Now Playing Tracks

Depression is humiliating. It turns intelligent, kind people into zombies who can’t wash a dish or change their socks. It affects the ability to think clearly, to feel anything, to ascribe value to your children, your lifelong passions, your relative good fortune. It scoops out your normal healthy ability to cope with bad days and bad news, and replaces it with an unrecognizable sludge that finds no pleasure, no delight, no point in anything outside of bed. You alienate your friends because you can’t comport yourself socially, you risk your job because you can’t concentrate, you live in moderate squalor because you have no energy to stand up, let alone take out the garbage. You become pathetic and you know it. And you have no capacity to stop the downward plunge. You have no perspective, no emotional reserves, no faith that it will get better. So you feel guilty and ashamed of your inability to deal with life like a regular human, which exacerbates the depression and the isolation.
Depression is humiliating.
If you’ve never been depressed, thank your lucky stars and back off the folks who take a pill so they can make eye contact with the grocery store cashier. No one on earth would choose the nightmare of depression over an averagely turbulent normal life.
It’s not an incapacity to cope with day to day living in the modern world. It’s an incapacity to function. At all. If you and your loved ones have been spared, every blessing to you. If depression has taken root in you or your loved ones, every blessing to you, too.
Depression is humiliating.
No one chooses it. No one deserves it. It runs in families, it ruins families. You cannot imagine what it takes to feign normalcy, to show up to work, to make a dentist appointment, to pay bills, to walk your dog, to return library books on time, to keep enough toilet paper on hand, when you are exerting most of your capacity on trying not to kill yourself. Depression is real. Just because you’ve never had it doesn’t make it imaginary. Compassion is also real. And a depressed person may cling desperately to it until they are out of the woods and they may remember your compassion for the rest of their lives as a force greater than their depression. Have a heart. Judge not lest ye be judged.
Pearl (via sherunsfromdarkness)
tubesofpaint: A collection of small journals I have created and bound.  I store them inside a velvet lined cigar box.  Most of them have watercolor pictures inside, telling a short story.  For example, Balloon is about a balloon falling to the ocean and transforming into a jellyfish, then back again.  They are playful and whimsical little stories!  Aside from the small books, I have made larger empty journals as well.  At some point, I will make a tutorial on how to bind them- its a fairly simple process, with a few necessary tools! 
Zoom Info
tubesofpaint: A collection of small journals I have created and bound.  I store them inside a velvet lined cigar box.  Most of them have watercolor pictures inside, telling a short story.  For example, Balloon is about a balloon falling to the ocean and transforming into a jellyfish, then back again.  They are playful and whimsical little stories!  Aside from the small books, I have made larger empty journals as well.  At some point, I will make a tutorial on how to bind them- its a fairly simple process, with a few necessary tools! 
Zoom Info
tubesofpaint: A collection of small journals I have created and bound.  I store them inside a velvet lined cigar box.  Most of them have watercolor pictures inside, telling a short story.  For example, Balloon is about a balloon falling to the ocean and transforming into a jellyfish, then back again.  They are playful and whimsical little stories!  Aside from the small books, I have made larger empty journals as well.  At some point, I will make a tutorial on how to bind them- its a fairly simple process, with a few necessary tools! 
Zoom Info
tubesofpaint: A collection of small journals I have created and bound.  I store them inside a velvet lined cigar box.  Most of them have watercolor pictures inside, telling a short story.  For example, Balloon is about a balloon falling to the ocean and transforming into a jellyfish, then back again.  They are playful and whimsical little stories!  Aside from the small books, I have made larger empty journals as well.  At some point, I will make a tutorial on how to bind them- its a fairly simple process, with a few necessary tools! 
Zoom Info
tubesofpaint: A collection of small journals I have created and bound.  I store them inside a velvet lined cigar box.  Most of them have watercolor pictures inside, telling a short story.  For example, Balloon is about a balloon falling to the ocean and transforming into a jellyfish, then back again.  They are playful and whimsical little stories!  Aside from the small books, I have made larger empty journals as well.  At some point, I will make a tutorial on how to bind them- its a fairly simple process, with a few necessary tools! 
Zoom Info
tubesofpaint: A collection of small journals I have created and bound.  I store them inside a velvet lined cigar box.  Most of them have watercolor pictures inside, telling a short story.  For example, Balloon is about a balloon falling to the ocean and transforming into a jellyfish, then back again.  They are playful and whimsical little stories!  Aside from the small books, I have made larger empty journals as well.  At some point, I will make a tutorial on how to bind them- its a fairly simple process, with a few necessary tools! 
Zoom Info
tubesofpaint: A collection of small journals I have created and bound.  I store them inside a velvet lined cigar box.  Most of them have watercolor pictures inside, telling a short story.  For example, Balloon is about a balloon falling to the ocean and transforming into a jellyfish, then back again.  They are playful and whimsical little stories!  Aside from the small books, I have made larger empty journals as well.  At some point, I will make a tutorial on how to bind them- its a fairly simple process, with a few necessary tools! 
Zoom Info
tubesofpaint: A collection of small journals I have created and bound.  I store them inside a velvet lined cigar box.  Most of them have watercolor pictures inside, telling a short story.  For example, Balloon is about a balloon falling to the ocean and transforming into a jellyfish, then back again.  They are playful and whimsical little stories!  Aside from the small books, I have made larger empty journals as well.  At some point, I will make a tutorial on how to bind them- its a fairly simple process, with a few necessary tools! 
Zoom Info
tubesofpaint: A collection of small journals I have created and bound.  I store them inside a velvet lined cigar box.  Most of them have watercolor pictures inside, telling a short story.  For example, Balloon is about a balloon falling to the ocean and transforming into a jellyfish, then back again.  They are playful and whimsical little stories!  Aside from the small books, I have made larger empty journals as well.  At some point, I will make a tutorial on how to bind them- its a fairly simple process, with a few necessary tools! 
Zoom Info
tubesofpaint: A collection of small journals I have created and bound.  I store them inside a velvet lined cigar box.  Most of them have watercolor pictures inside, telling a short story.  For example, Balloon is about a balloon falling to the ocean and transforming into a jellyfish, then back again.  They are playful and whimsical little stories!  Aside from the small books, I have made larger empty journals as well.  At some point, I will make a tutorial on how to bind them- its a fairly simple process, with a few necessary tools! 
Zoom Info

tubesofpaint:

A collection of small journals I have created and bound.  I store them inside a velvet lined cigar box.  Most of them have watercolor pictures inside, telling a short story.  For example, Balloon is about a balloon falling to the ocean and transforming into a jellyfish, then back again.  They are playful and whimsical little stories! 

Aside from the small books, I have made larger empty journals as well.  At some point, I will make a tutorial on how to bind them- its a fairly simple process, with a few necessary tools! 

I beg young people to travel. If you don’t have a passport, get one. Take a summer, get a backpack and go to Delhi, go to Saigon, go to Bangkok, go to Kenya. Have your mind blown. Eat interesting food. Dig some interesting people. Have an adventure. Be careful. Come back and you’re going to see your country differently, you’re going to see your president differently, no matter who it is. Music, culture, food, water. Your showers will become shorter. You’re going to get a sense of what globalization looks like. It’s not what Tom Friedman writes about; I’m sorry. You’re going to see that global climate change is very real. And that for some people, their day consists of walking 12 miles for four buckets of water. And so there are lessons that you can’t get out of a book that are waiting for you at the other end of that flight. A lot of people—Americans and Europeans—come back and go, ohhhhh. And the light bulb goes on.
Henry Rollins (via emotional-algebra)
To Tumblr, Love Pixel Union