I'VE BEEN PRETENDING TO BE PRETENDING TO HAVE DEPRESSION FOR PROFIT AND I'M SORRY

<John Campbell

It was easy to pretend to be pretending to be depressed. I sat down and wrote ~650 words over the course of two days. One of the days I was writing, a roommate with anger problems I was kicking out of my apartment choked me and broke my drawing desk because of how strongly he felt emotions that he could not seem to express in another way.

For most of this year I've been taking 40mg of citalopram and 150mg of bupropion every day. I have no idea what they are or what they do or how the human brain works. If I listened to a neurologist explain how the brain works, I would continue to have no idea how the brain works but I would learn some new words.

I've spent ~7 years making comics and posting them to the internet in an attempt to connect with other human beings in any way, on any level. We have been trying to make sense of the seemingly causeless and sourceless pain in the world, and wondering why it seems like the pain we experience causes pain in other people, even when we strongly desire not to cause pain in other people.

I knew that people with depression (and people pretending to have depression) would be capable of conceiving of a world where despite all this, I was still a person who would choose to dismiss the validity of their experiences of pain. I knew that when depressed people expressed this sentiment toward me, despite my attempts to form a connection with them, I would feel "wounded" for a short time and I would imagine that everything I had done could be easily wiped out in the minds of all the people I want to connect with.

The people who believe I could be capable of some kind of systematic faking of depression are themselves faking this perspective. Even if it seems like they are not aware that they are faking this perspective as of yet. It still takes me some time to feel the emotional perspective I desire to feel.

We can think of something worse than what is happening. We can do this all the time. We can think up things that no one has felt horrible about before. We can be very creative.

I am attempting to make a home for myself where I feel safe emotionally and physically. I have lived off of very little money for the majority of my time as a cartoonist but chose this lifestyle because the desk jobs I've worked have helped make me desire to die.

The idea of a happy person drawing hundreds to thousands of compulsively melancholic stick figures "for profit" is a funny idea.

The idea that a person could believe that all depressed people are "faking it" is funny.

It would be funny if a mental illness caused someone to write the previous update in a sincere way. It would be funny if a mental illness caused me to write the previous update in an "insincere" way. It would be funny if the mental illness you have makes you interpret these words in this order in the way that you do.

• https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/73258510/sad-pictures-for-children/posts/313179