2025: Chapter 19

November 9th:

There are myriad studies suggesting people became more antisocial in the post-Myspace/Facebook era, which spawned into numerous other social media apps and online dating services. This trend of antisocial behavior was only furthered in the aftermath of the Covid quarantine, when people grew comfortable with the reality of spending more time alone.

As someone who bends more towards being a recluse in my private life, anyway, I know very well the difference between being alone and being lonely. I can count on one hand the number of years, like in life, that I have been in a relationship. I have friends, but my closest ones happen to be cut from the same cloth as I am — which is to say doing activities such as ‘going out,’ or ‘hanging out,’ are few and far between. This is especially the case since I quit drinking.

In my last article I went into semi-depth about my experience at Virginia Tech, at least insofar as my feelings and memories were concerned. I touched on learning what depressed — as a way of life — meant, as compared to an adjective used to describe someone else. What I didn’t really get into was the solution that got me out of it.

And depression can be a complicated thing. I think the worst kind I’ve only gone through a couple times in my life, where I have really been, like, in the shit. I’m talking about heartache, an extreme loss of appetite, lack of regular/consistent sleep. Things of that nature. Even with good intentions of putting on a brave face and walking tall with a seemingly positive attitude, it still doesn’t matter. Everyone can see it when they look at me. The permanent purplish bags under my eyes. The dramatic weight loss in a short time. Etc.

But then there are other types of depression, the ones that aren’t so noticeable on the surface. It tends to manifest in sleeping too much, where that’s all the body wants to do. I can get eight hours, or ten hours, and then take a nap later on that lasts another two or three hours, and still I just want to roll over and sleep some more. This type of depression makes me more irritable. It shortens my fuse. All that good stuff.

Anyway, the solution. I found it when I was 19 years old. As complicated a thing as depression can be my solution was incredibly simple: You just gotta get up, and get out there. You have to do things. I always forget about this when I’m stuck in a rut, which kinda makes sense because that’s what ruts do. They make the universe a lot bigger and a lot more complicated than it needs to be. They force the sufferer to look inward at everything that’s gone awry rather than out — at the bigger picture. It’s easier said than done, of course.

I think the response I gave to my most recent severe depression wasn’t it, either, though. While I knew the answer to what ailed me was to get up, and get out there, I ended up doing too much. I got myself into multiple pickles with women, I drank more and with more frequency than I had at any point in my life, I gambled more (monetarily) and inevitably lost more than at any point in my life, and I just generally was out of control with money. There is something to be said about the temporary relief it gave me emotionally, but it also led me directly into sobriety.

What I am experiencing right now is the lesser form of depression. The one where I’m sleeping too much. The reason it’s kind of a curious (if not annoying) intellectual exercise is because, perhaps ironically, I’m not drinking or gambling anymore and thus I have fewer things to go out and do. It’s kind of a pathetic existence when I think about it, the idea that bars and casinos are arguably the two places I am most comfortable at.

So when I talk — as I did in my last blog post — about needing to figure out my life, I imagine that’s what I meant. That we can score it in the win column that I’m basically five months clean of alcohol and gambling, and yet still so goddamn young in the What Else Are We Gonna Do With Ourselves department. That is my current dilemma.

November 11th:

Today being November 11th, I feel compelled to give a shoutout to Niña — wherever she may be. I don’t know how or when it all began, but her and I were very dedicated to texting one another at 11:11, whether A.M. or P.M. Pacific Standard Time, whenever we had the chance. It’s silly, but her and I always thought it was cute. Then on the actual date (November 11th) it was doubly as silly and/or cute.

I still think it’s a trip that she’s gone. That someone I was so close to — whose bed I regularly slept in, whose food I regularly ate, who I regularly showered with, who I regularly went grocery shopping with, who I regularly folded laundry with — just… isn’t here anymore.

Aside from November 11th being the exact 11-month anniversary of her death, it is also the full one-year anniversary of the last interaction her and I shared (via text message). Strangely, as if the universe was giving me one of its hidden signals, I ended up texting her on the day she died — on December 11th, 2024 — asking if I had done something that made her upset with me. (Since it was so abnormal that we hadn’t texted or spoken in the prior month.)

I wish she knew how much she meant to me. Similar to how Niña found a boyfriend almost immediately once I shifted so much of my attention to Heather, back in late-2022/early-2023, once I directed my focus on Nohemi during the autumn of 2024 Niña told me she was seeing somebody new. It was my ignorance into believing things were going well with that new somebody which made me respect the distance between us in the final month of her life. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and I didn’t know that she was seeing her ex-boyfriend again and thus repeating the cycle of toxicity that defined their relationship.

In other words, I feel like Niña convinced herself that I didn’t give a shit about her. That she was just, like, this placeholder that I could talk to and play games on our phones with and watch shows with before we went to sleep — until I found the Heather’s and Nohemi’s of the world. I can’t speak on this with any confidence. It’s just how I perceive it based on the way the puzzle pieces fit in to their specific places in hindsight. It feels to me like she used various men as distractions whenever I was preoccupied chasing other women.

In reality, I saw our friendship (or relationship) as one of those forever kinds. I could have envisioned a world where I invited her to my wedding, where she was in some capacity a part of my life for the long haul. Of course I harbored a ton of guilt after she died. It still exists residually, in fragments, hither and thither, inside me. The only thing that gave me any sort of reassurance in the aftermath was the esteem her family held me in. How her mother honored me by asking if I would view Niña’s body with her (which I couldn’t stomach at the time). Or how I was the second person, and first non-family member, to speak at Niña’s celebration of life.

