TW: depression

Also, thank you to for encouraging me to publish this post, with and without meaning to. Your work is so unabashedly honest, and I’m not sure I would have gotten over the “cringe” of sharing this with others if I hadn’t read it, even though that’s kind of the point of this whole piece.

A week ago, at one of our coffee shop coworking sessions, a friend asked me and another friend if we were going to the No Kings March that Saturday.

“I’m kind of jaded,” I said, the no guiltily implied. “It’s hard for me to see the point these days.”

These days was an accidental double entendre, referring sort of to our current sociopolitical climate but mostly to how I’ve been lately. In February I spent my first-ever 72-hour stint at a psychiatric hospital, a fact I am not particularly shy about, less because I’m eager to challenge mental health stigma than because pretending I’m fine is a lot more painful than allowing people to judge me. (So far, though, I don’t believe they have.)

In the week or so immediately following my hospital stay, with a $2,600 facility bill freshly loaded onto my credit card (fuck the American health insurance system for making my monthly premium basically useless, but at least I’m earning travel points, I guess), I found it extremely difficult to face nearly anyone I knew. Feigning happiness or general stability felt frustrating and stupid and also kind of heartbreaking, especially because many of my closest pals were celebrating major life events at the same time that I was exploring a new low. I felt torn between what felt like two very distinct options: act as though the hospital visit was a weird and quirky fluke and everything was on the up-and-up, or allow myself to be honest about the fact that progress—in emotional well-being, in familial relationships, in allowing oneself to call something “trauma” when it could have been so much worse—was apparently not linear.

As someone who’s generally embarrassed to have needs, I am more familiar with the first option. But when life hands you a wake-up call in the form of a $2,600 EOB, you listen.

In December, when the wound that has been afflicting me was newly reopened, I began working on a novel. In a way that contrasts sharply with my debut (read: only) book, it was literary and melancholy and set in a real place, where I have memories and photographs and routines. I made Pinterest boards for the thing, told my writer friends I was working on something new. It was only once I started to sketch out an outline that I realized the story too closely mirrored my own. This wasn’t just a self-insert; it was one step away from a memoir.

Sometimes, I think my writing inadvertently attempts to take something ugly and tie it up with a pretty little bow. I was sad, but I’m happy now. I was conflicted, but I’m decided now. I was insecure, but I’m confident now. It is difficult for me to exist transparently in a difficult or unflattering state because I hate pity; I want people to know that I not only can make it through this (whatever “this” happens to be at a given time) but already have.

But I can’t do that right now. I can’t take a situation with a parent that continues to break my heart and turn it into a story that isn’t devastating. My options, then, are to put this idea on hold or write a depressing novel that never really succeeds at wringing out its grief.

Though the project still interests me for reasons that aren’t entirely autobiographical (I am a setting-first writer and setting a project in 2008 excites me, mostly because I can sneak in references to my favorite recession pop hits), I’ve set it aside. There is value in creating fiction from things you personally have experienced, but that feels too ambitious right now. Everything does. Pitching stories, promoting my book, giving my office the deep clean it’s needed for who knows how long. What little energy I have must be carefully spent, and attempting to achieve anything at all will stretch the budget.

Lately I’ve been playing the 2021 remake of The Oregon Trail1 on the Nintendo Switch. The party from my most recent playthrough included a farm girl named JILL, who was both KIND and PUGNACIOUS. She was handy when we encountered other families on the trail or when it came time to hunt, but she was prone to low morale. Her party was always having to pull out a harmonica or stop at a campfire to tell stories, lest she grow too bummed (FORLORN) and jump ship (er, wagon).

“Ugh,” I griped to my boyfriend when we were gaming separately-but-together over the weekend, “this bitch is always FORLORN.”

Don’t worry—this is not me making a cute little analogy about how like Jill, we all get a bit sad sometimes when I really mean we all have a terrifying mental breakdown sometimes, after which we need weeks, maybe months (who knows!), to recover. What I will say, though, is that after a lifetime of playing The Sims, I thought it was genius of The Oregon Trail to make every gameplay choice both advantageous and costly, in one way or another. You can stop at a campfire to tell stories all night to boost your party’s morale, but you’ll lose hours of valuable travel time. You can tightly ration your food to make it last longer, but it’ll lower morale. You can hunt, but it’ll exhaust even your best marksman.

I felt kind of stupid for thinking this was a clever game development strategy when I realized that’s how real life works, too. And, like, of course it is. I can get stronger by adding an extra workout to my weekly regimen, but that’ll make me tired, making the next workout more difficult. I can save money by eating leftovers at home, but sharing some takeout with my boyfriend would be more fun. And I could tell those around me that I’m feeling fine now while pushing myself to write or pitch or promote, but it might take longer for me to feel better if I do.

In an effort to avoid feeling even more FORLORN, I’ve been trying to strike a balance between participating in fun, non-achievement-based activities for the sake of levity and indulging my sadness when it needs to be felt. In addition to playing The Oregon Trail, I’ve been logging many an hour on Planet Zoo2, working on my garden, hanging out with my friends’ cute little baby, and attempting to improve my cake decorating skills. But I’ve also been doing a lot of crying—like, a lot—and trying to convince myself that when I talk to people about my feelings, they probably (hopefully?) won’t think, Ugh, this bitch is always sad. I’m not trying to be melodramatic, after all. I’m just being truthful, and if there’s anything I’ve learned over the past couple of months, it’s how dangerous it can be to keep the truth to myself.

