Ether 12:27

I spoke in church on Sunday.

I wouldn't have brought it up, except I was kind of sort of having a panic attack while I was up there. I was worried about accepting the assignment in the first place, because I thought something bad would happen and I would be embarrassed. I was correct, as it turned out; but I don't think it was a mistake to accept the assignment. I was more or less in hysterical tears the whole time I was up there, and also apologizing for crying, and also talking about my anxiety because it was related to what I was speaking about.

Which, if you were interested, was the scripture in Ether 12:27, in the Book of Mormon. For my non-Mormon friends, it goes like this: "And if men come unto me I will show unto them their weakness. I give unto men weakness that they may be humble; and my grace is sufficient for all men that humble themselves before me; for if they humble themselves before me, and have faith in me, then will I make weak things become strong unto them."

I have this weakness. Anxiety. It's stupid crap even on the best of days, and on the worst... well, I stand behind the pulpit crying hysterically for three minutes and attempting to say words that sound like I am speaking, instead of sobbing. Longest three minutes of my life.

But I knew I had this weakness, and I took it to the Lord in prayer and I was impressed to speak anyway, and to talk about my anxiety. God gives men their weakness that they may be humble— well, yeah. I'm kind of very embarrassed. But I put aside my embarrassment, because it doesn't matter, it's a secondhand emotion.

The primary emotion was fear and boy, I wanted to run— there are seven exits from the chapel in our building, nine if you count the sacrament prep room and the choir closet. There were several good places in the room I could have hidden, and several places in the building I could have hidden. I was thinking about bolting. I was thinking about throwing up in the bathroom because I honestly thought I might. I was thinking about walking home all by myself, which would have taken hours.

I've had to think about it for a few days, because part of me cynically wonders if this was worth it. Should I have accepted this talk? Are people going to be more focused on me and my problems than on the message I'm trying to share? Or did I forestall that by making my problems part of the message I was trying to share?

When I was done I kind of stumbled blindly down through the chapel and found my dad and just cried for a bit. I was shaking. I took my drugs which take me from freaking out to zombie-land in about ten minutes. I drank water and blew my nose and I realized that I was not going to die after all.

When the meeting was over I had a bunch of people come up and tell me I did good, that they were touched by what I'd said and how I'd gotten through it despite the obvious difficulty I was having. I had a few come up and tell me thank you for sharing, we struggle with anxiety too. I had a few come up and tell me that they love me— simple kindnesses, all of them.

I forget sometimes, in my fear of showing my weakness, that I am capable of affecting others. I know I have kind of a gift with words. I can communicate clearly through writing. Speaking is difficult; I have to write literally everything down and read it. My rambling doesn't make sense unless I'm really comfortable with people. But I can write, boy can I write, and even though I was breaking on the inside I could read my message and try to help people feel the Spirit.

I am weak. I went to the Lord in my weakness, and He gave me strength to speak.

He didn't cure my weakness. God is not going to point His finger at me and say, "Zap! Your anxiety and depression are gone forever!" He could, but He's not going to do that. That's not why He gave me these things to struggle with. He gave me these problems so that I could use them to help other people. If helping other people means standing up at a pulpit and gross-crying into it for three minutes while whining about my brain, then I suppose God's made me capable of doing that. I didn't think I could do it. He helped me.

I am religious, but I don't often post religious things because religion is intensely personal and private for me. I think about these things more than I speak of them. I am a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints— a Mormon or LDS, colloquially. I believe in God. I believe He is my father, and that I am His beloved daughter and that each and every one of you are also His children, loved and cared for and prayed for. I believe that my trials are, in fact, given to me for a reason. Sometimes it feels like they are senseless and stupid and wrong, that God is punishing me for something. In my wiser moments I am capable of recognizing that God would not have given me this burden if He didn't think I could handle it— which to me is a wonderful compliment, because I have come so close to not handling it in the sense that I've considered suicide as a legitimate alternative to life.

I am still learning how to cope with depression and anxiety. It is not easy. I have been living at home for fifteen months and going to therapy for just about ten or eleven. I have learned that I need drugs to cope, that I need a decent mattress to sleep on, that I need to be productive and create things, that I gain the most out of life by helping other people. I have also learned that I do not have to work and serve others all the time; it's okay to relax and take care of myself because I can't help others if I don't help myself.

And sometimes I still fail. Sometimes I wake up but don't get out of bed until six at night. Sometimes I stay up all night worrying about what happens if I can never find a job and have to depend on my parents forever. Sometimes I don't remember to eat. Sometimes I forget what day of the week it is because my mind is slow and full of gray fog. Sometimes I cry and cry for things that I couldn't cry for before I realized what was wrong with me.

I have learned that it is okay to be weak sometimes. In a moment where I was wondering why I wasn't a good religious person, my mother reminded me of the scripture about how the flesh is weak, but the spirit is willing. I want to be good; that counts when I can't figure out how to do it. I want to be healthy, and that counts when I can't figure that out either.

Either way, I am allowed to be weak. I accept my own vulnerability. In exchange, all I pray to God is to be allowed strength I do not have. On Sunday afternoon, standing at a pulpit and crying for fear of people I know would never hurt me, my prayer was answered. I let a hundred and fifty or so people see my weakness and in so doing was given strength.

May you all allow yourselves to be weak, and may you all accept the strength you are given.

