Depression Is So Gay
The hippocampus? Girl... she's gagging.
I know, I know. You signed up for a happy gay newsletter and now you clicked on this one and you see the word “depression” and you’re like, Matt, what the FUCK is this shit? I subscribed to your free newsletter expecting you to make me laugh, you stupid clown. Well guess what, bitch? Gay culture is about dramatic twists! One day you think you’re getting a funny newsletter and then BAM, I hit you with the ol’ razzle-dazzle (depresh talk). It’s called range, sweetie. I am basically the Meryl Streep of newsletter writers.
But… it’s been a shitty week (slash month slash year), and what good is having a newsletter if I can’t complain about my life? Gay culture is about forcing people to listen to your problems! Gay culture is about making everything about you!
Now, I’m legally required to clarify: not all gay people are depressed, and not all depressed people are gay. (Even though I firmly believe, deep down, that all of us are both gay and depressed.)
But as a person of depressed homosexual experience, I am sticking the rainbow flag in my shriveled hippocampus (the technical term for the part of the brain that regulates emotions and also the term for the grounds of a community college for hippopotamuses) and claiming depression as inherently queer.
I’m no expert on depression, but I’m pretty sure it works something like this: there’s three drag queens that live inside our brains called Deaux Pamine, Sara Tonin, and Nora Eppin Ephron and they’re all here to make sure we have a gay old time and also to write Sleepless In Seattle. In lots of brains, these queens go on stage exactly when they say they will because they are professionals and that is their job. In brains like mine, these bitches take their gay ass time to do their gay ass jobs, and like all gay people, they do their jobs poorly and also leave questionable stains in the green room. It sucks that they suck at their job, but we give them some pills, take them to therapy, put them in sunlight, and hope that they do their shit better tomorrow.
I’ve had depression for as long as I’ve had gay. (And yes, I am medicated for both.) And the super exciting thing about depression is that it keeps you on your toes, like a quality stilletto heel. Your brain is like, “OK sis, don’t be mad, but we decided to be sad today, and also we’re absolutely not gonna tell you why. Good luck and don’t fuck it up!” And then you get to spend the whole day wondering: Am I just hungry? Or dehydrated? Or underslept? Or hungover? Or is it just cloudy? Or is there a full moon? Or did I just see a photo of Harry Styles on a boat and wish *I* was on the boat, except I’m not on the boat, I’ve never even been to the part of the world he’s in right now, I’m just sitting in my apartment alone, picking at an ingrown toenail and wondering if it’s gonna get infected and then eat its way through my insides from the bottom-up? Or… are my brain chemicals just not pumping right today? Who knows! There is simply no way of knowing!
I suspect a lot of us are feeling weird right now in a kind of indescribable way. It feels like the clouds have parted after a gloomy year and the gay Teletubby baby that lives inside the sun has finally peeked out, and we should be feeling more hopeful, but there’s still this lingering blahness. It’s a mixture of FOMO, of relearning how to exist in public, of living in the aftermath of an entire year of nonstop shittiness, and it feels like too much is happening and not enough is happening all at once. It’s weird. And it’ll probably continue to be weird for a little while longer.
Jason Sudekis — one of the few heterosexual men I will acknowledge — said this in GQ this week about making sense of the end of his relationship: “I'll have a better understanding of why in a year… and an even better one in two, and an even greater one in five, and it'll go from being, you know, a book of my life to becoming a chapter to a paragraph to a line to a word to a doodle.”
A chapter to a paragraph to a line to a word to a doodle.
All bad stuff feels immense in the moment. Our brains are good at making us feel that way. Because our brains are dramatic and gay and they like attention. But a bad day (or week! or month! or year!) will eventually dwindle away to nothing.
In the meantime, take your meds, go to therapy, call the Trevor Project hotline if you need it, get some sunshine, and do gay shit.
In other gay news…
We’ve long known the brown and green M&M have been in a long-term committed lesbian relationship, but the communion of the red and yellow M&M remains largely unexplored. I, for one, am firmly of the belief that these two know one another carnally. But I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.