First World Problems – Diary of a Mad Millennial

I’ve been depressed since I was eight years old.

This is a claim I cannot back up with scientific evidence, a medical diagnosis, or even real tangible proof. It’s all anecdotal at best and perhaps a claim forged in my depressive mind long enough to the point that I believe it to be true.

But I remember being a fat little kid unable to run during gym class and “whistling from my mouth”. That’s how I described wheezing to my dad, a term I learned meant that my lungs couldn’t properly take air in whenever I was running. So from the time I could start remembering doctors appointments, I’ve been listed as an asthmatic whose symptoms only manifest “upon exertion”.

The feeling of watching the other kids jogging while carrying on full conversations and laughing what felt like miles ahead of me made me feel so sad and insufficient. It’s that twinge of self-dissatisfaction I’ve carried with me to parties, family gatherings, class, the gym, the office, alone in my room while striking out for the nine trillionth time on MLB The Show…

That miserable low has been so apart of me over the past 20 years, I can’t really think of life without it. And since the pandemic, my mind has withered into a dark cave of frustration and rage. I’m triggered by the slightest fucking nuisance – an article detailing Republicans’ obstruction of a January 6th commission, Israel’s continued overuse of power and general being racist assholes to Palestinians, a bloviating drumstick sucking off Tony La Russa for giving the opposing pitching staff a license to drill his own player, etc.

I’m out of work for the first time in my over 11 years in the workforce because one day, I threw my hands up and yelled “Uncle!”

I told my boss I needed leave, she helped me start the process, and since filing my claim over 12 days ago my primary care doctor of over a decade managed to belittle and lie to my face when saying he’d help me make my case to my company’s insurance adjuster and instead torpedoed my claim, and now I’m depending on my half-retired therapist to safely navigate herself and her husband back home from the Florida Keys through treacherous waters whilst also hoping for my psychiatrist to come through for me when submitting documents on Monday.

I’ve spent over four years making myself miserable and sick to the stomach from watching the news as part of my job and now when I need to take a goddamn break, the world seems hellbent on ensuring my leave is denied and force me back into this godforsaken stretch of never-ending mental torment.

Apparently, it’s Mental Health Awareness Month. How fitting will it be for the adjuster to stonewall my mental health claim right now? I couldn’t have timed this more perfectly!

If I’d G-d forbid broken a bone or suffered some other physical injury, this claim would have started on time. But thanks to the fact that every process involving taking time off from work in America is contingent upon making sure the claimants aren’t gaming the system, something nearly nobody fucking does mind you, I’m using what little PTO I have to give myself an unwanted staycation all because employers are incessantly paranoid over the mere chance you could be wasting their time.

Yet if you ask nearly any (mostly Republican) “expert” on such things, we need to make the process to claim disability as hard as humanly possible to stop people from mooching off of a system where the richest people in this country have effectively been given welfare and wealth redistribution dozens of times over while the rest of the population festers and chokes in its own filth.

Have we ever questioned whether this system is beneficial to the minds of the average American? Doubtful. And even if we have as a society, we certainly came to the wrong fucking conclusions if the answer was to make a clinically depressed human being send in mountains of paperwork to prove to some faceless cohort of insurance adjusters something that person has known as reality their whole adult lives.

Perhaps the pandemic and the brain-fracturing 2020 election has turned me into a leftist, anti-capitalist shill. Or maybe years of being fucked by the system has taken its mental toll and left me with nothing by resentment and hatred in my heart.

Either way, mental health isn’t taken seriously in this country.

I just wish I had enough money to run away and never look back.

To Live and Die on Twitter

Here I was worried about having a Twitter in my name thinking I’d get in trouble for tweeting out my unfiltered beliefs online that I’d deactivated not one, not two, not three, but four (possibly five) Twitter accounts with my actual name.

Come 2016, I briefly had a Twitter for the minor league team. About a month or so after coming back to Atlanta, that shit was gone. I turfed it and went on with life.

And then the Nazi president struck and suddenly I needed to be back on that little bird app to make sure the world hadn’t ended in 180 characters or less.

I’d made a handful of “anonymous” accounts, basically just accounts without my name (like this blog). I did have one last account with my true identity before getting rid of that sucker in 2018. Thinking I could safely browse the Twitter-sphere, I forayed into that great valley of memes and feet pics/thirst traps under my assumed name.

At first I only browsed. Then the browsing turned into casual likes, and retweets, and eventually full-on tweets. Sometimes, even telling Trump to go fuck himself personally! What a thrill to verbally assault that fucking orange clown!

And then I began “violating” Twitter’s policies: one time was for telling someone to play in traffic, another for telling the official @GOP account to “eat shit and die”.

With one anonymous account down, I resorted to posting on my self-described “sports” account in which I’d try to avoid the political bullshit, more or less making that little corner of binary code my home for venting about the state of the pandemified world.

Of course, I interacted with more and more people, inevitably catching Twitter’s attention for a handful tweets, like the time I reacted to a post where a woman posted screenshots of demented texts from her abusive father who beat her and her mother on the regular. Upon my reply of “I wanna beat this fucking guy to shit WOW you abusive fucking prick”, I was suspended for abuse and harassment even though 1) I wasn’t tweeting at this man in particular and 2) HE WAS THREATENING HIS DAUGHTER WHO WENT ON TWITTER AND POST SAID THREATS AS HER OWN WAY OF COPING.

And yet that caught me a 10-day Twitter jail run.

But of all the times I more or less told Candace Owens to go fuck herself, called Matt Walsh a stupid fascist, or even went after Donald Fucking Trump himself, the final straw was the following:

YES, you read that correctly!

“I don’t see Tucker Carlson, I just see a redneck.”

And thus, the Twitter gods consigned my 20-follower account to ***SUSPENSION**** (pending review).

In direct violation of their policy that you must not create a new account to skirt a suspension, I fucking did that shit knowing that just like the last account I had this happen, they were never gonna give me a chance. So, I figured I’d try again.

And dear reader, I made an account that racked up 6 followers IN ONE DAY.

I felt FAMOUS, ALIVE: I had BEATEN the Great Jack Dorsey and his merry band of sometimes-not-completely-oblivious-to-actual-harassment moderators policing the high seas of the Timeline.

Alas, I tried following the girl with the abusive father and send her message, something I couldn’t do without listing my phone number.

And dear reader, you know damn well my stupid ass posted the only phone number I own, the very one linked with my currently suspended account. You know, the same account they told me not to try skirting around the suspension with a new account?

Hardly the smartest social media violation I’ve ever committed, but sadly it will more than likely end my Twitter days.

All of this, keep in mind, beginning because I was too damn afraid to have a Twitter in my own name in the first place.

All’s well that ends well, I suppose.

Maybe Tom from MySpace will welcome me back.