A Livable Life

Let's start out today with the obvious statements, ones that I've probably either strongly implied or outright stated in previous posts:

1. I have depression.
2. I also have anxiety.
3. Struggling with these issues has been extremely difficult for me and resulted in me coming just short of a college degree before being completely overwhelmed by the idea of, well, life and having to go home to recuperate. (December 2014 - present)
4. I take medicine for my issues but that doesn't solve everything.
5. I go to therapy for my issues but that also doesn't solve everything.
6. I am in no way, shape, or form an expert on the subject of either depression or anxiety. I speak from my own experiences.

Are we good on this? Okay? Okay. Cool.

The way I live my life at the moment is not anything I would consider "livable." I am an adult who has lived semi-independently and who now lives at home with a fairly demanding but lovely roommate and kind, lenient landlords and several other house-mates who at times make things either very difficult or very easy for me. I am fed, I am clothed, I am provided with a place to sleep. I am grateful for all these things and more that my family offers me.

But I am not happy. These things should make me happy. I am taken care of, I have people who love me, I am in treatment for my issues.

What would make me happy? The answer: I don't know.

So many people live miserable lives. They are lonely and scared, as I often am. They do not have the luxury of food on the table, hot water to wash with, clean water to drink, flushing toilets, clothing that protects them from the elements. Women (and sometimes men) live with men (and sometimes women) who assault and abuse them. Children starve in the streets and countries are run with brutal military force. Silent victims fall every day to disease, starvation, abuse, and all of the world's worst calamities.

Some people have been betrayed by family or friends. Some people have had their hearts broken. Some people have had to watch the ones they love die and weren't able to do anything about it. Some people have all of the terrible things happen to them and none of the good things.

I should be grateful for what I have. I should be content with my lot, because I am not a woman in the Middle East who has had a bucket of acid thrown at my face. I am not a woman dying of AIDS somewhere in Africa. I am a woman who lives in middle-class America and who has a lovely family and food and clothes and a home.

None of this makes me happy. If anything, it makes me more miserable, because I do not feel as though I have the right to be unhappy. I feel guilty for being unhappy, because there are people in this world who have their towns blown up with bombs or stormed by soldiers with guns, there are people in this world who are starving slowly for lack of generosity by those who can afford it, there are people who cannot marry those who they love because it is illegal, there are people who are afraid to walk on the street because the color of their skin could get them shot. I am a white, straight, middle-class, able-bodied woman who lives in a democracy and has everything provided for her. I have so much privilege in this world and I should have NOTHING to complain or be unhappy about.

I have come to learn that some things defy privilege and class.

Depression does not care that I am white. It says, The color of your skin does not matter, for you are disgusting anyway.

Depression does not care that I am a cisgender heterosexual female. It says, It does not matter who you love, for nobody will ever consider you worthy of love.

Depression does not care that I am middle-class. It says, The contents of your bank account do not matter, because the things you want cannot be bought with money and you will never have them anyway.

Depression does not care that I have a healthy, active body. It says, Death will claim you in the end, as I have done, and it is pointless to try to improve yourself when you will only be leaving this mortal shell anyway.

Depression does not care that I live in a country where freedom is valued. It says, You do not deserve to have choices, and so I have taken away your ability to make them.

Anxiety does not care about any of these things either, but the messages are different. Here the weapon of choice is not lethargy, but guilt. You've got so much, why are your worrying about it? You can't go to institute, someone might talk to you and then you'll do something horrible like throw up or cry or faint. You can't get married, you'll saddle someone else with all your problems and why should you be allowed to get married when some of your friends can't get married either? You can't afford to leave home, you can't afford to finish college, you can't afford to get your own place, you can't even afford to buy books or music to take away some of the pain. You are fat and ugly and no amount of exercise could possibly improve anything about you. Oh, look, another pimple. Great, something else you have to worry about. And on top of all this, you're so self-absorbed you don't even think about how your sadness makes your family feel. What if you're making them feel bad that they can't do anything for you?

Only that delicate combination of the two could possibly contrive to make me feel as though it's my fault that my gay friends cannot get married in some states. As though I, by virtue (or lack thereof) of being a straight woman, have singlehandedly brought about the circumstances in which my friends are not permitted in certain areas of the country to be married. Only depression and anxiety could make me believe that it is my fault.

My mother says that I experience empathy for others, and that's why it's so hard for me. I guess I do. It's not really empathy, though. I'm a frigid, selfish human being. I only want others to have what I can have because I can't have it. I am not good enough. I am not even good at all.

When I get to this point, I usually go to bed and shut my blanket-fort-tent-thing up and cry for a while. Sometimes I go to sleep. Sometimes I go downstairs and, diet be screwed, I eat Nutella or ice cream or something with a lot of carbohydrates and a lot of delicious. Sometimes I listen to music or write a story or read a funny book. And sometimes, that makes me feel better.

Sometimes, it doesn't.

Sometimes, I get to the point where all of these feelings are so overwhelming that I just have to stop feeling things. I detach, disengage, break away. At these times, I become a hideous caricature of myself. My mother has told me that sometimes I am cruel. Today, for instance, I was annoyed at something that my little brother was doing and I told him, "Nobody's listening, nobody cares, just shut up," and he felt so bad that he cried. Because he has this thing where he thinks I'm awesome, when clearly, I do not deserve to be called awesome. I haven't apologized for it yet, but he seems to have forgiven me. He's a very sensitive child, but he's also surprisingly resilient. I'm always afraid I'm going to break him. But I forgot that today, when I detached, and I cut him with my words and he turned out all right. Wounded, but all right. I don't even know if I will apologize. I don't even know if I want to.

