Excerpt from my unsuccessful Stanford University application essay

In the cold of October, the sunlight diminished. The light in my life vanished alongside it, leaving me stumbling blindly through the frigid night of emotional isolation. Depression had previously overtaken my life years prior; however, this felt different. The darkness appeared as a permanent fixture, a personal thunderstorm raining down on me. As commonly occurs with depression, I began to question my existence and wonder what meaning, if any at all, life possessed. Despite my initially nihilistic perspective, experiencing mental illness ultimately increased my understanding about the nature of life itself.

I found myself imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital in November of 2012. Society views such hospitals as institutions of insanity; conversely, the purest form of reason lies between the walls of a so-called “asylum.” The patients receiving treatment there helped provide me with a new perspective about the reality of the world. Ernest Hemingway explained in A Farewell to Arms, “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially.” Hemingway illustrates a principle of reality that the patients of the hospital demonstrated to me, for indeed, many of them represented the good, gentle, and brave aspects of life; subsequently, the world tried to destroy them. However, society succeeded only in breaking them and strengthening them at the broken places, highlighting their resilience while facing the struggles of mental illness and the societal stigmatization of those affected by it. Contrary to my initial expectations, a prison of madness proved itself a sanctuary of sanity through the wisdom of those whose lives had seen the effects of mental and emotional agony.

The explanation as to how those emotionally afflicted patients not only survive, but rather, thrive as individuals resides in their resolve to find purpose in pain. The great philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “The discipline of suffering, of great suffering - do you not know that it is this discipline alone that has produced all the elevations of humanity so far?” Nietzsche illuminates the idea that suffering can, and often does, act as a catalyst for positive refinements within our society. This concept provides me with a sense of purpose in my experience with depression, and consequently inspires me to utilize the encounter I have had with emotional despair in a positive way.

On Religion and The Just-World Fallcy

A few years ago, a boy in my neighborhood who was about my age took his life. I had only met him one time, he had played basketball with me and a few friends. I don't know if I even spoke to him that day, but when I heard a few months later that he committed suicide, something broke inside of me. I would play the memory of him passing me the basketball over and over again in my mind, realizing that he was just a memory now. His brother came home that week from his deployment in the military to attend the funeral, and the neighborhood had a sort of parade in honor of that. And it fucking bothered me. For some reason the neighborhood seemed to care a hell of a lot more about his brother than about his death. He was gone. Just gone. Forever. Gone.

I currently live in a overwhelmingly Mormon community, and I think the above experience proved to me the toxicity of religion. Consciously or unconsciously, almost every religious person I know subscribes to the just-world fallacy, and as a result, they blame victims. Never was it more evident than when I heard other people my age, all Mormon, making comments like, "well, it's his own fault, he deserved it." It disgusted me. They were so fucking set on this idea that you get what you deserve that they couldn't seem to comprehend the idea that suicide is less of a personal problem and more of a societal problem. Our society is more afraid of the words "mental illness" than it is of the words "nuclear war", and there's something so wrong about that that I can't even begin to express it in one blog post. Sure, the boy pulled the trigger that ended his own life, I don't disagree with that. However, he lived in a community where getting help for depression is nothing less than a shameful experience. Among the Mormon community, depression represents a flaw in character and a lack of spirituality. If an individual is truly righteous, they will be joyful, and therefore, depression symbolizes a sinful life. It's completely distorted thinking, but millions of people think that way.

Society needs to open its fucking eyes and realize that depression is an illness, and that suicide is a symptom of that illness. They have nothing to do with sin, and the sooner that fact is acknowledged the sooner that people can start getting help for their depression or other mental illness without being stigmatized and ostracized. I can't wait for the day when people don't have to be afraid to admit unhappiness.

A New Chapter

An entire new chapter of my life has been unfolding these past couple months, but it could not actually begin until the high school chapter came to a close. Two months ago I was hired by drchrono, a company that develops an electronic healthcare platform based out of Mountain View, California. In three weeks from today I finally move to the Bay Area to begin working there full-time. I am delighted to be part of something bigger than just me. This job is not about me or my bi-monthly paychecks, it is about increasing efficiency in healthcare so that doctors can focus on their patients rather than paperwork or billing. I think this might be a plot twist in the story of my life. A twist that thrusts me out of the dark shadows of depression and into an enlightened world of selfless pursuits, and hopefully, happiness.

Part of me fears being happy, as strange as that might sound. Depression has interweaved itself into my identity, almost as though my slogan has become, "Hi, I'm Austin, and I have depression." The reality, however distorted it may be, is that I don't want to be depressed, but that I also can't imagine myself any other way. Sure, I have my happy moments, in fact, probably the majority of the time I feel at least decent. Strangely, the 40% of the time that I feel depressed seems to entirely overshadow the 60% of the time that I don't; so much so that I have a hard time imagining the percentage of happy moments ever increasing. That said, that percentage has to increase. The life I've lived for the past four years simply is not sustainable in the long-term.  Luckily for me, a new chapter has begun, and as each page is turned, I am no longer bound by the previous one.

A Humble Introduction

Silence. 

I have spent most of the past few years in complete silence. 

Not the silence that probably came to your mind as you first read that word. 

I like noise as much as the next guy. 

I love music, I love talking to friends. 

Yet I live in silence. 

Not acoustic silence. 

Emotional silence.

What exactly do I mean by "emotional silence"? I'm referring to a deep sort of emptiness that only the depressed can truly empathize with. Depression stole the music from my life. Emotionally healthy people live to a sort of emotional "music." The tempo frequently changes, the intervals are sometimes harmonious, sometimes they are dissonant, but there is always a song playing. Depression took that song from me, just as it steals it from millions of other people every year. 

I've lived in this emotional silence for years, and I think it is finally time to break that silence by writing about the emotional turmoil of the past few years. My emotions enslaved me, they controlled every aspect of my life, all the way down to my thoughts. I have often thought the battle has already been lost for me, but that if I share my experiences maybe I can potentially give another individual the strength and knowledge required to win their battle.

Ultimately, this blog is a place for me to express the complex, oftentimes paradoxical, emotions and thoughts that have accompanied my depression. It's a journal of my life from an abstract, emotional perspective rather than a concrete one. I believe the abstract and emotional are far more important to an individual's humanity than the absolute occurrences of their daily lives anyway. The "why?" of human behavior is so much more intriguing than the "what?". And so, this blog will be an attempt to answer the "why?" of my life: of my emotions, my thoughts, and ultimately my actions. The journey will be introspective for me, but hopefully it will inspire introspection for others as well. How can we begin to understand and comprehend the world around us if we haven't fully grasped the world inside of our own minds?