chocolate voice

You can tell with people. You can see it on their wrists and in the way they take too long to smile. It's like a gaydar for depressives and people who don't like themselves, we call out to each other like angsty beacons. You can tell sometimes - but then sometimes you can't.

What I realise is that the closer you look, the sadder people are. You take someone shiny and wonderful and either get them drunk or just take the time to talk to them and suddenly stuff spills out, secrets land on the grass and there's nothing to do but just try and hold it, because that's all you can really do for someone. You can't take someone's burden, but you can step underneath it, hold it with them for a while.

Yesterday, the psychiatrist asked to see my legs. As if short skirts and shorts hadn't given it away, he wanted to see, to really see.

No no. Because it's secret, isn't it. So secret that I can't even think about it sometimes, let alone talk about it on the internet. You just don't tell people. Misery is like that. Such a bad conversation starter.

On the quad I hear a guy telling another guy that he doesn't need Valium, he should just stop taking them, he doesn't need them. His dad's dead, he says, and he never needed them. It's as if, if people would just pull themselves together, there wouldn't be any depression or pain.

Why are we so unkind? We change the subject before I get to yell, much to my chagrin, because I've grown a few opinions about pills recently and I just love to shoot my mouth off. Mainly I just want to ask this guy if he's ok. Not in the way he's been asked, not in the 'what the fuck's so bad that you can't get through it without drugs' kind of way. People are so confrontational, like if they ask the awkward questions that psychiatrists have never thought to ask that they'll somehow find the answer, they'll prove themselves stupidly right and break that person a little bit more.

I want to give the guy a hug, because I can't make it better, but I can tell him that he's not the only person in this circle. Of course he's not.

You learn this about being unhappy - you have never been and will never be the only one. No matter how low, how awful you think you are, there's someone else who feels the same. And it doesn't diminish it, or take away your right to be unhappy because everyone has the right to eat and breathe and feel like shit.

You have the right to be weak.

Heart to hearts recently, it's like chocolate voice. You know when you eat too much chocolate or anything really sugary and the back of your throat clogs up with the syrup and when you try to talk you sound like a Fraggle? That's chocolate voice. When I got it one day, Est pointed it out and I was so fucking stunned. How could it be that someone else knew about chocolate voice? How could anyone else possibly understand the thing I thought only happened to me?

Being miserable is like chocolate voice. We all get it, even if we never notice it, and the moment you start talking about it out loud you realise that no one's immune.

Suddenly you see that everyone has chocolate voice, to some degree, and suddenly you see that no one's talking about it. Why aren't we talking about it?