Last night, I had this overwhelming feeling of happiness. God was like, "You know what? Everything will turn out okay in the end." I was so happy that I cried. I laid in bed playing solitaire on my iPod and I cried. It was all going to be okay!

Today was not good. I sat with my family on our weird couches for four hours listening to General Conference and feeling guilty the whole time because everything they were saying was meant for me to hear but I don't think I can do any of it because I suck at being a person let alone a good person and something frightening and inconvenient happened with my sister (no details for privacy) and I was grumpy and snapped at my brother and I have a cankersore forming in my mouth despite the fact that I have been very diligent about brushing my teeth and I feel gross and worthless and I can't find that feeling I had last night. Nothing is going to be okay, nothing will ever be okay, how on earth could you ever think that?????

I re-read my patriarchal blessing the other day. It says I'm going to have a joyous life like, eleven times. I counted. At times like this, that feels ridiculous. It's possible that I've gotten to the point where that blessing doesn't apply to me anymore because I'm such a sad, awful mess.

Sometimes I think I shouldn't be confessing these things here on a fairly public blog. Women are already perceived as weak, I don't need to contribute to that god-awful stereotype.

And really, me having a blog at all is something I do so that I can complain to people about how my life sucks without doing anything productive about it. It's rehashing the trials I have to live, over and over again. It's probably really annoying.

I am at a standstill. There are paths in all directions and I am too paralyzed to choose even one. Everything is pushing, demanding. "You must choose! You must be responsible for your life!"
I can't even be responsible for what my own body decides to do. I don't know how anybody ever expects me to be responsible with anything else.

The point I am attempting to make with these rambling, depressing statements about my life is that I am a massive pile of negative emotion, amplified further by feelings of unworthiness and guilt and feelings about my feelings, which is a whole other meta-commentary mess, and I am ultimately, as we all are, human.

But I am choosing. I choose very small things. I choose to eat cheese, which is allowed on my diet, instead of bread, which is not allowed on my diet. I choose to brush my teeth even when that cankersore is driving me distracted with pain. I choose to take a shower even if I'm not going anywhere.

[Skip the following if descriptions of potential suicide bother you; if you want to read it, then you can highlight it.]

I choose not to empty my whole bottle of ibuprofen down my throat and call it done. I choose not to jump headfirst out of the window of my room. I choose not to slit my wrists and bleed out in the shower. I choose not to walk into the path of a truck. I think about these things and more every day, but I don't do it.


And each day I think maybe that it doesn't matter what I choose. Maybe life is just hopeless crap and we're all going to die.


But what matters is that I choose to live, I choose not to die, and even though I am occasionally miserable enough that death sounds really nice, I still choose life.


That, for me, is what makes my life "livable." The fact that I would rather be here than dead, most of the time. That is what makes it okay for me to keep on breathing. I might feel like utter crap all the time, but I still choose to be here.


And depression and anxiety can talk at me all they want. They are not me. I am not them. They are a part of me, they are something that has changed me in ways I do not like and do not want. They are not cancer but they eat at my soul the way cancer eats at the body, catching on to new parts of myself and growing and twisting to suit themselves, a side effect of choosing to live.


I am living a life that to anybody else might not be livable. And I'm glad of that. Nobody should have to experience what I am going through. I would not wish that on my worst enemy.


And it might not be properly livable, not now, not yet, not for a long time. I'm just going to get by on my drugs and my therapist and my family and hope that for now it will be enough.


But it's mine.


I chose it.


I choose to live.

Books That Have Shaped My Feminism

It turns out that I was a feminist long before I ever went to college and had near-constant internet access; I just had no idea that what I believed was called feminism. I remember being in Sunday School classes at church and feeling as though I could be more than what they told us we could be. They said, "You are daughters of God, you are queens, you are beautiful and wonderful and you will be great mothers." But at the same time, I heard other things, I heard, "You can go on a mission and be a wonderful missionary, you can go to college and become educated, you can enter the military and work to protect people." There were so many options in the world for me.

Ultimately, I chose to go to college and receive an education. I became an English major. Perhaps this spelled the beginning of knowing that I was a feminist; at least, I was aware of feminism early in college, because my Critical Writing class, English 295, the class that taught me how to write a ten-page paper and love it, had all girls in it. We could get into the meatiest readings of feminism without feeling uncomfortable, because the men at Brigham Young University meant well, but they were not always open to our thoughts. It was an all-female class with a female professor, and I learned that in a class like this there was no fear, no anxiety, because there were no boys and we didn't feel as though we had to put on a front for them.

Perhaps this sounds unfair, but I am one of many English majors. We may not all be the same, but many of us chose the major because books are kinder than people, and they are more forgiving and less able to break our hearts the way the world can.

I was not an active feminist until after I came to terms with my mental health struggles. Before that, I assumed, I believed, I followed. I knew that I was a divine daughter of God, that I would someday be a queen in paradise, and I knew that I wanted to be married and have children. I still know these things, and I still want these things. But I also know that I can be a writer, a reader, a leader, and an example to everyone in my life, and not just some distant, unknowable man and children. I want that man and children- want them with my whole heart, with my whole life. But I choose to want them. I choose it every day of my life. And I have the ability to choose them, because I understand that I have a choice in the matter. You always have a choice, even if sometimes the language of our teachers is couched to make women feel as though the only respectable choice is motherhood. It is not the respectable choice. It is a respectable choice.

