What if my sadness is not context specific- diary 24/08/25

Also, what's more dignified, being a poor political commentator or a filthy rich OnlyFans influencer?

Monday 18th August

What if my sadness isn’t the result of events at all? What if it arrived with me, stitched onto my skin, and spends its days hunting for hooks to latch onto, like a baby cuckoo forcing out the other emotions so I’ll feed its sulky beak?

I don’t know when I first realised I was a melancholic person. Maybe Mum planted the seed. But my earliest memory of craving a pain more agonising than my own dates back to high school. A classmate’s rejection had me fantasising about dying, about people mourning me and regretting the cruelty they’d shown.

I was a moody teenager, a mercurial twenty-something, and now, at thirty-one, a measured stoic. The triggers for heaviness are often obvious: who wouldn’t grieve over sick parents, betrayal by friends, indifference from editors, or exploitation by bosses? I just don’t trust my sadness to be honest. I think she is trying to pull the wool over my eyes. She whispers in my ear when I receive compliments, warning me not to trust them. She tells me they don’t care to tell me the truth, that they are not my real friends, but rather sycophants. She was there at my worst, in my unfuckable hate nerd days. I stuck with her, and look how far she took me. How dare I question her authority?

It’s a tough gig, being my sadness. I am the opposite of a self-destructive person. I am a walking, talking self-help book. All the lines on the graph point in the right direction. I never give her any obvious things to attach herself to, apart from my parents deteriorating circumstances (she loves reminding me they’ll die). So she has to be creative. She strips some layers off my skin, makes sure taps feel like lashes, kisses like stabs.

I just have this feeling that my fellow travellers are alcohol or drug addicts. I just know it.