A Depressed Anarchist’s Guide Surviving Winter
Image by Ales Krivec.
In case you haven’t noticed, dearest motherfuckers, my mental health is kind of a hot mess. OCD, ADHD, CPTSD, OSDID, all on top of LGBT and just a dash of BDSM for flavor. It seems like every year I add a few more letters to this dizzying alphabet soup, not to mention a few more prescriptions. I thought I was fucked up back when I was afraid to leave the house, then I escaped through the closet, switched genders, and stumbled headlong down a rabbit hole of repressed childhood trauma and began sprouting personalities like fucking mushrooms.
So, yeah, I’m a little bit fucked up, in fact all five of me are. If anything, qualifying my mental state as a hot mess is kind of an understatement, especially in January when the freezing cold has the odd tendency to make that hot mess a lot hotter.
Don’t get me wrong, the trials and tribulations of Stressmas can be quite the shit show in their own right, but at least there’s fudge. Then January rears its frigid head and there is no more fudge; no more lights, no more tinsel, no more sugar cookies, no more chestnuts roasting over an open fire or shimmering candy-colored Christmas trees. Only death; cold, dark, muddy, death.
Just one long slog through three more months of winter sludge without a goddamn thing to look forward to but a light so far at the end of the tunnel that it might as well be on another fucking planet. We don’t even get snow anymore in Central Pennsylvania thanks to those climate raping parasites over at Exxon Mobil. Just dead trees with no leaves and the wind whistling Morrissey up my spine. I wouldn’t exactly say that I’m suicidal but by February the barrel of a shotgun begins to look more appetizing than a chicken fried steak.
I survive because that’s what I do; I suffer, bitch, and survive. But a lot of people don’t, and I feel for them. As fucked up as I may be, I’m not alone and I’m not just talking about the alters in my internal family collective. Depression is booming in this country and for good goddamn reason. This country and much of the world it rapes sucks. In 2023, Statista reported that an estimated 17.8% of American adults report currently suffering from depression, which is a significant increase from the 10.5% in 2015.
Armchair normies stroke their beards at such numbers and call it a crisis. I look at those numbers and all I can think is that at least 17.8% of Americans are finally paying attention. Depression may suck but it isn’t a fucking illness, it’s a painful state of awareness. America is governed by dueling herds of white supremacists who are actively financing at least one full-fledged genocide in the Middle East and several uranium tipped cold wars pretty much everywhere else, including outer space where HAL 9000 will soon be deciding our collective fate with fucking laser beams.
You would be sick if you didn’t want to die and as something of a civil libertarian absolutist, I actually support that right. However, if everyone with enough of a conscience to feel like shit about this world being shit blew their fucking brains out there would be nothing left but Republicrats and Dempublicans to talk to and I would have little choice but to join you on the balcony out of pure boredom alone.
Such a fate would also let the dicks who currently run this world off way too goddamn easy, so this January I have decided to provide my unique services as a professional crazy person with a fifth-degree blackbelt in fending off the noose to anyone feeling tempted to eat their hardware in a Kurt Cobain club sandwich this winter. This is a brief guide from a depressed anarchist on how to be as fucked up as you have every right to be without blowing your brains out and these are a few things you might want to consider trying before pulling that trigger.
1.) Find Yourself an Advocate, not a Life Coach
As you can imagine, I have seen my share of shrinks and most of them deserved to be shot far more than I do. With that being said, contrary to what my screeds against the tyranny of the DSM may lead you to believe, I am not anti-psychiatry. I just happen to believe that like most authority figures, psychiatrists have way too much goddamn power in this country and that the burgeoning for-profit therapeutic state encourages downright tyrannical behavior from such professionals, but there are exceptions to this rule, and they can save your life if you let them.