I am a feminist who hopes someday to be married and to have children. The two decisions are not incongruous. All it means is that I want other women and men to be able to make the same choice that I have made. I want people to be able to choose whether they have children or not. I want people to be able to choose between a job or parenthood. And I want people to be able to make those choices without fear. Technically, people have these freedoms already. This is especially true in America and Europe, places where modern families and lifestyles exist in so many different ways. But there are still attitudes that suggest that only women should stay at home to care for children, and that only men should work to provide for the family. This is the preference of the church, but there should be no shame or fear for those who cannot or who do not want to follow this pattern. Everyone should pray for guidance in how best to create a family for themselves on the earth, and they should feel as though they can create a loving family without being ostracized by those who follow more traditional family patterns and who disapprove of those who do not do the same.

I have read many books over the years; as a casual reader, as a fangirl, as a feminist, and as an English major. Here is a list of the books that have shaped my worldview in some way or another.

1. Jane Austen's novels: Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion have all contributed to the way I think. They are about romance, love and marriage, but they do not take themselves too seriously, as Jane Austen did not take herself too seriously. It's something to keep in mind- if you read Pride and Prejudice and sigh over how romantic Mr. Darcy is, then you're missing the point of Jane Austen's writing: everybody in that culture was hyper-focused on marriage without considering the romantic aspects of relationships. Jane Austen was more of a humorous writer than a romantic one. (Which is not to say that I don't sigh over Mr. Darcy. It's just that I only sigh over Colin Firth in a wet shirt. Because DANG.)
2. Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and sequels (Good Wives, which is the second half of Little Women; Little Men; and Jo's Boys). Not only do these books depict healthy romantic relationships (which is something that should be a standard for every romantic novel), but they also discuss morality outside of religion as well as religious morality. Louisa May Alcott's family was part of the Transcendentalist movement in New England; she was acquainted with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, among other writers of the age. The Transcendentalists were all about getting back to one's roots with nature, living simply, serving others, and improving themselves. These values were associated with or without religion as individuals chose to believe, and out of all the movements of literature between Shakespeare and J.K. Rowling, I identify most with the Transcendentalists.
3. The entire works of Tamora Pierce. I was introduced to Tamora Pierce in junior high school by a few good friends who enjoyed her work. It was my first introduction to feminism in fiction, because Pierce's work is undeniably feminist, and in a genre that doesn't always see much feminism, either- that of fantasy. Pierce writes straight-up medieval fantasy, with complex and beautiful magic systems, and her stories are about young women, written for young women, and they celebrate young women. I loved Tamora Pierce's books long before I knew what feminism was. There were characters I identified with. Alanna of the Lioness quartet was never anything like me, and neither was Daine of the Immortals quartet. Aly, in the Trickster duo, was not much like me, either. But then I found the Protector of the Small series, with Keladry of Mindelan, a girl who wants to be a knight. I loved Keladry from the very beginning because she looked like me. She had brown hair and hazel eyes like me, and she was tall for her age the way I was before I reached my full potential at five foot five and a quarter. And she wasn't thin- she was described with beautiful words and phrases like "broad-shouldered" and "strong," and it wasn't negative, either. Keladry was beautiful, and she was also a large, healthy girl. And then the series became more about Keladry's desire to protect others than it did about her desire to become a knight. She wanted to become a knight because that was what knighthood meant to her- that she could protect others. But it was never just about achieving a status traditionally awarded to men. It was about using that status responsibly. And all of Pierce's writing has spoken in the same ways to me, about girls who can learn and grow and strive for the very best the world has to offer, and that they can do so as well and sometimes better than men can, and that they use their power wisely instead of wasting it.
4. The Nancy Drew books. They've always been fun and light-hearted reading for me. One of my favorite aspects of the books was that Nancy solved mysteries, sometimes with her friends Bess and George, and sometimes with all their boyfriends Ned, Burt, and Dave. (I'm not a hundred percent solid on those names.) But Nancy didn't always get knocked on the head and captured and had to be rescued by Ned; sometimes Ned got knocked on the head and captured and Nancy rescued him. Nancy's friend George (yes, a girl) learned judo and she used it to take down bad guys.. Nancy's father, a lawyer, gave her cases to work on and trusted that she would work hard and do her job well.
5. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. This story, for me, is the ultimate in healthy relationships. It doesn't start out that way, though. Jane falls in love with Rochester, who is mean to his ward Adele, looks down on his distant relation/housekeeper Mrs. Fairfax because he believes she is unintelligent, and plays games with Jane's mind by using Blanche Ingram to make her jealous. And let's not forget about the fact that he was married already, to a crazy lady from Jamaica who he kept locked in the attic so that she wouldn't kill people. Jane falls in love with him despite all this, and she sets a good enough example for Rochester that he is a better person for having met and observing Jane in the first place. And then, after the almost-married-bigamy scandal, Jane leaves. She has the strength to leave him, despite temptation and love, and she makes the choice to remain true to what she believes in. And then, even after Rochester's crazy wife sets the house on fire and kills herself and Rochester goes blind in one eye, even after that- Jane comes back, and Rochester has changed and become a better man because he learned to suffer without her. 
6. Everything that Rick Riordan has ever written. This so far includes the Percy Jackson series, the Kane Chronicles, and the Heroes of Olympus series. In all of these books, there are strong female characters of all ages, strong male characters of all ages, characters who are not just generically attractive white people but who are from different cultures- black kids, Hispanic kids, Asian kids. And the books are laugh-out-loud funny, but not once does any character make a sexist or racist joke. Everybody should read these books.
7. The Mysterious Benedict Society series by Trenton Lee Stewart. Wonderful characters, excellent story. Delicious, delicious books.
8. The Redwall books by Brian Jacques. You should basically just read them all, there's twenty-something and everyone's a mammal of some kind. The food descriptions are positively mouth-watering.

