#removethestigma

by Marissa Kartub

Hi guys! First off, just want to put in a woot woot for our first post that helped kick things off. So well done. I hope I can do it justice with this follow-up.

Music has helped me both through listening and creating. I always tell people that I love the ukulele, but that doesn't really do the instrument justice. When I was in high school, going through teenage angst and hating the man, I found solace in the plunky sounds of the uke, and I can honestly say it is a kind of medicine for me. All jokes aside, depression is something I've battled my whole life, but the simple act of playing the ukulele has given me so much peace. There's nothing quite like singing along with the ukulele to help you feel a little better. And it's simple to learn, too, which doesn't hurt.

In college, I again was aided by music. I was feeling alone in a big university. I had friends and things were going okay, but I also felt that I was missing something in my life. I wanted to create again and feel I was a part of something. That something became my a capella group, and I still can't believe how blessed I was to join it. Making music with people who you love is an indescribably magical experience. I encourage anyone who loves to make music to share the gift. Life is too short - sing out loud.

Singing for me feels like release, like breathing. It is a necessary thing for me to feel whole and I am always amazed by how it can match whatever mood I'm in. When I'm feeling depressed, I sing oldies from the likes of Etta James and Ella Fitzgerald. When I'm feeling happy, I sing silly pop tunes that have no real meaning but just make my mouth feel happy. And of course, listening to music is a huge game changer. A while back, I was working at an awful corporate job that was in an awful environment. I hated the work, hated my boss, and hated how useless I felt. I can honestly say that listening to Tupac and Biggie feud was the only way I could get through the day. I came across this quote "listen to some gangsta rap and get over it", and felt that it was pretty accurate. 

I can't wait for us to get this ball rolling and start sharing more music and experiences with all of you. From RnB to rock to rap, there is so much music for us to delve into. Come join us, share your story, and be a part of our movement!

Here’s the song I wanted to highlight with my post:

I was sitting on my patio with my hands cuffed behind my back trying to answer all the questions the police were asking me as I watched my mother crying in the doorway. There were a few cops inside, searching my room, probably for other weapons or maybe drugs or whatever. They confiscated my step-dads shotgun, which was a gift recently given to him by his dad. I was barefoot and in my boxers in the back of the cop car for the forty-five minute drive to the emergency psychiatric ward. On the ride there and for the next few days I could not stop thinking about how scared my mom and family must be. My mom jumped on my back when she saw me hovering over the gun, she had to hear me damning my existence, her own son. My four day stay gave me more than enough time to reflect on my actions and my feelings that lead me to them. I met people with a variety of different illnesses. I heard stories of internal and external adversity, and I heard it straight from the mouths of the people it affected so regularly. These experiences began to reveal the bigger and nearly hidden picture of people facing the issues of mental health and the systems put in place to help them and how ineffective those systems can be and how mysterious these problems are.

Months before all this I was living in Austin, TX. I lived in a one bedroom apartment by myself. All my friends and family were back in Los Angeles. I made a couple friends there in Austin but wasn’t hanging out with them very often. I was a real estate agent, Uber driver and Postmates driver. None of my jobs really had co-workers. Instead my jobs meant interacting with new people every day for brief periods of time. It wasn’t long into this lifestyle that I started feeling the effects of isolation. I became debilitatingly depressed. I found myself drinking and smoking in excess. I spent night after night by myself, crying and wishing I didn’t exist. I wished for a button to press that would quietly, unobtrusively delete me from history. I valued the end of my terrible numbness more than I did the well being of my friends and family. That is to say I stopped caring about who might weep for my death.

I got a therapist and shortly after that I moved back to LA. Things were better but I was still a bit shook. There were a couple months I was feeling particularly lost and anxious and that’s when the whole shotgun and trip to the psych ward thing happened.

I’m here now writing this (on my way to the beach for my cousin’s birthday), so you know I made it out of all this shit alive. I can confidently say that I’ve amassed enough of an emotional/psychological toolset to keep me out of those super low lows. I still have lows because like anyone reading this, I am a human. Unlike before, I now see no low worth my resignation to life.

The biggest set of tools I have can be categorized as “sense of belonging”. Humans are inherently social beings, whether or not we need tons of alone time. When a group of people have a common goal that they’re genuinely enthusiastic about, there is a deep fulfillment that makes it near impossible for depression to rear its ugly head. I got a job with co-workers who I loved to be around. I doubled down on my art and months later I was doing what I loved for a living. I began spending more time with people pursuing the same things as I was. It’s good to have any kind of extreme intimacy but the most potent kind is with someone that you share goals with. Find a tribe to hunt with and you’ll seldom be tempted to escape existence.

There’s a handful of things that helped me through those dark times, but there are a couple really important sources I’d like to share:

Tim Ferriss’ “Some Practical Thoughts on Suicide” http://tim.blog/2015/05/06/how-to-commit-suicide/

Sebastian Junger’s “TRIBE” https://www.amazon.com/Tribe-Homecoming-Belonging-Sebastian-Junger/dp/1455566381

For the longest time I’ve suspected there to be a huge disconnect between the way humans have evolved to live and the way modern, developed (and mostly Western) society has been designed. Though I’ve seen plenty of films dealing with isolation and depression, none have really addressed directly the things that made my experiences so excruciating. Out of my experiences I’ve made a film reflecting the causes of my sickness and the values that have helped me overcome it. It’s called “A Short Introduction to Love and Purpose”. Though there are many more facets to what I went through, I made sure that the film embodied the most important things: isolation, feeling hopeless, and not being able to recognize that same thing in anyone other than yourself.

I hope that at the very least the film could be an insight into one of the many ways depression takes a hold of people every day, and that if anyone facing these things themselves sees this film they can find some sort of catharsis or hope in getting through their darker times. https://vimeo.com/217615235

The Female Wank

Grace Campbell

The first time I was turned on

I was eight.

Kim Kardashian’s sex rape.

A girl in my class showed it to me after school.

My vagina get like a hot air balloon.

I ran home so that I could finish the feeling alone.

I’ll never forget it,

Sex with myself for the first time.

A feeling of utter bliss, and then suddenly—

I felt ashamed.

Disturbed.

Like I deserved to be locked up.

But I continued to do it. All the time, in secret.

A teddy bear. A pillow. A TV remote.

It was the biggest source of comfort,

And the biggest source of loneliness.

No one had ever told me girls could touch themselves.

Meanwhile, boys were being boys.

Wanking in the toilets at school.

Wanking alongside their friends to the same porn video.

A community of wankers.

Fathers were joking with their sons

about what type of porn they watched

Cuming of age.

Boys were taught to think the female orgasm was as simple

as unlocking an iPhone.

All you need is a light fingerprint, and she will cum.

Send with boys was a misunderstanding.

When it happened, there was no hot-air-balloon feeling.

He thought, put it in there, and she’ll enjoy it.

Every time I do mush as sighed, he thought it was an orgasm.

His pleasure was more important than mine -

My pleasure was locked up on the box of secrets.

I still thought I was a freak.

It wasn’t until I was twenty that my friend told me

she did the same.

What I would have done to know that

for all those past twelve years.

All that anguish wasted on nothing.

The next time I had sex,

I put my hand down there.

Showed him how it was done -

Whoever he was.

The sex I had with mysel

Unlocks new levels of sex I have with other people,

Like Candy Crush,

Patriarchy has attempted to write female pleasure

out of our culture.

Patriarchy what’s is to think our sexual gratification

can only be granted to us by a man.

But life is too short to be having bad sex.

Tell your mates -