The Last Summer

Last month I didn't blog. And I'll tell you why. I spent about 80% of my time depressed out of my mind, 10% feeling sorry for myself for being depressed, 5% pestering the crap out of people who were too busy to spend time with me, and the other 5% feeling guilty about it.

Wait... ok, yeah. That adds up. Right? Yeah. So, obviously, there was no time to blog.

Sounds like a very good use of time, right? Not exactly.

Why was I depressed? Ever since I started at Drake, I imagined how this summer would be. My last summer. I would be living in an apartment off campus. I'd have a car. I'd be interning at Meredith. I'd be coming home and making myself dinner and doing my dishes afterwards in my kitchen sink.

You know what? I have ALL of those things. And, yet, I was miserable. I was just unhappy. And on top of being unhappy, I also freaked out about being unhappy. If having so much of what I always thought I wanted turned out to suck so much, what did that mean, exactly? Suddenly, I felt like I didn't know what I wanted anymore and with graduation approaching my doorstep, that made me really nervous.

Add all of that to the fact that moving away from campus was unexpectedly difficult. Last semester I couldn't wait to move off. I love Drake, but after three years, I guess I was just tired of looking at it all the time. It's great, but I needed a change of scenery. So I moved away. And I got a change of scenery. You know what else I got? An overwhelming sense of loneliness and isolation. Granted, it's summer and there aren't too many people around campus anyway, but I still felt cut off from it. I felt like I couldn't survive with out. Like I had been institutionalized or something and couldn't live on the outside.

It was HARD.

But then I remembered... didn't I kind of go through this last summer, too? Last summer I was an RA in Ross Hall and living on my own in a pseudo-apartment. I had hardly any residents (and the ones I did have didn't need me for anything) and I felt rather alone and I got depressed then, too. But as alone as I felt then, I wasn't truly alone. I had two other RAs I saw a few times a week and I talked to my friend Ryan online all the time. So I was by myself, but not really alone.

You know what happened? They all graduated and now they have lives. Busy lives full of life things. Which is great. They should have lives and jobs. In the meantime, though that was hard for me to get used to. I felt like they got to do stuff and be busy and move far away, and I was just still here feeling completely isolated.

It's not like I stayed in my apartment all the time, though. I went out. I did stuff. But it seemed like every offer I made to every friend on the short list of people I have who are local was returned with the four-letter b-word.

Busy.

So I went out anyway. And that was good, but not great. At least I wasn't at home in my apartment eating copious amounts of cake and watching guilty-pleasure, self-loathing movies like Bridget Jones' Diary. That's something, right?

I was proud of myself for doing so, but I just could get over feeling so depressed and frustrated with my complete lack of social situation. It's not like I needed to be with someone constantly, but every couple of weeks or so would be nice. It was weird and I never thought it'd be like this. And then I got scared that it would be like this for a long, long time even after I graduate.

But then one day I woke up completely exhausted. As it turns out, being depressed constantly kind of takes a lot out of you. And to be honest, I was tired of it. So I kind of just decided that I didn't want to be depressed anymore. I said to myself "you're not allowed to be depressed today." The weird thing was, it kinda worked. I wasn't puking rainbows or anything, but I wasn't wallowing in self-pity, either. I suppose I just realized that I had done everything in my power to fix my lack of social life and it wasn't working. People have other things going on and there's nothing I can do about it, so it's really quite pointless to mope about it. So I stopped. I realized that the summer--my last summer--was already half over and I blew half of it being stupid and I was done with all that. I still have some time left to make the summer amazing, and that's just what I'll do. Sometimes you just have to suck it up and take control of your own happiness and not leave it up to other people.