There are more, of course- so many more. But these are the ones that shaped my childhood and adolescence, and they have done the same for many more people. Read them, have your kids read them, and talk to them about it. Ask questions, answer questions. Talk about why the girls in these books are so much better than girls in other books and in movies and television. Show them that girls in real life and female characters both can be strong, can be smart, can be kind, can be brave. Show them that anybody can turn out to be mean or stupid or cowardly, no matter whether they're a boy or a girl. And show them that they can work to become the good things and avoid the bad things by doing good things, by helping people, by kindness and courage. Boy or girl, these are qualities you can strive for, and that you can succeed in. It's the work of a lifetime, and I shall undertake it the same as you.

@owlcity

I own about ninety-five percent of the music produced by the electronic music project Owl City. The reason I don't own a hundred percent of it is because they (he) sometimes have (has) special tracks for different countries or because sometimes they (he) have (has) random singles written for movies or whatever. Also, I am poor. That contributes.

Generally, my musical preferences involve a fairly heavy bass line and fantastic percussion. I don't even care what the genre of the song is, if it's got a good bass line and percussion, I will listen to it. This explains why I like Muse, which always has killer bass, and why I like Imagine Dragons and Bastille, both of whom generally have sick percussion. (Bastille also has the added benefit of occasional but always-on-point harmony under the singer's melody line, and I do love me some good harmony.)

Owl City has neither consistently excellent bass lines or awesome percussion. Instead, it's a mish-mash, depending on the album in particular. It's not really a band, given how there's only one consistent musician involved. The genius behind Owl City is Adam Young, a Minnesotan singer/songwriter/composer/what-the-heck-ever-er. Owl City is far from his only musical project, but it's the biggest by far.

The easiest word to describe the Owl City sound is electronic. The sounds are usually produced by computer programs (my experience with such being Logic Express and Audacity) or by synthetic sounds from keyboards. Young experiments with different kinds of microphones and amplifiers in order to get the kind of sounds he wants. I'm a little more familiar with his work regarding synthetic keyboards, as I've done similar work in high school. I played keyboards for my high school musicals during my sophomore, junior, and senior years. Generally, my role was to duplicate an organ, a small string orchestra, or a guitar; but occasionally I got to make bass sounds, or weird synthetic environment sounds. So I have that as a basis for understanding the sounds produced in Owl City's albums, and it helps me to enjoy it more.

Young got famous through MySpace and iTunes. He created the first tracks of the Owl City sound in his parents basement in 2007 and promoted himself through social media. It worked, and he became something of a MySpace phenomenon. He released several EPs before signing officially with Universal Republic Studios as a major label, but Owl City didn't become a big name until the first full-length album, Ocean Eyes, premiered in 2009. Three of the tracks on Ocean Eyes were released as singles: "Umbrella Beach," "Vanilla Twilight," and "Fireflies," which reached the Top 40 in the US and Canada. "Fireflies" is Owl City's most famous song to date- most people have heard it at least once and recognize the tune when it's played or sung.

While "Fireflies" isn't my favorite song by Owl City, I appreciate it a lot because it is not a love song, and it's relatively rare that a Top 40 isn't focused on love or sex. In that sense, Owl City has retained an innocence in the sound. Young has written songs about love (notably "Vanilla Twilight", "The Saltwater Room," "Lonely Lullaby," and one of my personal favorites "Bombshell Blonde"), but the overall content matter is weirdly philosophical, which is why I like it so much. Another contributing factor to the innocence I personally associate with Owl City is that of Adam Young's own Christian faith. While very few of the songs he has produced mention Christian themes explicitly, many of the ideas are associated with the moral values taught as part of Christianity. A prime example of a song that does mention Christianity is "Galaxies," another favorite.

I could wax rhapsodical about this project for several hours, honestly. I'll spare you the pain of reading through that and provide you with listening basics. There are three main albums: Ocean Eyes (2009), All Things Bright and Beautiful (2011), and The Midsummer Station (2012). A fourth album is in the works, but has not been given a release date or a name. My personal favorite album is The Midsummer Station. There's also a variety of EPs, including Of June (2007), Maybe I'm Dreaming (2008), and Ultraviolet (2014); and so many singles. SO MANY SINGLES. The singles include tracks produced for Wreck-It Ralph, The Croods, The Smurfs 2, and VeggieTales.

If you haven't got the time or money to buy all of the things but are curious, here's a list of songs I recommend for starters. They can be listened to in any order, but they're among my favorites.

• Of June
• Hello Seattle
• The Saltwater Room
• Ocean Eyes
• Early Birdie
• Meteor Shower
• Fireflies
• Vanilla Twilight
• Hot Air Balloon (deluxe edition)
• All Things Bright and Beautiful
• Deer in the Headlights
• Dreams Don't Turn To Dust
• Kamikaze
• Galaxies
• Alligator Sky (feat. Shawn Chrystopher)
• Lonely Lullaby (deluxe edition)
• The Midsummer Station
• Dreams and Disasters
• Shooting Star
• Gold
• Dementia
• I'm Coming After You
• Speed of Love
• Good Time (in collaboration with Carly Rae Jepsen)
• Embers
• Silhouette
• Metropolis
• Take It All Away
• Bombshell Blonde (iTunes edition)
• Ultraviolet
• Beautiful Times (feat. Lindsey Stirling)
• Up All Night
• This Isn't The End
• Wolf Bite

...Why, yes, I did just recommend that you listen to the entirety of The Midsummer Station and Ultraviolet. Hey, it's good stuff. It's all excellent.You really should listen to all of it. Dooooooo iiiiiiiiiittttt.

