Nov. 2020-Apr. 2021
PART I: PROLOGUE
Who doesn’t love celebrating anniversaries? After all, they are commemorations of moments that remind us that we’re human, constantly evolving and changing over time. Things as simple as birthdays, holidays, or even life-changing promotions come to hold these deeper meanings to us as the years go on. These are irrefutable. They are the accomplishments that are forever tied to our name, giving a sense of pride at how far we’ve come. To celebrate an anniversary is to remember the existence of time, of progress, of being alive.
Though not all anniversaries are made equal. As I sit at my laptop, I recognize the significance of November 13. In 2020, it was one of the screwiest of holidays: a Friday the 13th that happened to mark a significant moment in my life. To look back on it is to wince, maybe even cry. As I overlook old documents all I can find is a person stuck in a perpetual state of self-pity, barely holding onto the façade that they were fine. What hurts more than the pain of those words was the knowledge that this was the start of something that would be sustained over five months, where a simple depression wasn’t going to cut it. This time, it was a plunge down a dark tunnel. The voices echo to me, thinking that I can still see where I’m going, but barely.
I found myself on the other side on April 26, 2021. Whereas most of my depressions could be labeled under “manageable,” this is one that found me coming out a changed person. The months behind were filled with pain, of dissociation caving into intrusive thoughts and self-harm, of weight loss that caused my chest to occasionally hurt. Long nights of viral video escapism paved way for sometimes not getting out of bed until noon. This was the worst that depression has ever been for me, and it was only when I felt that pain and felt more shame than relief that I began to change.
To those who only wish to know the broad strokes, this is a good place to conclude. I’m someone who has been granted a happy ending and, in some respect, one where the darkness ultimately leads to greater understanding. For those who want a greater picture, I present this essay that I write not to celebrate the start of my worst depression, but an attempt to better understand why, memorialize it so that those emotions aren’t allowed to feel foreign. Somewhere in these words, I hope to find encouragement for myself, to continue to find meaning in this life, and ultimately be grateful. The journey there is not a flattering one, though at the same time I don’t necessarily believe it to be authentic to strictly me.
If you are in that dark tunnel, I hope you will find the strength to make it out. I can’t promise that it will be easy or even happen soon, but hopefully, the road ahead will be worthwhile for you. Please take care of yourself and do know that you are loved.
SECTION II: BACKGROUND
Macro
There was no easy way to survive living in The United States in 2020. Following a period in Late-2019 where Covid-19 spread throughout Asia, it was easy to predict that it would hit American shores eventually. This was a viral disease, able to be spread so rapidly that its invisible existence became one of the greatest threats to humanity. Within weeks it was elevated from an epidemic to a pandemic. Hospitals became overwhelmed as staff did everything to understand a disease that would become a permanent fixture in their lives. By the end of the year, hospital vacancies were at 0%. Ambulances would have to make decisions as to whether picking up a sick passenger was ultimately worth it as many had to wait for access. Exposure to that much death en masse, where it piled into storage units and if the staff wasn’t facing psychological turmoil, their constant use of gear made resources difficult to manage. Many loved ones weren’t allowed to see each other in their final days for fear of spreading a virus which, until November 2020, didn’t have any clear future of a cure.
The world, logically, shut down… or at least the portion that saw the health risk as just that. On the one hand, people panicked buying resources (including an overabundance of toilet paper that lead to its own plague of bad TP jokes). Given that the future of the economy was for the first time in decades completely uncertain, it was a confusing time to be alive. Where could one even walk without the risk of dying? The arts were gone or at least moved to online videos. Meanwhile, the president launched a poorly planned Covid-19 safety initiative that was more mocking than helpful, suggesting at one point that injecting bleach was safe. Given other forms of division that he created in this time, it’s easy to see how these comments created their own cycle of anxiety. He soon would contract the virus and still proceed to make fun of its harmfulness in every way possible.
Outside of a once-a-century pandemic, 2020 was marked with several noteworthy conflicts. The most noteworthy was the murder of George Floyd, where a police officer laid on his neck for 8 mins. 47 secs., thus starting a nationwide protest (the longest sustained and biggest in this nation’s history). Following it was a discussion over race relations, including conflict around police brutality and funding. Peaceful protestors were gassed so that the president could take a hacky photo in front of a church for no discernible reason. His scorched earth on 2020 wasn’t over, as he still had a reelection campaign to run that included such chestnuts as “Proud boys, stand down and stand by.” The crazy thing is that he arguably would’ve won if the pandemic didn’t make him look so irresponsible.
Meanwhile in California, amid rent moratoriums and free food distributions, there were climate disasters afoot. The most noteworthy was the ongoing wildfires that burn millions of acres annually. When asking for resources, the president rejected the protection of federal land because of California’s disagreement with his personal policies. Given that the southern border featured building an ecologically disastrous wall and featured hundreds of families separated for months and years, so much of the state was thrown into disarray. Suicide rates were on the rise and while records have suggested that California is on the lower side of fatality percentages, the numbers were still some of the highest in the nation.
