hard drive, that’s fine too. I write for the love of the game before all else. I do want to print some of my work so my wife can have it in case I croak. I should probably finish one of them.

I need to go write a paper on political action committees now. Where I used to hold myself to a higher standard, I have been coasting through these papers and collecting B’s. I am surprisingly fine with it. I do the reading. That’s my secret trick to coasting. Even if I take sparse notes, I can bullshit my way through a paper based on what little I retained. Maybe I’ll crank some tunes too. As Tim Armstrong once said, “When I’ve got the music, I’ve gotta place to go.”

This piece went all over the place, but I don’t really care. Love me or hate me, baby.

EDIT: My wife just got home, and we had a very definitive discussion about our goals. She basically told me to do what I want because she ‘selfishly’, according to her, also has individual dreams she’s chasing.

Stay crescent fresh,

JTC