Given my musical background, however, I'd expect some people to say really ignorant things like "BUT ELECTRONIC MUSIC ISN'T REAL MUSIC" or "WHAT'S WRONG WITH CLASSICAL CONCERTO BY BACHTOVEN NUMBER FIFTY BAJILLION" or whatever. To that I have only one response: it's really sad that you can't recognize music if it's different from what you're used to. Yes, there's weird background synthy sounds. Yes, Adam Young has a really uniquely weird-attractive voice that sounds nothing like regular male pop artists. Yes, the bass and percussion aren't always consistent from track to track. Yes, one of the songs I recommended on the list is rap. Yes, Bombshell Blonde has that screechy bit in the middle which serves to remind everyone that dubstep also started out as electronica, but bypassed soft and pretty in favor of loudness. But you know what? I don't care. Owl City is my thing, it's my niche. I'm probably going to love it forever, no matter what happens or how it changes. It's something I have that's mine, but that I want to share because it's too good to keep to myself.

Also, Adam Young has the best Twitter account. The best celebrities interact with fans. I rest my case.

Rational and Irrational Fears

Being up front about my mental illnesses is something that did not take very long for me to do. It sounds like I'm bragging, but I'm not. Thankfully, I was born in an era where having depression and anxiety wasn't a reason to lock me up in an institution- at least not unless it gets really bad, and I have no reason to think it will.

Some people were raised in a time where the attitude was, "We don't talk about that sort of thing," but I've made it a personal goal of mine to be open about it. Mental illness is just that, an illness. Sometimes it's like a cold- you treat it and it goes away on its own eventually, but there isn't a known, permanent cure. Sometimes it's like having arthritis- you have to deal with it whenever the weather is bad, or whenever something in your environment happens to trigger pain. And sometimes it's like being terminally ill. You have to live with it, knowing that you can't do anything about it, and you just have to wait for it to end.

I don't, of course, mean to say that depression and anxiety are fatal. They don't have to be, and many people live with them successfully. But it is fatal for some, when the sickness becomes so bad that it alters the way they think and they find that dying sounds easier than living.

I've had those moments. I've had majorly suicidal thoughts at least twice in my life. But by calling my parents at three in the morning or by curling up in my bed with my bears and some music, I've been able to stave off the urge.

(Please note that I'm fine at the moment, and that you don't need to talk to me about it because I am thankfully not at a point in my life where dying sounds better than living. It's a relief, to be honest, because somebody else would have to clean up the mess it would make and I really don't want to burden anybody else that way.)

I did, in fact, have a point with this. What I'm trying to get at, in my spectactularly long-winded way, is that mental illness, both depression and anxiety, are like any other illnesses, and that they have parts that you can't just explain away.

Anxiety, specifically, has some unpleasant parts that have no reason to them. For instance, I am afraid of a lot of things that I wasn't, formerly. Some things do have vague reasons behind them, but some don't.

So here's a list of my irrational fears, some with possible explanations and others with nothing at all.