Between January and December 2020, millions globally died with thousands contracting Covid-19 daily and raising the question of just where was safe. While creatives passed the time making some of the most intimate and authentic art in their careers, there was still reason to believe that everyone would come out of this a little bit battered. Suicide rates were rising and many mourned the loss of those holidays, those in person encounters that had come to symbolize so much joy in their lives. It was a time of isolation, of inactivity, and really questioning just why America thought it was a good idea to run a Census in a year where a significant percentage of the recipients were sick or dead from a disease absolutely nobody could control.
This is just 2020. I choose to stop here for the sake of your sanity and to allow this to serve as a pretext and not a thorough history.
Micro
By nature, I am an introvert. I flock to the quiet and simple life. With that said, I am no different from any other person. I need my escapism. I need live theater and cinemas to populate my mind, give me a routine that allows me to explore the world around me. This is not something one can acquire from your couch, popping through Netflix and finding a new TV series to enjoy. For me, there is something to the spontaneity, of being in an environment where most of the variables are outside of your control. On some level, this would be true if I just returned to my regular life, throwing the safety mask aside when I saw fit. However, I love these venues because they feel protective, recognizable. As of this publication, several of them have closed due to bankruptcy.
In what can be considered poor planning on my part, I also chose to release a short story collection near the start of the pandemic, when EVERYTHING was shut down. “Esoteric Shapes,” ever since sometime Mid-2019, was planned for an April Fool’s Day release. Why? Because I liked the humor behind it. By the time things were etched in stone, it was difficult to turn around and cancel because who knew if there would ever be an appropriate time. As a result, it was one of the first awkward moves I made in 2020, releasing something that I wasn’t sure was worth selling given everyone pinching pennies to get through potential months of limited funds.
It was true that I also received my first check around this time. I’m talking specifically of receiving money from royalties I got off of Amazon. That is a lifelong accomplishment that I will forever be proud of, even if it’s not enough to retire upon. Having also recently started The Memory Tourist as “A look at a life through media that helped define it,” I had more than enough creative pursuits to keep me busy, and thus for every day between April and early December, I published content daily, sometimes writing and editing for 4-6 hours. While it expanded my tastes and connected me with a wider net of friends on Twitter, this came to be exhausting as it went from delightful discovery to overbearing obligation.
This is a pain to live through, especially when there wasn’t as much validation for your work as you’d hope. This was supposed to provide job opportunities. Given that I turned down a job working the Census because I feared health concerns, I was already feeling like a failure. By the end of the year, I not only was running out of steam but I was also lacking passion and a sense of self. The website wasn’t rejuvenating anything. It sometimes didn’t feel personal enough. I still wrote an occasional article that made me proud, but the guidelines I set for myself were so annoying, especially when there was little greater reward for absolutely any of it.
Putting this aside made me realize how much of that six month period I had been alone, coping with excessive thoughts. Not all of them were necessarily benefitting me, either. What was being gained? The most that could be said from reviewing three pop records a month was that these albums were much more conventionally-designed than I had previously realized. The young love of these stars weighed on me as I tried to feel an emotion clearly designed for teenagers. Even the idea of them being more glamorous and skinny ate at me. I wasn’t mad, just sincerely jealous that my youth didn’t have more expression behind it.
When I unlocked the idea that The Memory Tourist was a website FOR ME, it in some ways revealed two things at once. It was too freeing, but also meant that being more open would force me to be more vulnerable in ways that I wasn’t exactly being even with myself. I hid things because, quite honestly, I didn’t think they were acceptable or worth exploring. Even sharing interests unlocked the memory of feeling bullied out of liking pop music in fifth grade because most of the school liked nu-metal and gangsta rap. I understood that my journey to self-healing wasn’t just a microcosm of one event, but prolonged experiences that resonated to different eras including as a very young child, my high school and early college years, and most recently in 2017 with the excessively traumatic outcome of my sister’s divorce. We are all happier now, but what I came to realize was just how much I needed to work through.
I also got into my dream school, California State University of Long Beach (CSULB), but that’s not important just yet…
SECTION III: “TYLER, WHY ARE THERE NO PHOTOS OF US?”
Certain things are difficult to fully process without available documentation. This can be in letters, pictures, or even landmarks that bring back vivid ideas. I live in California, where everything is under reconstruction, where the joke is that every newly abandoned building will become a Spirit Store in a few months. The beloved Acres of Books downtown that once regaled Ray Bradbury with so much joy now became a useless lot. Memories existed in my head, and they weren’t always clear pictures. In fact, when dealing with complex forms of trauma, where being self-critical has overpowered rational thoughts, it sometimes is easy to think that everything sucks and nothing will ever get better. I force myself to be an optimist because of this, needing to not give into the darkness.
Early in the depression, the positive heirlooms weren’t in direct grasp. I had to deal with so many ideas running through my head, refusing to let happiness be high on the priority list. I hadn’t seen my “Movie Buddy” in near six months and my ultimate achievements lacked any permanence. I had “Esoteric Shapes,” but that was about it. I had family, who unintentionally made me feel pressured to stay healthy and available solely that I could babysit on the chance that my father needed to take care of my aging grandparents or any other emergencies came up. I was in a bind, unable to really do much of anything, and the freezing with a lack of myself recognizing gratitude meant I was repressing so much that I wanted to say and do. I couldn’t go out and do something fun because the risk of being sick was too much, especially when hospitals were at 0% capacity.
