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This has been a very tough couple of weeks for me. Around two and a half weeks ago I video called my mom. Throughout the night she was showing me my cats and just chatting normally. Eventually we got onto the topic of finance. As we normally do. And damn I really hate when that gets brought up. Being in college I’ve kind of gotta accept financial insecurity, but it’s especially bad when you come from a middle class Midwestern background. For some reason my parents decided to bring up the “idea” that I quit art school and come back home to work fulltime to pay off my student loans. I guess giving up my dreams to stop the quickly accumulating debt is the best option. This wasn’t even the worst part. My parents suggested that I go work at the Toyota factory close to home. They talked about how one of my childhood best friends works there now and that my mom’s friend’s son works there and is making good money. It’s about $25 an hour. For Indiana that’s definitely not shabby, but you have to realize the effects that would have on me as a creative. I fucking hate the term “creative” because we are all creative in our own insanely self-indulged way. Hitler was a “creative.” He painted. Back to the factory issue--Ever since middle school I suffered severe depression. I always felt isolated and drowned out by everyone in my life and it only heightened as the years went on. In middle school I lost a lot of things. I lost confidence. I lost my cheer. I lost my faith. I lost most of my drive. I lost friends. I lost my best friend. I lost my cat. All of this loss on top of the ever-growing stress of being a middle schooler crescendoed into high school. High school was an awful time. I feel like the awkward middle school days that normal people have were shoved into my high school days. I was bullied. It was not a great time. Shoved and punched; called every slur you can call a white guy. That was only freshman year. Sophomore year I found solace in older kids that I was in marching band with. They were there for me even if they weren’t good for me. They were the youth group white kids. They weren’t very Christ-like though, would always say racial slurs and spit homophobic or transphobic remarks under their breath. I’d go along and mutter those things as well . . I was just happy to be included. I was starting to bloom towards the end of sophomore year. Realized how stupid it was that I was hanging around such toxicity and hatred. I branched off. Joined a new group of people. My best friends back home to this day (though I’m only a freshman in college so that could change.) As I stated earlier my depression started with tons of loss in early middle school. I kind of suppressed it until junior year of high school. This is where things get messy. Junior year. Late October. Around my 17th birthday. I remember I had my first public panic attack. I don’t even think it was a “panic attack,” it was more like all my depressive thoughts and insecurities were Mentos and my body was a bottle of soda. The Mentos finally hit the soda. That metaphor is awful. I was in a gymnasium somewhere near Indianapolis. It was Marching Band Super Regionals weekend and everything was going comically bad. The weather was cold and it was thunder storming everywhere. We had to load the trailer in the rain. The place that was housing us canceled on the entire band (all 200 of us) at the last second and we had nowhere to go. Just a bunch of wet and cold teenagers crammed in buses. I don’t remember exactly what was going through my head at the time, but what I do know was I felt alone, cold, and scared. After about two hours sitting in the buses we had a place to go. Some random gymnasium in a high school somewhere. How nice of them. We entered the gym, all wet and cold, and started picking corners to go to. Me and my friends went to the back right corner by the vending machine and to the side of the bleachers and set up camp. That’s when I popped. I’m getting out my air mattress and I can't find the pump. I’m flipping my luggage upside down looking for the air pump, but I can’t for the life of me find it. I’m so wet and tired. I’m thinking “they wouldn’t miss me if I died.” I’m flipping my luggage over like a crazy person screaming, “Nobody loves me!” My friend is saying “Hey man, chill out.” I still can’t find that fucking pump. I’m so mad. I’m scared. “I miss my uncle so much.” He died in 6th grade. I finally just threw my air mattress against the wall. I fell down on the ground and curled into a fetal position and started sobbing. They’re asking me “What’s wrong?” The only reasonable response was “Everything.” It’s all fucked. That was the first time. The entire rest of the trip I was on the verge of tears. Anything could have set me off. I flash forward to December. Another crazy breakdown. Was