1. Opening the oven and getting things out of it when they're hot. I don't really have a clue about this one. I don't have any traumatic childhood burns, mostly because I was a good child and listened to my mother when she told me that the oven was hot. But I really don't like to open the oven and get things out. I can do it, but I really, really do not like it, and it always takes me a minute or two after I've opened the oven to try and get out the thing inside of it. It's dumb, I hate it, and it's one of the primary reasons that I don't like baking or cooking as well as my mother does.
2. Talking to boys. This one has a logical reason. About two years ago I was an idiot about a boy I knew and got my heart broken, which was one of the major catalysts for my depression and anxiety. They would have happened anyway, but I stupidly invested a lot of emotional energy into the relationship and when it fell apart, I became unglued at the seams and I cried and worried all the time and slept a lot and then one night I thought maybe dying would be better than living, and then I realized I had a problem so I called my parents at 3 am and sobbed at them over the phone. In retrospect, it probably would have been a good idea to leave college at that point, but the boy in question was at home and I was not, and I wanted to keep my distance. This resulted in me staying at college and only coming home for Christmas, for the next two years. And that resulted in me having a mental breakdown and not being able to finish college. Basically, talking to boys ruined my life, and I'm not terribly eager to start that whole thing up again.
3. Walking on busy roads. I lived in a college town, and this was something that annoyed me more than it scared me. I used to have a job where I got up at 4 am to make sandwiches, and one morning I jaywalked across the street at 4 am because there was no traffic, but it turned out there was and I came within two feet of being hit by a minivan. The driver apologized profusely, but I was just kind of in shock and I was like, "Nah dude, it's okay, it's fine," and ever since then, the sound of a car behind me makes me all tense and jumpy. I hate it and I wish it would stop but it hasn't yet in three years so it looks like I'm stuck with it.
4. Being in crowded places. I go to church every week with my family. I go because I believe and because it does me good and because it's somewhere I want to be. But despite the comfort I get from my faith in God, it's sometimes really hard to be at church. There are too many people. There are social pressures. People want to ask me what I'm doing with my life, a question which frustrates me almost as much as it does my siblings, and they want to tell me about their own lives, and I wish I could apologize in advance for this but with like ninety-five percent of the people who want to tell me things, I don't care. I have to not care about things, because when I do, the anxiety gets way, way worse. But people are sometimes too close and too loud and they want to get too personal and it's just like being stabbed in five different places at once. If I want to talk about what I'm feeling, I do it. Usually on the Internet or with people I consider important enough to share with. If I don't want to talk to you, I will smile vaguely and push you away with polite verbal nothings.
5. Bugs. We used to have regular ant infestations in our house. I am a bajillion times bigger than an ant. The little suckers scared the daylights out of me. I do not like ants, bees, wasps, hornets, stinkbugs, cicadas, or gypsy moth caterpillars. I can deal with flies and mosquitoes, but I am of the opinion that God could have left those out of the life cycle and nobody would have been the worse for it. They probably have some sort of purpose, but I honestly don't know what it is and I don't think it's more important than so many people getting malaria every year. I can deal with butterflies, but it feels irritable, like my skin is itching even if I'm not touching them. Moths just make me shriek and cover my hair and cry. Irrational, as I said. Spiders I can tolerate, due to the fact that they eat other bugs and also because they don't like people and I also don't like people. We have a lot in common.
6. Playing video games. Now don't get me wrong- I happen to love playing video games. But sometimes I'll be playing a game and something happens and my brain goes, "Aaaah. What is happening. This is hard. My fine motor skills have all committed seppuku. The graphics are so good that things are getting scary. I don't know if I can do this. I'm freaking out." This happens most commonly when I'm playing Zelda games, especially in a dungeon with wallmasters... Ahem, moving on.
7. Being alone. On the one hand, I don't like people and I hate being around them most of the time, with the exception of my immediate family who don't count as people people. On the other hand, I am really scared that someday I am going to end up as the last one in my family to be alive, ancient and a hundred and moldering with good health and forty cats. I would really not like to outlive all of them, because that would be sad and stuff. I also would not like to die as a single woman and I would also not like to die without having been kissed at least once or without having gone to England. I don't want to spend my life as a sad, lonely girl who worries too much. It would be nice, if not literally necessary, to be married and have kids.
8. People don't like me. Despite the fact that I don't like people all of the time, I am convinced about ninety-nine percent of the time that the people who say that they like me are just lying to make me feel better and that they actually only tolerate my existence because murder is illegal and because I don't have the resources to go somewhere else. I used to get especially paranoid about this in college, because I sort of followed my friends to whatever apartment complexes they wanted to live in, and I always felt like I was tagging along or that I was annoying or childish or that they didn't like me. This is something that used to compound with the depression and made my brain decide that nobody loved me and that I was worthless, and that led to the second occasion where I strongly considered suicide, which was approximately in late-August, early-September of this last year. Thankfully, I did no such thing.
9. Pain. It's safe to say that I have so far avoided most major pain in my life. I have never been bitten by any animal, I have never broken or sprained or twisted any limb of my body, I have never been stung by a bee, and I have never had kidney stones or given birth. But the ideas of them are things that I can imagine, and I have a very low tolerance for physical pain. My whole mind just goes, "NOPE, LET'S NOT," whenever I try to think about it. This is also the basic reason why I haven't ever given in to suicidal urges- because it would probably involve pain of some kind.
10. Driving. I held a driver's permit at the age of eighteen for approximately a year. I was able to learn the basics of driving a car around the neighborhood- steering, braking, gas pedal, turn signals. However, my teacher was my father, and any environment that is stressful to him causes him to radiate stress like a beacon. We tried leaving the neighborhood exactly once, and I almost steered into oncoming traffic. I promptly had a panic attack and refused to leave the neighborhood, and I pulled over (through the grace of God, I suppose) and made my father drive me home. I haven't tried to drive since. I'm going to be working on that next, hopefully with a driving school rather than my father. I love the man, but he is an impatient and worrisome driving teacher, and it was extremely scary and stressful.
11. Trampolines. My family and I went to a trampoline park in Utah once. Everything made me bounce too high and since I was two hundred and twenty pounds it felt like everything was going to break under me. There were also foam block pits, and I jumped into one like once and it felt like I was drowning and it took me like five minutes to get out. I would like to never experience that again, thank you.