It makes you feel useless, like your life is forever on pause while everyone else does the more noble deeds. During this time, I had a conversation online that triggered memories of my childhood. While this was driven as much for the emotions of the time that I hadn’t addressed in years, it was the strange revelation that I fell in love with this person because they felt so familiar, symbolizing an aspect of my past that I was longing to revisit. I had no control when I did finally listen to every dumb record I hadn’t thought of in years. It would still be some time before I addressed core conflicts in my life, but I felt alive.
An issue was that I always knew that she would be just a friend. Sometimes my lack of people to be vulnerable with caused me to want to project onto her, especially since she was very candid about her own life. In some ways I emulated her, feeling myself grow uncomfortable in the process, worrying that everyone would judge me. I was too eager for attention and at times there was enough lost in translation that I felt like punishing myself for trying. To her credit, she has been a good “Twitter friend” as it were and I’ve done my best to not feel pressured to please her for no discernible reason, and it’s allowed conversations to feel more relaxed. I won’t say much about her other than she’s a lesbian and her own confidence in identity was a small part of my own personal encouragement later in this piece.
But that conversation drew me to find artifacts, to dive into my own past. At the time I was very self-critical. To find old writing on The Memory Tourist is to notice an abundance of calling myself “stupid” and believing that my opinion was inferior. I thought of older relationships, such as this girl I knew in high school who meant the world to me then. Thinking, a bit one-sided, of how I let her down only tore open wounds, especially since most of our documented history together had been wiped out in a MySpace database error a near decade ago. Most evidence that we knew each other was absolutely gone.
So I hated myself. Simple as that. This moment that should’ve been long past was piling onto an already building sense of worthlessness, like I would be trapped in this pandemic state forever. Cabin fever had set in and I had no idea how to break free of it. There was no vaccine, no sense of accomplishment. I could count how many pictures I took in 2020 on one hand, and none of them were necessarily indicative of that specific year.
Because of that, I rummaged through old documents, finding yearbooks and poetry notebooks. I tried to find any resource that gave me a sense of greater validation. In the process, I found out so much of myself that I thought had been new was actually thoughts I had for over a decade now, including this self-effacing sense of worthlessness. It’s the type of aspect that makes one believe that they always had a minor case of depression when it’s really some other complex form of conflict. Still, in reading those messages I found myself recognizing my worth, of noticing that I had been building up something of value for quite a long while. The most shining message came from Ethan who broke character and said that he liked me and thought I was talented.
While I do not have a museum of memories to pull from, I did have that message. I had old creative arts magazines to flip through and see everyone’s poetry from their teenage years. I got to wonder what they were up to. Even if I never quite figured out what Angela or Anthony was up to, I had this piece of shared history, and I clang onto it, along with the notebooks that held so much of a strange, complex look into my past that was equal parts embarrassing as well as enlightening.
These were the words of a person frustrated and confused by the world. There was as much anarchic punk rock spirit where it was clearly just naked aggression as there was pain disguised as humor. So many passages about personal suffering lined those notebooks. There were others where I reveled in ultimately gay ideology, notably in my published piece “Cross-Dressing.” Other times I took on the perspective of first person as a woman, leading to questions both on how I perceived women in my life as well as what that attempt at empathy was supposed to mean to my bigger identity.
I cannot imagine how others who are less inclined to preservation go about their life. How does one deal with wanting to understand personal growth, to have something to remind yourself of the many years you have spent on this earth?
In January, I watched the Euphoria special “Fuck Anybody Who’s Not a Sea Blob” and it had a profound impact on me. It was the story of Jules (Hunter Schafer) looking back on her life, assessing just what was going on amid certain traumas and interpersonal conflicts. In one flashback, she turns to a mirror and asks her online boyfriend “Tyler, why are there no photos of us?” The first time I heard that was eviscerating, realizing how much I struggled to even remember my own past. When I was most in need of it, there were only traces and even those were incomplete. I had no better way to access them. Instead, I felt Jules’ loneliness, this longing to form relationships with people online despite acknowledging deep down that something about them was hollow and unreal. To grapple with all of that may explain why I latched onto films like Portrait of Jason (1967) or the works of Chantal Akerman, eagerly trying to find some deeper meaning. I think deep down I wanted to be like Jules and reach the end of the therapy session with some relief that somebody listened, that someone even if it was just professionally cared.
How do you reconstruct a memory that has been altered by various coping mechanisms? It’s difficult. From advice that I was personally given, the goal was just to write everything out until you had nothing left to say. It’s what I had done for most of my life, since I was five. In years like 2020, I am grateful for that, for I have access to so much of my own written word. The issue is that while these are comforting, they sometimes cannot match the simple fact of seeing a face, or touching a hand, or hearing a joke. Without those, the experience was incomplete. What was my life but one big blur which, given that I was 31, felt worse that I was fading out of relevance fast and that nobody would care what I had to say very, very soon?
to be continued...
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