I don't even know where to start.

I could point out where the major downturn happened, but that's like pointing out when the economy crashed. Knowing precisely when we were "officially" in an recession doesn't do us much good, compared to knowing what steps were taken to get us there in the first place.

Am I depressed? I think so. I'm not ready to do the internet cliché thing of self-diagnosis, but I have a hunch I might be depressed. I'm just not sure what the next step is. Or maybe I'm sure what the next step is, but maybe I'm not ready to take it?

My mind is racing in circles. Sometimes the thoughts lap the track and circle around behind other thoughts, making it hard to manage and sort them out. Writing helps keep things on track because I can go back and edit. I've never been much of a talker anyway.

So what's wrong? Nothing new. What's changed is that now I want to talk about it. Because I really don't have much else right now.

It's not a coincidence that the time I stopped posting photos reliably is around the time that Banshee left my life. I wrote a journal about it in my photo submission here. That is a trauma that still haunts me to this day.

I still remember it like it was yesterday. It was a hot summer day. That morning I had been considering bringing my camera down for more photos with Banshee. But I decided against it; the camera would have be left in the car most of the day and I was worried about heat damage. It's decisions like that, that haunt you for the rest of your life.

I took Banshee for a walk. I was approaching the front gate of the facility when I heard one of the workers telling my friend about Banshee's imminent departure. It was so cliché that even he said so after he spotted me standing there, speechless, at the news I just heard. He knew I was about to take the news hard by the look on my face.

I remember that night vividly. I cried a lot. My poor dog was so frantic, she had never seen me in a state like that. I took her for a dozen walks, so much so that even she started to get bored of them. I took the only selfies I'd ever taken in my life. The only camera I had with me was on my cell phone, and it only had a resolution of 640x480. But that didn't stop me. I just needed more photos of her. My baby girl was leaving, and it was all I could do.

I remember walking out of the dog den that night. I had just seen Banshee for the last time in my life. I was about to collapse to my knees and wail (much like I'm doing right now). I was about to run back into the room and back into her pen, hold her in my arms again and cry my eyes out and refuse to let her go. I was about ready to declare that I'd walk back (40 some-odd miles) in the morning and try to negotiate with the sanctuary's owner, beg her to keep Banshee there until the end of the year. I only needed her there until January until I could kick out my roommate and make room for her. It's a horrible thing to say, but it's an even worse place to be in. My baby girl. I loved her as much as flesh and blood of my own. She was my daughter in any emotional sense of family. And I was faced with the prospect of never seeing her again. My roommate, my friend, would be homeless. But verses never seeing my baby girl again?

But I was too depressed to even make that sort of call. I walked slowly out of the room that night. My world had collapsed. I couldn't think. Everything was just a whirlwind of emotion. My friend suggested we get our minds off of it by taking out the trash. Yeah. Sure. Distraction. I didn't want to think. I wanted anything but to think at that point.

That night we stopped at the grocery store on the way home. Thank goodness for 24-hour grocery stores nowadays I guess? I remember I went to the bakery section. I just started throwing dozens of sugary delights into my cart. I was half-contemplating suicide by sugar. I had enough desserts in my cart to probably kill every diabetic in this country. I told my friend I intended to destroy my pancreas that night and die in a blissful sugary high. I was only half-joking. I didn't want to live beyond that point in time.

I've had unhealthy habits in my life. And I'd mostly rationalized them or just accepted them as character flaws I would try to improve over time. But with the loss of Banshee I just dove headfirst into some of those bad habits and it's effected my life.

You know people used to come up to me at conventions and ask me to take their picture? Not because I'm professional like the incredible Abrahm, or artistic like Anubisx360, or as personable and fun as Kurst. The only thing I really had was reliability and a knack for organizing things to make it easy for people to find stuff. I miss those days. I miss being productive. I miss being reliable. I miss being able to contribute to the furry community in that small way. Remember this pic? They all formed up in front of me because they knew where to find that photo after the convention. There would be no questions or wondering or scouring various sites of it. Mystery Otter recognized me, dramatically motioned for me to take the picture, and hurriedly herded the dingoes into position for the shot.

I miss those days. I miss that me. I liked that me. I liked being that reliable guy. I took pride in what I did. Even despite that I wasn't the best by any measure, it was something I could put my stamp on and proudly say "I did this!" because people appreciated it, and I appreciated doing it.