12. Men in general. I'm not a feminist because I'm scared of men or anything like that. I'm a feminist because women have ample reason to be scared of men, with the whole, you know, terrifying statistic of one in six women being raped, higher numbers outside of America, and the whole thing where that Elliott Rodger dude wrote a manifesto about why women were inferior and then went and shot up a sorority, killing six women and five men- all because he was too much of a jerk to get laid. It sounds vulgar, but the reason that man killed eleven people is because women wouldn't sleep with him. I wouldn't say I'm scared of men specifically. I would say that it's really hard to feel safe when you've lived in a college town, carried pepper spray at four in the morning, and have occasionally indulged in late-night walks to the local elementary school to use the swings. It's really hard to feel safe in a town that jokes about a dude dressed in black who would run around groping women while they were exercising or who broke into a women's dormitory at three am and was, uh, touching himself, in front of girls. It's really hard to feel safe and secure when there's no way to tell that a man won't rape you, because most women are raped by somebody they know. It's really hard to feel safe and secure by being unattractive, because attractiveness has nothing to do with rape. Rape is an act of violence. It's hard to remember that being raped would not make me less of a person or less worthy, because there are people who blame women for being raped or who look down on women who have been raped, as though they were unclean or filthy because of a man's decision to commit a violent act for the sake of feeling powerful.
13. Nuclear war. I'm not afraid of dying of radiation sickness, funnily enough. I'm afraid of what happens if life as we know it comes to a shrieking halt and nobody can produce my antidepressants anymore. What do I do in a post-apocalyptic society without my medicine? My mother has a thing with her thyroid and has taken the same medicine for like twenty years. What does she do if nobody makes her medicine? My sister has epilepsy and takes like ten pills a day to keep from having awful seizures. What happens if nobody makes her medicine? The answer to that last one is the most traumatic, because my mother and I can live without our medicine- we'll just be tired and unpleasantly cranky all the time. But if my sister doesn't have her medicine, then she has lots and lots of seizures and it all results in brain damage and then one of those days she would choke on her own tongue and die or something, and I really have to stop thinking about this one right now.
14. Getting into a fight. On the one hand, I have theoretical knowledge of how to disable somebody. Knee to the groin, stomp on the instep or kick the shin with the point of your foot or your heel, dig fingernails into cuticles, pinch the web of skin between the forefinger and the thumb, smash the heel of your hand up into their nose, gouge eyes, etc, etc... but on the other hand, I have no idea how to actually deal with any of those things, really truly and physically. My brother took karate lessons and he could probably actually kill somebody if he needed to, but I probably couldn't even defend myself against a wet quilt, to be honest.
15. Flooded toilets. This used to be a regular occurrence in our house, mostly because there were three teenagers and everybody eats and we all ate a lot and there was consequently a lot of poop- but also because two of said teenagers were girls and girls use way more toilet paper than boys. My mother gave us all lessons on how to stop the toilet from flooding when it looks like it's going to flood, and I have used this practical knowledge many times, both at home and at college. I am practically a plumber, I know so much about toilets. But I still panic if one does flood, because my brain starts yelling, "EW GROSS THAT'S A LOT OF PEE GET AWAY GET ALL YOUR THINGS AWAY EVERYTHING IS GETTING GROSS AND GERMY NOW EW EW EW" and the rest of me is like "OH GRACIOUS GOD WHAT DO I DO AT A TIME LIKE THIS" and my body is caught between my brain and its natural reaction, which is to jump up and away and swear profusely. It's a very panicky feeling and I don't at all like it.
16. Throwing up. It's happened before, and I know the sensation fairly well at this point. But it really hurts my stomach and makes my mouth all raw and everything tastes gross for like an hour, even after you've brushed your teeth. I hate it and I'm afraid of it because of the pain.
17. Disappointing people. I used to be like, really good at existing. I was smart in high school, I was talented and learned things and remembered them, and I didn't have to study a whole lot because I was good at remembering things, and I did just fine. Depression and anxiety have changed that, and now I'm really bad at remembering things, at concentrating, at paying attention to what other people are saying, at paying attention to what my own body tells me beyond panic or emergency signals. And some people do not understand why I can't just fight it off. It doesn't work that way. I don't have control over my body. My thyroid has control over my body, but my thyroid is flawed because it doesn't make enough happy chemicals. And so people are like, "Oh, Sarah, you're so smart and talented!" And I'm like, "Yeah, no, I'm really not, I used to be really good at faking it but I have no actual idea how to do things." And nobody seems to believe me, until I try something and fail spectacularly and then they're all like, "I don't understand, you failed me, how could you fail me?" and then I go, "I TOLD YOU I WASN'T GOOD AT THINGS ANYMORE NOW PLEASE BELIEVE ME." They never do, of course, but I'm still afraid of it.
18. Getting my period in public. I've gotten to the point where I can tell instantly when it's started, and usually it happens at like four in the morning and I wake up and my brain goes, "Oh, great, that's more underwear ruined." But I'm still irrationally afraid of having my period and wearing pants and what happens if it soaks through... yeah, I'm not going into this anymore. I think there are some boys who might read this and I don't want to gross them out. (Not that they should be grossed out, due to the fact that it's a natural bodily function and we don't get grossed out at them when they stand up to pee. Except when they miss and get stains on the toilet or the floor. Blech.)
19. Really loud dogs. I don't mind if the dogs are small or big. I just hate when they're too loud, because my brain can't focus on anything else and I worry about presenting an unnecessary threat.
20. Anti-Semitism. See, the thing is that a lot of countries in Europe and even in South America have some political party or other that is basically neo-National-Socialism. Despite the fact that less than a hundred years ago the Nazis killed six million Jews. Anti-Semitism is still the most common form of hatred out there, more prevalent than hate crimes against women or persons of color or gay people. It might not seem that way in America, but it sure is that way in the rest of the world. And you know who gets targeted for Anti-Semitism? People who have Jewish names. And my name is Sarah Abramson- literally about as Jewish as you can get. If I were to live in Europe, I might be the recipient of hate crimes. The Holocaust was seventy-odd years ago and we're still doing the exact same crap, but pretending to be more horrified about it. How about no.

I am afraid of a lot of things. Some of those things make sense. Some of them do not. I can't really control what I'm afraid of and what I'm not, despite the whole not-making-sense thing. My soul is rational. My mind and body are not. 

What I am most afraid of at this point is myself. I am afraid of my own feelings of helplessness and sadness, of the quiet waves of dark and fog that threaten to overwhelm me at a moment's notice. I'm afraid of losing myself to this illness, and I'm afraid that I can't properly tell anybody about it. I'm afraid of the shadows of my soul, the dark places in me that rise and loom over my bed at night. I am afraid that I am not enough to overcome it, and I am afraid of what will happen if I cannot learn to cope with this.

I think it will be okay, though. Being afraid of myself means that I've learned how to live with fear, and it's entirely possible that someday I will be able to look fear in the face and say, "I am done with you," and watch it shrink and languish away into nothing. I think that someday I will remember how to be fearless, and I look forward to that day.