Starting when I was a teenager when I got my first LiveJournal, I’ve always documented my feelings online, sometimes obsessively. In my late teens it was on Tumblr and Twitter, where I shared almost every thought and feeling I had with a bunch of strangers. This eventually led to me to a writing career.
In my late 20s, I began keeping journals in Google Docs, and large part to deal with chronic anxiety and depression. This new project, or zine, will take small fragments of those entries and juxtapose them to create something new. I wanted to share these snippets in part to show what living with mental illness can be like, or at least what it’s like for me.
This is by no means an objective portrayal of my life. The journals already skewed the negative, because I usually feel like writing when I’m struggling, I notice times when I’ve been feeling better are marked by gaps in entries.
But even though these fragments are just a snapshot, they are emotionally truthful. When I read over these journals, I see the same thoughts coming up again and again over the years, and I also see the same attempts to work on myself. I am very proud of all the work I’ve done over these years, even though these problems have proved challenging to fix. As hard as things have been, I do think I’m getting closer to accepting myself.
I’ve called this new digital zine Big Everything. It’s the name used in this fascinating paper to describe a general factor of mental health—every symptom that exists on a spectrum in all people, regardless of whether they are diagnosable.
Part 1
