aching to drown in a sea of bad metaphors

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I find it insulting when people insist to a suicidal person that “they have so much to live for,” and that “they are stronger” than their suicidal impulse. As if the person in question isn’t entirely aware of those things, as if the chemical, neural imbalances or possibly external factors in them that are creating those feelings can easily be “overcome” if only they’re “strong” enough. Does that imply that they reason they’re suicidal in the first place is because they’re not strong? That they’re weak, in fact, for feeling the way that they do? It is not encouraging or helpful to say these things to a suicidal person, in my opinion. It smacks of shaming them; “oh, nothing’s really wrong, you’d be just fine if only you were strong enough. You should get on that.”

Suicidal people who are still suicidal and not dead have already proven their strength, as far as I’m concerned. And even those who commit suicide and “succeed” in the end can’t fairly be discounted as weak - everyone makes mistakes, sometimes deadly ones, and theirs wasn’t even their fault provided it was inspired by a mental illness. I’ve had plenty of people try to bring me back from the brink of a devastating depression by telling me that I’m so much stronger than it, and I can safely say that all I felt in those moments was shame, for not being strong enough to simply not feel that way. I’m not trying to speak for anyone else, but as far as I’m concerned, hearing that hurts more than it helps when you’re that low. So fuck you, I don’t need to hear that I’m stronger than my depression. I knew that already, it doesn’t change how I feel. You can’t sprinkle magic sparkle unicorn words over a chemical imbalance and make it go away. Don’t trivialize, invalidate, what I’m going through like that.

The episode revolves around Jeff’s need to study for his biology final, something that he puts off to help Shirley in her trial against Pierce for controlling interest in the sandwich shop the two are finally allowed to open. He keeps repeating the phrase “cellular mitosis,” and I think that idea is crucial to understanding the whole season—and maybe the whole series so far. Cellular mitosis is the process by which cells split off from each other and replicate, so that all of your skin cells are recognizably skin cells and all of your bone cells are bone cells and so on. Mitosis involves a complicated process of splitting off, of one cell becoming two individual units. Throughout this season, we’ve watched as the members of the group have pursued their own interests and run off into their own little stories, and we’ve watched as more and more of the students of Greendale became characters in their own rights. But as the individual “cells” of the study group—or of Greendale—split off from the larger organism, they still carry the things they learned from being with each other. The longer they’re together, the more they’ll influence each other. But when the time comes for them to finally split off from each other for real, they’ll be ready to spread the things they’ve learned from each other even further. Wholes split into pieces, but they’re still wholes, because we carry those things forward in our hearts.

The truth is that an artist’s appraisal of his own work, in terms of how much better some stuff is than other stuff, is probably completely meaningless. If you grab a random person off the street and hold up two things and say this is my good shit and this is my bad shit, he probably won’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. 9 out of 10 people will probably say it’s the same exact shit.

This is why worrying too much about the quality of what you do is kind of ridiculous, and worrying about it is what leads to blocks. In the end what you make is the result of your capabilities and your effort, and practically nothing else. So you might as well stop worrying, drop the bullshit, and just make it.

Go after her. Fuck, don’t sit there and wait for her to call, go after her because that’s what you should do if you love someone, don’t wait for them to give you a sign cause it might never come, don’t let people happen to you, don’t let me happen to you, or her, she’s not a fucking television show or tornado. There are people I might have loved had they gotten on the airplane or run down the street after me or called me up drunk at four in the morning because they need to tell me right now and because they cannot regret this and I always thought I’d be the only one doing crazy things for people who would never give enough of a fuck to do it back or to act like idiots or be entirely vulnerable and honest and making someone fall in love with you is easy and flying 3000 miles on four days notice because you can’t just sit there and do nothing and breathe into telephones is not everyone’s idea of love but it is the way I can recognize it because that is what I do. Go scream it and be with her in meaningful ways because that is beautiful and that is generous and that is what loving someone is, that is raw and that is unguarded, and that is all that is worth anything, really.

I don’t see what’s so t’riffic about creating people as people and then gettin’ upset ‘cos they act like people. Anyway, if you stopped tellin’ people it’s all sorted out after they’re dead, they might try sorting it all out while they’re alive.

In my time online I’ve been called “fag” approximately 104,165 times. I keep an Excel spreadsheet. I’ve also been called “asshole” and “cockweasel” and “fuckcamel” and “cuntwaffle” and “shitglutton” and “porksword” and “wangbasket” and “shitwhistle” and “thundercunt” and “fartminge” and “shitflannel” and “knobgoblin” and “boring.” And none of it mattered, because none of those people knew me well enough to really hit the target. I’ve been insulted lots, but I’ve been criticized very little. And don’t ever confuse the two. An insult is just someone who hates you making a noise to indicate their hatred. A barking dog. Criticism is someone trying to help you, by telling you something about yourself that you were a little too comfortable not knowing.

An ad that pretends to be art is—at absolute best—like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what’s sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill’s real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.