Depression Starts Talking and His Voice Is Raspy

“And I'm the only thing that's standing in my way yall

But I gotta be with me, it's no escape yall

I guess depression just stepped in, and took over shit like it's known to do

Guess it said, hey Joe, I'm going home with you

Turn your phone off, I need to be alone with you

I need to be in the zone with you

Cuz I'm the only thing you've grown to, nigga

Look, I OWN you, nigga

Been with you since 10, but you starting to confuse me

Cause it's been so long and you still tryna lose me

Like how could you show me such cruelty??

When everybody turns their back on you, Joe it's you and me

Still you don't want me to see you right

And why you always come get me, how we re-unite

I know you feel for me deep in your heart

Doctors, meetings, pills couldn't keep us apart

Now you got a deal and you wanna get rid of me

We’re roommates, I'm in your head, Joe you live with me

So I don't write for the fans, nah, I write to my man

And hope that he'll just leave and understand

Like, like please leave the kid in peace

Let me smoke this one cig in peace

Just leave for a second, man it's been too long, and I can't troop it

But as long as you around I can't make that dance music” - Joe Budden

I was going to try to put all my feelings in words but that would take far too long and I believe those lyrics pretty much summed it all up. Obviously not too many people I know deal with it but it’s a serious disease of the mind. I go through some form of this shit every single day. Some days I wake up and simply don't feel like being bothered with anyone at all, then sometimes I can be in a rather pleasant mood for the entire day and someone will do something so minor and it’ll set it all off. It's literally like having an alter ego, I have no clue who will show up the next day. Today, it might be the person that most people have grown to know and love but tomorrow I could easily be the person they utterly despise. What makes it worse is that me, being the logical person I am, decided to try and figure a way around it but that was to no avail. I figured drugs would help but that just made it worse because it turns out that apparently I’m a textbook addict too. The drugs just create an illusion for the mind to cling to for awhile but eventually that goes away and reality kicks back in which is precisely why I’ve never seen a shrink. “I’d feel less if I drugged myself up with antidepressants, but in essence I’m threatening my character assessment.” Where’s the value of life if you have to walk around in a zombie-like state just to cope with it? But being an addict, I lost track of why I was even doing the drugs in the first damn place and became overwhelmed with all the fun I was having and the chaos that I would create. I remember once looking back through all of my facebook statuses dating back over a year and I could literally distinguish every single time I was high just by the subject matter and the way I presented it. So I guess being an addict is really the scary thing here because we’ve seen over and over again the type of devastation it can cause and others around you are forced to basically sit back and watch your steady and inevitable decline. I truly hope I don’t go out like that and I don’t think I will because I wholeheartedly believe I’ve learned my lesson as far as that’s concerned. Looking back and realizing you were doing enough drugs at one time EVERYDAY to kill an average person will put things into perspective but it also made me realize that a lot of it’s mental. Think about it, in the 90’s people took GHB and rohypnol, the date rape drugs, recreationally because it supposedly produced effects somewhat similar to what ecstasy does nowadays. Now what that says to me is that mentally preparing yourself for it allows for a different effect as opposed to having it slipped in your drink and unknowingly taking it. So I think that, that in itself is the best medication, to just mentally prepare and embrace it all. Im ok with the depression enough to know that it’s certainly not ideal but it does have its upsides and that’s why I love those lyrics because he understands how much pain it causes but at the end he realizes it’s also what causes him to be so creative and passionate in his music. That was especially refreshing to me because I used to look at it as a bad side effect of being gifted but actually I think being gifted is a good side effect of the disease. As much as I hate dealing with it, I do enjoy having an abnormally high IQ haha but a stipulation of being gifted is that you have to be equipped to live with all the critics. People constantly criticize me for being so negative about things and letting the stupid shit affect me like it does and normally it wouldn’t bother me at all but some act as if I do it on purpose so theoretically I should be able to just up and change it if I wanted to and that’s what upsets me. Honestly, who the fuck would knowingly choose live their life like this? My mind becomes encompassed with terrible thoughts and there’s no way of getting rid of them other than finding something else to think about and it’s usually not too much better but at the same time the replacement thoughts are certainly not as dark. I can tell you that there have been so many times when I wished I could just be like everyone else for at least a brief moment and have the ability to feel the entire spectrum of emotions , but at same time I’ve been in too many situations where it helped because bad things didn’t affect me like they affect normal people. What’s pitiful is that I find myself too often just going through the motions when it comes time to show emotion. Death doesn’t make me too sad, sure I feel for the families but I guess with me, I’ve personally dealt with it so much that it no longer poses to be that wake up call for me that it is for everyone else. That’s just simple psychology, a person dies and the people that know them are forced to take a step back and analyze their own mortality and then you get all the cliché sayings that go with it. I guess this is somewhat fitting since for all of us that went to high school together, we just lost one of our own and while everyone else is busy being flooded with emotion , I’m just sort of sitting there in amazement and disbelief. Of course it’s undoubtedly tragic, I’m not denying that for a second, but I’m more in awe at the ignorant value of life that living gets. Are you suddenly reminded of how valuable it is only when someone you know dies? What kind of thinking is that? Maybe it’s different for ordinary people but for me, a person who often wishes he had other people’s lives, I fully understand how valuable it is because I live everyday with the thoughts of how terrible my mind perceives mine to be but I always keep in mind the simple fact that it could be worse. But enough with all of my rambling, I just said that to say this; I decided to become a student of the mind when I realized I was becoming a prisoner of it and all I wanted was to mastermind an escape route but I ended up falling in love with all of the things I learned in the process. I've studied people for damn near my whole life so I know what makes them tick and while I'm one of those people who thinks ten steps ahead, I can also see your moves ten steps in advance. Hell I can figure you out in a heartbeat and manipulate the living hell outta you if I so choose to but that would only end up making things worse in the long run, and trust me, I've already thought it through hehe. So throughout it all, it’s given me an ability to see the world in a much different light than most people can and while I know now that I’ll never escape, I guess the best thing to do would be to use that knowledge for good and try to provide insight to anyone who’s willing to listen and take my advice.

