same girl. same emptiness. upgraded sarcasm.
So here I am again, post diagnosis, post first episode, same girl, same emptiness, upgraded sarcasm.
Last time I left you at “the sun rises anyway.” Groundbreaking stuff. Very inspirational. I should print it on a mug and never look at it again.
Turns out the body told the truth once, and apparently decided that wasn’t enough drama for one lifetime, so it came back for round two. Bloodwork evened out, anxiety calmed down, and right on schedule, a brand new flavor of nothing moved in and made itself comfortable. Emptiness, but make it cozy. It brought snacks. It’s staying a while.
I used to think depression was a costume lazy people wore so they didn’t have to do dishes. Bold theory from someone who has never understood how people stay excited about anything. I get excited for exactly four minutes, like a phone charging at one percent, and then the excitement drains out like it remembered an appointment somewhere else. I called this my social battery, like I was a gadget with a warranty instead of a woman quietly falling apart in real time.
From Today’s Notes
I sit in a room full of people I supposedly love and think about how nice it would be if everyone, including me, evaporated.
I hear people talking and my brain files it under noise pollution, right next to construction sounds and other people’s children. I have become a human “do not disturb” sign, except the sign itself is also disturbed, deeply, on multiple levels, possibly needing its own sign.
I did the responsible adult thing, which is to say I diagnosed myself at three in the morning, staring at the ceiling, asking if I’m sick, lazy, or just spiritually unemployed. No motivation. No purpose. I dislike my job with the quiet loyalty of someone who still shows up anyway, punches in, smiles at the coffee machine like it owes me nothing and yet I forgive it daily. Waking up feels like a chore nobody put on my calendar. Breathing, some mornings, feels like a task assigned by a manager I never applied to work for and definitely didn’t approve in the interview.
Naturally, instead of doing anything useful about it, I took a Cosmo quiz. “Which best friend energy do you have?” Circle A if you cry during commercials. Circle B if you own more candles than actual humans in your contacts list. I used to love these as a kid, back when Cosmo was thick enough to stop a door, packed with horoscopes and quizzes and enough pages to survive a long car ride. Now it’s basically a perfume ad with some paragraphs stapled around it for legal reasons, which honestly tracks, since my own depth these days has also gotten a little thin.
But if we’re being honest, Cosmo was never the real prize. Reader’s Digest was the good stuff. That magazine had range. Smart jokes tucked between the ads, the kind of sarcasm that actually respected your intelligence instead of just selling you perfume. And then there was that section, Real Heroes Among Us, ordinary people doing something quietly extraordinary, and as a kid I used to read it and think, someday that’s going to be me. Someday I’ll be the stranger who did something so unexpectedly decent it gets written up in three paragraphs with a stock photo.
The Cosmo quiz, for the record, told me I’m an “independent lone wolf who secretly wants a pack.” Thank you, Cosmo. Truly life changing information. Very much something I already knew without a magazine’s permission, at three in the morning, alone, wolf-like, unpacked.
Because here’s the humiliating part under all the jokes: I do want a pack. Real friends. The kind who laugh at the bad jokes and the worse ones, who text back, who show up without being asked twice. At this age making friends feels like interviewing for a position nobody admits they’re hiring for. Two suspicious adults pretending they don’t desperately want the same thing while quietly checking each other for red flags. The dog doesn’t have this problem, but the dog also eats things off the sidewalk, so I don’t take relationship advice from him.
And at this rate, the Reader’s Digest headline isn’t coming for me the way I pictured it as a kid. Not “Real Heroes Among Us.” More like “How to Be Hated by Your Neighbors,” featuring yours truly, several years down the road, standing in a front yard lined with handwritten No Trespassing signs, a matching set in the back for symmetry, glaring at anyone who lets their dog sniff too close to my mailbox. The neighborhood Karen origin story nobody asked for, written by the same woman who once dreamed of being a Reader’s Digest hero and instead became the reason the block has a group chat with a whole thread just about her.
So here’s the update on my one woman show, still called Emptiness, now in its second season, somehow renewed despite terrible reviews. Give the isolation a few more years to marinate and I’ll be the cautionary tale, not the inspiration. The lone wolf finally got her territory, and she’s defending it with laminated signage.
And yet.
The sun, rude as ever, keeps showing up. Doesn’t check my mood first. Doesn’t care that season two started worse than season one. Just rises, offers the same tired deal, no strings attached, in case today’s the day I feel like being a person again instead of a punchline.
I still haven’t taken it up on the offer. But it’s there. Patient. Insufferably patient. Waiting for the day sarcasm stops being my personality and goes back to being my coping mechanism.
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