it even that crazy? I just remember sobbing one night and I went to my mother’s medicine cabinet, grabbed the heart medication we could barely afford, and shoved it in my mouth. There were four or five tablets just floating on my tongue. I went to swallow them, but my body wouldn’t let me. I started to tear up. In frustration I spit them out and put them back in the bottle. Now wasn’t the time. Flash forward again. It’s February or March 2020. The girl I so desperately wanted to like me said she wasn’t looking for a relationship, goodie, and most of my friends weren’t including me in activities. I always think maybe they could smell the suicidal thoughts and depression oozing off of me. I wasn’t getting much sleep. I was working out everyday and not eating a lot. I was 145lbs and six feet tall. The smallest I’ve ever been. It was agonizing. My dad asked me to lend him a hand with yard work. I was so annoyed. I saw that all my friends were hanging out without me again. I helped him with the yard work. My dad usually has a short temper when doing anything in the yard or around the house. His worst quality. He yelled at me and I just ran inside. I grabbed my backpack and went into the garage. I grabbed some sort of wire/rope hybrid. Something to suffocate myself with, and I walked out the front door. Walking up the road I heard my dad yell my name, I turned my head and saw him. My eyes welled up a bit. “What’s wrong bub, is everything okay?” I made those tears go back into my head. “Yeah. I just need some air. Gonna go on a walk. Be back in a bit.” He looked at me in silence for a bit. “If you need to talk to me about anything you can.” I grinned. “Love you, dad.” He said, “I love you, too.” I kept walking uphill and turned left, towards my old elementary school. There’s a path that leads from my neighborhood to the old school. On that path there’s a bridge with a creek. I was going to kill myself under that bridge. I just sat there on that bridge for a while. Listening to the water. Listening to the birds. Thinking about how nobody will miss me when I’m gone. I go under the bridge and unzip my backpack. I reach my hand in there. Nothing. I reach deeper. The rope. I bring my hand up. My hand didn’t grab onto it. I zip up my bag. I walk to the playground. I’m swinging. Swinging while listening to sad songs. Looking at a couple kids and their parents over on the slides. I eventually get up and walk home. Maybe it was because my dad said “I love you” and came out to me to make sure I was okay. Maybe he noticed I was upset. Maybe I’m just a huge pussy. Probably that. Either way I’m thankful. COVID started soon after. All of my friends didn’t really follow quarantine. I had to quit marching band and distance myself due to my mother’s heart problems. My grandma was finishing up her cancer treatment at the start of COVID too. Didn’t want to be the reason they died. This isolation really hurt me. I would go to sleep at night sobbing. Late April or early May I had an appointment with my doctor. Just a checkup. I brought up that I think I need anti-depressants. There’s no way I could’ve gotten through COVID without them. I told him about my thoughts. The darkness I felt in my mind and body. The cold. The isolation. He asked if I ever planned to kill myself, I told him yes. I hope he kept that confidential because I think my mom wouldn’t be able to live with herself if she knew about my attempts. I was prescribed Fluoxetine. Yay. I was good. For a while I was good. In August of 2021 I went to college in New York. I want to write screenplays. Make movies. Create escapes for people. At the start of college my depression was pretty bad. I remember having a panic attack in a big grass circle at 10am in a park. I told someone that I needed to go home and take my antidepressants. I had skipped out on them because I had been feeling so happy lately. It felt like I wasn’t present. I wasn’t real. I wasn’t a human. I still have problems living in the moment. I walked home and took my meds. I remember crying in my pillow that night. My roommate was asleep and I don’t think I woke him. Everything was relatively fine after that. Some dark things here and there, but I was finally happy and comfortable in a place I love to be in, with people I love to be around, and doing what I love. We did it. We made it back to where I left you. Back to that god forsaken “Toyota factory” comment. That fucked me up. It snapped me out of my happiness and stuck me back into the harsh realities of the world. Made me realize my parents had no faith in me. They were already coming up with plan Bs' in their head. I was mortified. Angry. Sad. I was up all night thinking about what I would do if I had to work in a fucking factory. I was thinking I’d have to kill myself to not have to worry about the loans or working for a bone-crushing corporation. I came to