Last year, the weekend before MFF, I had a panic attack. Or whatever you might call it. I wasn't able to make MFF last year and it was on my mind. The weekend before it, I was home from work, decided that my apartment needed clutter removed (as well as other things). So, I started going through my closets, tossing a lot of junk I didn't need and really didn't have room for.

I found old pictures of me playing with my aunt's dogs. It put a smile on my face. Was good times...I was only like six years old at the time, but they were happy memories. Outside, playing. I found more pictures like that. Damn I used to be outdoors a lot when I was a kid, what happened?

Something started creeping up on me. I pushed some thoughts to the side, and kept on clearing out stuff. But those thoughts couldn't be pushed away. They kept pushing forward. I started getting this feeling of sadness. Loneliness. Isolation. Hell, I work graveyard shift, so I was clearing out my closets at 2am. So yeah, maybe it made sense to be a bit lonely.

But it started getting very serious, very quickly. Within a few minutes, I couldn't even keep cleaning. I was too distracted. I started pacing around my tiny apartment. Each passing second, I started feeling more and more alone, more isolated. I started getting this overriding feeling that I was alone. Not just alone in the apartment. I mean well and truly alone. I couldn't shake this feeling, this all-consuming terror that outside the four walls of my apartment, was nobody. Logically I knew I had neighbors I happen to share walls with, this being an apartment complex and all. And I knew people were all around me every day and this planet has seven billion people in it. But this was an emotional feeling of isolation that just refused to be pushed aside by logic and reason. My heart started to race. I started to tremble and my chest started to tense up. I was hyperventilating. I backed up against a wall, started to sweat and claw at my hair as I stood there shaking.

I can only explain it like this. Imagine you're reading a book and the main character is going through this. He starts saying, in the book, "I am alone."

"I am alone"

Then, there's a few dozen spaces before the next line. And the font is a bit bigger.

"I am alone".

Nothing else on that page. So you turn to the next page. "I am alone", written in bigger font.

Next page, the same passage, but the font is so big it takes up half the page.

Next page, the phrase is so big it takes up the entire page.

The next page, the font is so big, that "I am" is alone on the page, and the entirety of the next page is "ALONE".

Then the next page, the font is so big now, that only one letter fits on the page. Each page is dedicated to just one letter out of that horrible, horrible phrase.

Then suddenly someone smacks the book out of your hand. You look up, and the main character of the book is manifest in front of you. He shouts at you at the top of his lungs, "I AM ALONE!!!". You get frightened by this and step back...right into another manifestation of the character. You turn around dramatically as he shouts, "I AM ALONE!!!". But now you're surrounded by dozens, nay, hundreds of this character. In a scene straight out of the matrix, countless clones of him surrounded you. You can't push past them, they won't let you out from inside the circle. They're all screaming "I AM ALONE!!!" and you can't shout over them. They're drowning out anything you have to say. They're just too loud. They start to drag you down to the floor and pile on you like a football player, all of them screaming that. You can't get away, there's no way out, just more and more of them piling on top of you screaming that. You can't think, there's so much noise now. You're just drowning under them, you can't reach out because there's nobody to reach for, and your hand just gets buried under more of these clones, all of them screaming I AM ALONE!!!.

It was like that.

I almost literally started climbing the walls. I freaked out so badly that I rushed to put on some outside clothes and I ran to work. There were people at work. People I could interact with. I tried to pass it off as "hey, was just in the neighborhood, thought I'd stop by". At 2:30 in the morning, nobody buys that. They were cool about it, but they rightfully thought it was strange. I just needed to interact with other human beings. I made as much small-talk as I could before they had to get back to work, and I went home, dove into one of my video games, and tried to forget about it. That morning, I texted my friend...the very same friend I had considered evicting just so I could adopt a shelter dog, and I begged him, in the middle of winter, "for the love of god, get me out of this apartment. I don't care what we do, just get me out of here".

We went for a hike in a local county park. It was nice.

Since that day, a lot of things have slowly made more sense, the more I allowed myself to think about them. I've been passed over for promotions at work because while my work is still exemplary, my competition has been doing pre-emptive courses and training modules when they're at home. It's easy for me to be productive at work. I can focus on that. When I'm home, I take to distractions of any kind like an alcoholic takes to booze to forget his troubles. We all have our vices. I abhorred alcohol and drugs because when I was a kid, those things tore apart my family. I saw what they could do to people. But here I am, 25 years later, and I'm locked into my own vices I'm just now realizing are only technically different. The addiction is the same, the abused item is different.