I hope that when the time comes for me to weave true grief and sadness and anger into my fiction, my sincerity—my lived experience—will shine through. But I’m not quite there yet; it takes time to build up the hope and the confidence necessary to make that type of work successful. Sometimes the feelings just need to be felt before they can be made into something new.

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This is the second entry in the as-yet unnamed blog section of Creativity Under Capitalism, where I publish occasional personal and/or lifestyle-oriented posts. If that’s your thing, I’m happy to have you! If it’s not, you can unsubscribe from this section without losing your subscription to Creativity Under Capitalism.

I have always had a terrible memory. I often joke that my best friend is my memory; now and then she’ll ask if I remember a moment from our teenage years or early 20s, to which I’ll always respond, No, but I believe you. I am grateful that she remembers so much of what we’ll one day call “our youth,” but dismayed whenever I can’t relive the bubbly laughter, bewilderment, or melodramatic high school emotion that she so easily calls to mind.

A few months ago, I shared this with my therapist, and she frowned. “A poor memory is often a marker of a terrible childhood,” she said. But I shook my head. My childhood wasn’t abrasive enough for my brain to want to scrub itself clean. The problem, I posited, was that I never paid sufficient attention to anything. I was always focused on whatever was going to come next.

I’m doing that now on my couch. It’s New Year’s Eve, and the living room is dimly lit, a jazz compilation playing on the TV. I’ve brewed myself a cup of hazelnut black tea in anticipation of our late night out, but it’s over-steeped; I forgot about it a minute after dunking the bag into the hot water, having mentally moved on to the next task (whatever that was). Everything I do is simply a way of biding my time until the next thing, which will serve as a waiting room activity for what follows.

Is this a survival strategy? Maybe. In high school, when my relationship with one parent really began to deteriorate, I convinced myself that I just needed to make it to graduation, after which I could move to Arizona (where I’d spent my early years) and form a life of my own choosing. Through college, as I worked a very intense full-time job and took a full slate of classes (often while also working freelance gigs on the side), I told myself that I just needed to make it to graduation, after which I could finally slow down and start living. Then, after graduation and the implosion of my planned career in federal law enforcement (lol), I told myself that I needed to hustle to build the writing career that the world had always implied was unrealistic and unsustainable. After that was settled, I could hopefully afford to stop and smell the roses.

But here I am, with most of the life I yearned for as a teenager—a loving partner, a home I own, a career I’m good at and enjoy, plenty of friends, a published book, and two cats who are my whole world—plus more, and I still insist on rushing ahead. Part of me thinks this is because I am constantly convinced I don’t have “enough time”; a few years ago, after breaking free of long-term suicidal ideation and realizing that I did indeed want to live for a while, I developed a fear that, out of a cruel sense of irony, the universe would kill me off earlier than I newly wanted. In a way, I feel that I’m on borrowed time. If I want to publish another book or buy rural property in my favorite desert town (my most frivolous but stubborn dream), I’d better do it quick.

But if I don’t break this pattern, another year will pass with little conscious memory to accompany it. While scrolling through my camera roll for photos to add to the collage above, I came across moments I’d completely forgotten about: one of the most incredible dinners of my life in upstate New York; fostering two rambunctious orange kittens; surprise fireworks while my friends and I were at the pool. If you had asked me pre-scroll what my 2025 was like, I probably would have mentioned my authorial debut or the part-time job I desperately wanted, got, and then left six months later. The “big” stuff.

Intellectually, I know that life is not just a collection of the type of events that end up on one’s Wikipedia page: it’s also what happens in between. The best days of my life so far were not the ones in which I got into my alma mater, moved to Arizona, bought my house, or earned my first publishing deal. They’re ones in which the universe served up seemingly small yet pleasant surprises, and I had the awareness required to recognize just how lucky I was to experience them.

Emotionally, though, it’s hard to convince myself to slow down. I see in the news that a young person has died in a terrible and unexpected way, and my anxious brain reminds me: That could be you next time. Better hurry up. Or I finish a book, flip it over to read the author’s bio, and realize that they are roughly my age, only to ask myself why, unlike them, I haven’t yet managed to land in the Paris Review and secure a literary agent. It’s this cycle that urges me to push fast-forward, desperate to get to “the good parts” so at least I’ll know they’re there at all.

But this is the good part, I tell myself on the couch. There’s a quiet, calming sort of magic in allowing these moments in between to illuminate how my cats play with each other, how the shrimp dance across the gravel in my little aquarium, or how impeccably my boyfriend cuts the chives that go on top of our dinner. Don’t these details lend texture to a life, too?

I’m two days into the new year when I finish writing this post. As 2025 gave way to 2026, it began to rain, with a smattering of showers appearing throughout the first day of the new year. I can’t help but assume such timely rain is a good omen here in the desert, and when I head out for a boxing session, I notice that the air smells like creosote, though the nearest mountain preserve is a few miles away. The resilient plant’s scent lingers as I run a few post-workout errands, infusing urban Phoenix with the quintessential aroma of desert rain. With every item I cross off my to do list, I challenge myself to take a deep breath and remember that moment.

Is the Walgreens parking lot a Wikipedia-worthy place? Is the post office? No. But I want to remember them anyway.

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This is the first entry in the as-yet unnamed blog section of Creativity Under Capitalism, where I’ll publish occasional personal and/or lifestyle-oriented posts. If that’s your thing, I’m happy to have you! If it’s not, you can unsubscribe from this section without losing your subscription to Creativity Under Capitalism.