My advice is to proceed with caution. A good therapist is a lot like a good whore. If they aren’t willing to be upfront with you about their ethics, then no condom on earth is going to keep you safe. Seek out a therapist who behaves more like a collaborator than a doctor. The quickest way to do this is to tell any prospective therapist upfront that you don’t view your pain as an illness and that you think that the DSM is the shittiest self-help rag since the Old Testament. If they respond by just taking notes and asking how that ‘makes you feel’, get the fuck out of their and find an actual human being to talk to. Therapy should be an informed conversation between consenting adults. Anything less is just abuse with a bill.
2.) Drop Out of Anything that Makes You Want to Die
We live in a society that ties up way too much self-worth into some strange sense of duty to do things that are soul crushing for a paycheck or a diploma. We all need to make a living but if you’re spending nine to five wondering which AR-15 goes best with the color of your manager’s empty chest cavity then you really aren’t making a living, you’re making a dying. Get the fuck out and try to find a way to get by that doesn’t feel worse than cancer. Maybe that’s flipping pancakes at a greasy spoon in Montana or selling whippets in the parking lot of a Phish concert. Shit, maybe that’s begging for change and drinking fortified wine beneath a freeway overpass.
Define your own goddamn happiness and to hell with everyone else. I’m a welfare queen myself and as much as I despise living on money stollen by the state from other taxpayers, I’d much rather see that money go to putting a downpayment on my first novel then see it go to more scatter bombs for Israel. Stop concerning yourself with pleasing an unwell society and focus on what kind of living you can actually live with instead. One good way to start is by dropping out of society altogether.
3.) Find a Cause that You are Willing to Fail Trying to Achieve and Build a Community Around It
In my experience most people labeled as mentally ill like me just care way too much about all the right things in all the wrong ways. It’s easy to get overwhelmed when you look at the crisis that our entire planet has put itself in since the Agricultural Revolution; AI, climate change, genocide, nuclear war, Nickelback… The stakes are high, and they just keep getting higher but putting all your focus on the whole damn world is only going to burn you out quicker than the sun.
In fact, this whole global universalist mindset is a big part of what has fucked the globe up so badly. No one person can save the world and trying to do so has an ugly tendency of resulting in attempts to rule it. Think smaller. Think locally. Think about the kind of community that you would like to live in right now if the rest of the world would just fuck off and start living it.
I’m an obnoxiously Queer anarchist who lives in the rusty outback of Central Pennsylvania tetanus country. The weight of the military-prison industrial complex crushed me into an agoraphobic mess for most of my twenties. Then I stopped plotting to overthrow the new world order and started to focus on creating a way for people like me to live rurally without having to rely on the vanilla technocracy of big government and big business. It’s an endless work in progress. I volunteer at local shelters, take part in local support groups, and help out with my little found family’s struggling homestead, but it is both work and progress.
I may never live to see my goal of a Queer hillbilly utopia that’s equal parts Mad Max, John Waters, and Ziggy Stardust but I don’t mind if I die trying and something tells me that if more people did the same while keeping their finances off the books and between friends instead of with the banks, maybe a lot of this evil global shit that makes so many of us want to die would simply fall apart.
Maybe I am pretty fucked up. Hell, I’ll own that shit, all day, every day. But I am not ill, at least not from anything innately biological. I am simply too sensitive to coexist peacefully with a society that considers voting for war criminals and spending two thirds of your life in a cubicle to be normal. This society is the sickness, I’m just slightly more allergic to the pollution than most, but not for long. The rate of despair in the wealthiest nation on earth is booming because human beings simply weren’t designed to live this way and we sure as shit weren’t designed to die this way.
If this makes you want to kill yourself then that’s OK. You’re not alone and you’re not the one with the real fucking problem here because you’re not the one hurting everyone around you like all those successful people do on their way to the office every morning.
But killing yourself is quite simply letting those cunts off way too easy. Do yourself a favor, stick around for a while and embrace going nuts as way of life instead of a way of death. The sun is going to explode anyway, right? We might as well make things a little more interesting before it does.
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