It's no single thing that I do. It's just escapism. I play a lot of video games, moreso now than I used to before Banshee was shipped away. Sometimes I binge watch shows I have on DVD. When the internet is out and I can't play EvE online, or when the power is out, I dive into a stack of novels I have. Just...anything I can do to not think. I can't even do photo editing because it's a reminder of the sorts of good habits and reputation I've lost. That, and photo editing isn't completely distracting like a video game. I have to stop and consider the nuances of the photo and try to make the best out of what are commonly very terrible shots. I have time to stop and consider my life without Banshee. And that just starts the sadness spiral again.

There was one day I was looking up cute youtube videos, and decided to watch a couple of "Miska", the husky that kinda-sorta-talks-if-you-are-already-predisposed-to-believing-it. I started watching a video of her and it was just SO DAMN FUCKING CUTE. I immediately started giggling and smiling, and it immediately swung over into balling my eyes out crying. She just reminded me of Banshee and the turnaround on the emotions was just "on a dime". It was precisely like how they sometimes show it in movies; a person so in shock they start laughing and the laughs turn directly into wailing cries with no transition whatsoever.

I have stories I owe people, stories I promised to write for people. I enjoy writing little stories. And I definitely want to get those done and finished. But I'm such a terrible person. This one guy's been waiting on me to finish his story now for almost three years. It's not a commission, mind you, just a request, but I agreed to it all the same, and I want to deliver a quality product all the same. But I can't just sit down and do it. I stop moving, stop distracting, then I start thinking. And it's not loneliness that haunts me, it's the sadness and depression from not having my baby girl in my arms. It hurts. It just hurts so fucking bad I can't properly explain it to people who haven't had children. Yes, I know, she was a dog, but she brought out every nurturing instinct I had in me. She was my daughter in every way that counts. And I've never felt loss of this magnitude before. When I was a kid, growing up, we had pets, and we had to part ways with them. It hurt. It hurt a lot. But never like this.

So now I'm acknowledging it. I think I'm depressed. Do I go to therapy? Who do I trust? Some states have no requirements for licensing for psychiatrists. Is a psychiatrist even the person I should be looking for? Or someone else? What if they want me to take drugs? I'm not technically opposed to medication under most circumstances, but I feel that anti-depression drugs are like taking a cough suppressant when you've got the flu. Congrats, you're not coughing, but you still have a viral infection that needs to be taken care of. You just covered up a symptom. I want a solution to my problems, not a band-aid to cover them up.

My life wasn't perfect before Banshee. I had my issues, I still do, and always will. But as time marches on I'm finding that unlike previous things I've had to come to terms with and deal with, I'm not successfully dealing with this on my own. There are so many parts of my life that are just getting worse due to neglect. My joke of career aspirations? No progress in years. My apartment? Still cluttered and unfit to have company over. My social life? Nonexistant, barely any friends, barely anything of a sex life, and still no grasp of more complex social interactions like handling long-term relationships and other adult situations due to a lack of experience. My interactions with the furry community at large? Suffering horribly.

I can't keep lying to myself and say that everything is going to be okay in time. I'm 30 years old now and my life hasn't progressed at all in years. I'm not happy with this state of affairs. But I'm lacking the motivation and drive to change anything. I just keep seeking out new distractions because thinking can be too painful.

Sometimes I am almost in awe of how lazy and distracted I am. Years ago...YEARS ago, I wrote a journal about wanting to learn how to play piano. About two years ago a music store opened up across the street from me, two doors down from where I get my groceries. I've yet to set foot in that store, despite a prominent sign in the window saying "we give music lessons!"

There's this thing I wanted to do, even if just once. I wanted to learn how to play piano because of John Lenon's "Imagine". It's such a beautiful song. The world is such a wonderful, majestic, amazing place. But that song managed to convey all the best of humanity in such a very simple way that seemed to be perfect despite, or perhaps, precisely because of how simple it is. Something everyone can understand and appreciate it. I wanted to learn how to play it because that song means so much to me. And one year I wanted to sneak over to the piano in the lobby of the Westin hotel at Anthrocon, and just play it once. It wouldn't matter that I can't sing along with it, or if nobody showed up for the short performance. Or that the staff would storm up there and kick me off rather quickly. As long as a few people heard it. I just wanted to share that beautiful thing with the people of this planet who have given me the most to be thankful for, the ones who have shown me precisely how beautiful everything is.

And every week when I go grocery shopping, I pass by that music store and shrug it off, reminding myself that I can't stop and think.

I just know that this isn't healthy.

I'm lost.


I am alone.