One thing that consistently keeps me alive is the fact that there will always be new things to enjoy. As a person who has been prone to get real, REAL depressed on a regular basis since, well, birth, really, or at least as far back as I can remember, life can feel gray and bland and without any sort of point or meaning a lot of the time. I don’t always have the energy or wherewithal to seek out new books / movies / TV / music / sensations / foods / ideas / hobbies / smells / etc. but I can and will at some point and so in the meantime, I will wave from under the weighted blanket with a box of Cheez-Its and fall asleep in front of a Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives and that’s fine. Sometimes the new things are those I seek out, sometimes they’re foisted upon me for better or for worse.

Just last week I got an absolutely horrifying rash on the backs of my knees that proceeded to spread up and down my legs and itched so fucking bad that I had to trim my beloved long fingernails to keep from scratching. I also recently got booted off of Mass Health and my new insurance doesn’t kick in until October and so I have no insurance for this month — the month in which my body turned on me and convinced me I had some sort of horrifying infection that would possibly just take over my body and send me shivering and blistered in the corner like that guy on the second episode of The X Files who turned out to be a secret UFO pilot or some such. I went to CVS Minute Clinic with horror and trepidation in my heart only to pay $139 to learn that I had…a severe reaction to poison oak. Sure enough, I went for a walk in some relatively tangled and overgrown woods a week earlier, but I have been walking in woods of all sorts since, well, since I first experienced depression hahahasob. Poison ivy? Oak? Sumac?