Josh Deprez

Let’s get dirty. Peel back a few layers of the human onion called Josh and see what’s under there…might maybe even post this on the blog, hah! Do I have the balls? I guess Paris wanted more blogging from maclab, well here’s my contribution!

I’ve claimed a few times that I had once attempted suicide. Pretty heavy stuff, hey? Well, it’s felt like an easy thing to say when I was trying to guilt someone—and depressed.

There’s nothing much else on this weird planet that is as serious as suicide. If you ever come so close as to think about doing it, don’t do it!  If for nobody else, at least stay alive for me. I don’t care how fat, ugly, stupid, useless or just plain numb you feel, you will make my world a more awful place by actually doing it! The thought certainly has crossed my mind a few times.  That’s a state of (non-)being I’d rather never have again, but not so much as to end the journey prematurely.

I didn’t ever make up being depressed at all. Even now, once in a while,  the world seems just a bit too colourless and I’m reminded again of the numb dullness of being depressed. I also thought about suicide a few times, some very grave moments they were. But the attempt part of the story was a fabrication and how I used it was in retrospect a pretty despicable way of trying to influence somebody. What really happened was I never followed through, my thoughts stayed confined to my head. There’d be a lot more people who’d know about it if I did follow through. To think of all the collective effort they’d have to put in to deal with such a selfish tragedy!

Right now though I’m just feeling a bit bad about how I tried to exploit the concept. The impact of abusing a delicate matter such as this, in order to gerrymander somebody else’s feelings has been awful. Thanks to cognitive congruence, the act of saying I had tried suicide probably prolonged the sadness longer. The person I was trying to manipulate almost certainly saw through it and I lost a lot of respect from then-friends—let’s not forget any health implications, loss of motivation to get my drivers license or a proper job, the unwillingness to do ACM programming competition training, and the utterly failsome sequence of pseudoromantic almost-relationships that were just so frustrating.

Looking back, I’m sure glad I never did try to kill myself. Looking back at the last three and a half years, it’s been a wild ride. A pivotal moment was when I rediscovered sobriety. These days, things have been quite stressful, having been flat-chat with Honours all year and not long ago with some mild romantic disappointment. Even last week I was in the same hypersensitive, pessimistic and cynical frame of mind that led to all the suffering last time. But now that the uni stress is all done and dusted for this year, life is picking up again, dramatically. This coming summer break, and 2010, are going to be lots of fun. Energetic and healthy Josh is finally energetic and healthy!

Who’s up for some tree-climbing or watching some anime?