class the next day. It’s my narrative class. My teacher was talking about artists that give up on their dreams. He said that they usually kill themselves. How funny. It sort of validated those thoughts. I was working on a set for a friend. That kept me busy for a week. I mentally checked out until the next narrative class. In that class there were only six people there, and my teacher gave us a very personal exercise. We were supposed to pitch why we deserved to be in a writer's room. What makes you unique. Tell us the life experiences that give you a unique view on writing and life. The TA gave an example. She talked about her struggle with eating disorder and her recent weight loss. My teacher told us to dig into things like that. I had a lot to talk about in that department. I talked about my mother’s congestive heart failure. That happened in elementary school. After school my dad would take us to go visit. I’d bring my DVD player and the second Ice Age movie. I’d cuddle up to my mom and we’d watch that stupid movie together. I remember I’d sob and cry asking my dad to take me back after we’d left the hospital. That was hard for a young kid. I talked about the medical bills that piled up. How I had to become money conscious at a young age because we were drowning in our sorrows the entire time I was growing up. I talked about my Uncle Rick. I talked about how he was a better father than my dad ever was. We’d go watch movies in theaters. We watched Up together during the opening weekend. We both sobbed at the intro. He took me and me alone to watch The Dark Knight Rises in IMAX, opening night. That was amazing. I’ll never forget him talking about how hot Anne Hathaway was in that leather suit while sipping a Diet Rite. He had Crohn's disease and he had to go into surgery. Some problems with his intestines or gut. It wasn’t supposed to be fatal. He made it through the surgery okay and even had a couple days recovering back home. I remember telling my mom that I should call him and talk to him . . . I put it off. Can’t blame the sixth grade version of yourself but I still do everyday. On one of the recovery days he got up and collapsed. My Aunt Julie came home and found him passed out on the floor. The ambulance rushed him to the hospital. Most of the family knew. We were at the hospital from the start. He was a pretty public man. He was the treasurer and he even ran for mayor. It was a small city in Indiana. Word got around. We were sitting in the fucking waiting room when I saw the news broadcast about him in the hospital. I was sobbing. It had been a few hours and they were just broadcasting. Why can’t we just be miserable in private. They moved him to a different hospital. We followed. We spent four days in the ICU. I barely slept. Curled up on the recliner in one of the seating areas. I still can smell the fake leather. I can still see the dimmed fluorescent light during the night time. I can still hear the crowd of people who’d come with flowers - and candy - and catering - and fucking get well wishes - and the prayers. The fucking prayers. So many prayers were said. You would’ve thought all those prayers would amount to something, but still. I was there when they pulled the plug. I was there hearing my Aunt Julie sob as he flatlined. So yeah I talked about all of this in my narrative class. Talked about my suicidal tendencies, didn’t say I attempted, though. I made the teacher assistant and one of my friends cry. The entire time I was shaking and my heart rate was incredibly high. One of my classmates tried criticizing my “pitch” on a narrative level and I made a joke about his criticism. He sent me a text later that night saying how brave I was to share. It’s always brave. It’s always thoughts and prayers. So now I’m here. It’s March 20th. Actually it’s March 21st. The clock bounced past midnight as I was writing. March 21st at 12:14 am. I’m back to one of my worst depressive states. All because of the Toyota factory and a narrative exercise that forced me to unbury that trauma. I have a month or so left of freshman year. I’m so scared to return to Indiana. There’s so much trauma that I left behind. I’ll be forced to stare at it throughout the summer. There’s an uncertainty that I’ll never return to New York due to financial reasons. I can’t be that “creative” who gives up their dreams and kills himself. There’s that word again . . . 

Isaac's personal essay won second prize in SVA's Annual Writing Contest in the spring of 2022. He also won third prize in the Scripts category. Isaac is a second year Film major at the School of Visual Arts who sits in his room and sometimes manages to write something passable. When he is not sitting in his room he can be spotted on the F-train listening to poetry and comic book podcasts. "Shout-outs to my mom," Isaac writes. "If you're reading this, please don't."