Knowing the guilt I felt, I honestly can’t imagine how her most immediate ex-boyfriend got (or is getting) through it. Based on what’s been said to me by Niña’s family, and friends, and to me directly by Niña herself when she was still alive, the guy wasn’t a good dude to her. The two of them got in a fight literally hours before she took her life. And Niña’s family refused his presence or appearance at her wake. Nevertheless, the guy would have to be a complete sociopath not to feel as if he had/has blood on his hands. But that’s just me projecting my own feelings — had I been the last person to have contact with her.

As it is I can only speak for myself. I can only say that I still think about Niña every day. I can only wish she was still here and that things had gone differently. I can be upset and frustrated that she didn’t reach out to me, or that she didn’t give me a chance to say goodbye. And I can only admire, in a way, her determination to follow through with what she believed was the way.

Within a few days of Niña’s passing I received a really fucked up, like stomach-churning, etched in my memory, direct message from an anonymous account on Instagram that read: It’s your fault that she killed herself. Hope this loss humbles you. Without any context, and without the logic portion of my brain functioning in any sort of reasonable capacity at that time, I internalized such a message and convinced myself it was true. It undoubtedly exacerbated my pain for several more of the subsequent days. I didn’t respond and I still don’t know who sent it.

It was not until I understood how involved Niña’s family wanted me to be, in the aftermath of her death, that I realized the DM could not have been legitimate. Even at her celebration of life her friends and coworkers came to console me, and were, like, in union to shun her most recent ex, and told me that Niña had recently spoken of me in a positive light. That she always had good things to say about me. Which was nice. I have clearly taken this hard — and I still don’t know what the rules are, or what the appropriate timetable is, for the grieving process — but her family and friends and coworkers really saved me from going down a much darker path.

November 14th:

So that’s what’s going on in my life. I got written up at work a couple weeks ago for being ‘unprofessional,’ and that I have been displaying a ‘pattern of behavior,’ because I guess a couple months ago I paid a guy out on baccarat by flipping a chip at him (with pinpoint accuracy, for the record), and most recently — insofar as the writeup is concerned — I was kind of being an asshole to a guy who the craps crew has notoriously had problems with.

About a week later, like this most recent Monday night, I ended up in the office again on my own accord because I felt the need to explain myself. I admitted that I thought it was a bullshit writeup, but that it was also good for me in a wakeup call sort of way. It felt almost validating that others notice me. That I am not as good as I thought I was at masking the way I feel.

And so it kind of turned into a heart-to-heart, with me saying that this year has been a revolving door of minor issues that have like attached themselves to the much larger issue of Niña’s death which has been cascading over me omnipresent in the background. That without such a writeup, and the ensuing communications thereof, I fear I was on track to disqualify myself from my job.

The most crucial part of my life experience has been understanding just how little I know. It has been pushing, and fighting, to get to a certain place, and then getting comfortable before another scenario worthy of humbling me comes along. And then I push, and I fight, and I get to another certain place, and then the cycle repeats itself again. After enough time passes one such as I convinces themself that it will never be that hard again. That I have enough tools in the shed, and enough arrows in the quiver, to withstand the next onslaught.

Just as I mentioned in my Virginia Tech article — about how I never learned how to study, and thus never knew what hard work actually was — my life has been comfortable enough that I never learned (and thus never knew) how to work on myself. All of this is new for me. Just as the problems of some others might not be a big deal to me, I’m aware that my problems aren’t a big deal to some others. I think I have a good head on my shoulders. I think I’m pretty good at keeping things in perspective. And I also think this has been, objectively, a difficult year.

November 16th:

But it’s not like I’m throwing in the towel or anything. All I know is to continue the push, and the fight, until I find some peace again. Since I was 18 or 19 my circumstances have never been, like, conventional or ordinary. From education to love to work to dealing with untimely deaths, my position is what it is. It has given me a somewhat (at least I think) unique take on the human condition.

I imagine that’s what generally makes me so good at communicating with others, at least from a bird’s eye view. I have seen a lot and felt a lot. My downfall is how specific my experience has been, and in turn how difficult it can sometimes be to communicate myself to others. A square can be a rectangle but a rectangle cannot be a square.

As this year winds down I’m really just looking for some clarity heading into 2026. I have my gaze fixated on one person and one person only, and she either doesn’t want me anymore or isn’t ready to have me. Either way, I can’t keep waiting on what may never come.

And working at the casino. It’s how I earn my living. It’s not what I want anymore, though. I had a strong urge heading into this year to hunker down and start priming myself for law (and eventually law school), but that got derailed six ways to fucking Sunday by all the things that once made me me — from drinking to gambling to women — and in turn made me take a detour into sobriety and focusing for the first time in a long time on spirituality. I’m still only 35. I have plenty of time to pursue that dream.

These distractions that I appreciated very much for how much of my time they have occupied, thus allowing me to not dedicate so much of my life on all the negatives, were in fact what was keeping me from doing what is necessary. I will make one exception for the girl that I love, but if that falls through — which I am fully assuming — then I will be without any distractions. I will be clean going into the new year.

Only a couple weeks ago did my calf heel. I started running again. Soon enough I’ll be myself again. Soon enough.