EPTIn 2005 I decided that I was going to drop out of school. I was in my junior year of high school at the time. The decision was spurred by the onset of what would become a depression that enveloped the next several years of my life. I am currently on the tail end of it. I say depression though I never had it diagnosed and I've never taken any medication for it. Not because I don't believe either of those would have helped, in fact I'm sure they would have. I simply did not realize what it was until very recently.
Now that that's out of the way. Let me regale you with a story of adolescence. I'd like to believe that I was rather popular, and I had several "girlfriends," as much as a teenager with no money and no car could have a girlfriend, that is. However, this story is going to revolve around 3 people, namely: my best friend, the girl(and thus shall she be referred to as "the girl" henceforth), and myself. I'm sure several of you think you know where this is going, and some of you may be right, but that's neither here nor there. I met my best friend in 7th grade. I had met both the girl in 6th grade. I had always had a small crush on her, though I didn't get to know her very well until later.
That leads me into my 8th grade year. My best friend was involved what another girl who ultimately is not very important to this story outside of that. My small crush on the girl had blossomed into what I believe was my first love, and that's what really begins to complicate things. You see, the girl was completely hung up on my best friend. As you can imagine, to a teenager this can seem like the end of the world, as I ended up friend zoned pretty hard. Now, like I said, I had other "girlfriends," but the girl was always the one I wanted.
We go into high school and the three of us(best friend, the girl, myself) spend a lot of time together outside of school. Awkward, right? You bet, though I never put much stock in it until later. Ultimately this situation is what I feel was the beginning of my depression. I continued to pine for the girl for the next 2 years(9th and 10th grade). The summer after 10th grade my best friend moved away. Again, another major event in a teenager's life. That combined with the fact that the girl, who I had been in love with for several years now had kept me in the friend zone ultimately culminated in me essentially giving up.
I lost almost all motivation, I effectively gave up, I no longer cared about school and skipped class constantly. So in my junior year I dropped out. In Virginia, at least according to what they told me, since I was still a minor(17) at the time I needed to enroll in a GED program if I were to choose to drop out. Which I did, so I did at least get my GED. Around this time I also started getting into MMOs pretty heavily. I had played WoW and FFXI in the past, but never anything serious. However, I ended up using them as an escape. Those of you who suffer(ed) with depression, and even those of you who haven't can understand this. It simply felt good to be able to forget about everything in the real world after logging in, tossing it all to the side and just being "Clemz."
Which brings me here now. As I said, I feel like I'm on the tail end of this depression, and I'm finally starting to put things back together. Unfortunately, I let everything suffer during it. I took some college courses, but never anything concrete as to my future, and I didn't work. I just played my MMOs and forgot about everything else. Frankly, if it weren't for them, I think I'd have gone crazy so I have absolutely no regrets about that much at least. So, putting things back together. I could go back to school, but at the moment I wouldn't feel comfortable doing that, so I've been looking for work. Which as you can imagine for someone with no work experience and little education, it's not going so well.
I realize this was lengthy, and for those of you that take the time to read it, I thank you. For those of you that don't, that's okay too, it was cathartic putting this out there as much of this was deeply personal stuff that I've not told anyone else before. With all that out of the way(and I hope this is okay) I would like to invite you all to join me on my stream over at twitch.tv/clemzlol. I just set it up a day or two ago and have been playing Chrono Trigger, at one point I was up to 6 whole viewers! So stop in and say hi some time.
(It was strangely harder to hit the "post blog" button after writing this than I thought it would be.)