“Depression tells me I suck, but I replied ‘I aint here cuz I fell down, im here cuz I got UP!’”

Assisted Suicide....What's The Big Deal?

Alright, first off I’d like to say R.I.P. to Jack "Dr. Death" Kevorkian who died earlier this month, a truly brilliant man in my personal opinion. His death inspired me to watch the movie detailing his life You Don’t Know Jack, which in turn inspired me to write this entry. So I guess we’ll just go ahead and get to the issue; do you consider him to be a revolutionary or a serial killer? I pride myself on taking an objective approach to everything I think about but with that being said, I can’t find a single valid point coming from those that believe he was some sort of a murderer. This world hasn’t seen a tremendous amount of truly great people but the ones we know about, I feel that the true essence of their greatness gets overlooked….think about it. For instance we admire Einstein for his genius, for coming up with the theory of relativity when in actuality he simply expanded on it. There was already a theory of relativity but therein lies his true greatness to me, because he understood that there had to be more to it than that and he wasn’t afraid to endure ridicule or failure to figure what was missing out so that’s essentially where I draw the line. There have been plenty of individuals who’ve invented great things or who’ve accomplished the seemingly impossible but then there were the great unsung heroes, people who truly changed the world by doing something that inevitably made the world stop and think…and that’s where I place Jack Kevorkian. Aside from his expertise in pathology and vast artistic ability was his determination to revolutionize this country and tip it off of its religiously fanatical axis by doing one thing: helping people end their suffering….. and all he ended up getting in return was a 9 year prison sentence. In my opinion it could all be so easy, just a matter of simple humanity, but this country and this government are so damn puritanical that religious dogma always seems to get in the way and trump all logic and reason. Make no mistake about it though, if you’re religious I’m not gonna sit here and knock you like I know you knock me but all I’m asking are 2 distinct questions: Why can’t you abandon your beliefs long enough to simply be humane or if you can’t do that then why can’t you realize just how hypocritical you are? The main accusations people made were that he was “trying to play God, only God should decide whether we live or die” and “God tests us and puts through things, he wants us to suffer in order to be stronger.” Ok well first off, virtually all medical doctors “play God” and that’s a fact. Secondly, and here’s where the big hypocrisy comes in, using that same logic why is it that when you get sick you immediately go to the doctor to get treated? Why is it when you have a toothache you go to the dentist to get painkillers? You see, to me there’s no difference between going to get help in order to extend your life and getting help to end it and herein lies what I like to refer to as the gray area, the place most people are literally afraid to look at or go to. The place you end up if you’re courageous enough to leave this “black and white” lifestyle we all grow so comfortable with, when you actually become torn between the two sides. I can speak from personal experience, I watched my father suffer and deteriorate before my very own eyes and I wouldn’t wish that upon my worst enemy but he did enlighten me on one last issue, the quality of life. I’ll never forget when he told me, “If you can’t learn to just let me go then you’re fucking selfish because this isn’t living.” The first person Kevorkian helped was a lady a suffereing from Alzheimer’s disease and while she clearly wasn’t going to die anytime soon he understood that it wouldn’t be long before everyone she loved would die, in her mind. Why not let a person end their own life while they can still recognize the people they love most, if you couldn’t remember your spouse, siblings, or even your own damn children then what the fuck would be the point of living? So with that being said, how could a person who helped people put an end to their excruciating pain and agony be called a serial killer? He allowed suffering people to go out with the dignity they all deserve and all people talked about was how bad of a person he was. And mind you he did this for free, unlike normal doctors who get paid damn good to keep you alive and who might decide to diagnose incorrectly just to keep treating your false condition and make you buy irrelevant, non effective drugs to keep making money and also simply because you don’t know any better. Then finally there’s the biggest point of all, and that was the government’s interference during all of this. Plenty of great minds have said it, Kevorkian included; we’re nowhere close to real freedom in this country. When religion and politics combine you’ve got a helluva problem on your hands, because still to this day there are only 3 states in this country that allow assisted suicide. I know that if you read this chances are that you wouldn’t make the connection between that and the whole abortion subject but that’s basically saying the government owns our bodies. They tell us what we can and can’t do with them, they have the power to decide if you can be taken off of life support but firmly oppose you taking matters into your own hands, literally. It’s almost as if they believe they have the right to decide who lives and dies and when it all should happen…..so who’s really “Playing God?”