26th Birthday

It has become wearisome tradition that each year on the anniversary of slipping from ‘twixt my mother’s thighs I write a narcissistic and self-pitying summary of the year since my last birthday. Even though this blog has recently been less populated than a Fukushima hamlet, I feel compelled to continue the trend.

An amusing aside: in last year’s birthday entry I predicted that by my 26^th birthday I would have transformed into a bitter hermit. I annotated it with a picture of a heavily bedraggled bearded old man:

Well, shit.

So, to my 26^th year. A year in which so little happened to me that isn’t depressive or devoid of entertainment. This is going to be a blast.

I took a 3 week trip to China and Thailand, where I variously horrified locals with my disarming western stench, was molested by overly-sexed trans-women, and spectated on the ejaculation of a turtle from a bodily orifice I will never find attractive ever again.

Despite quitting the gym due to lack of funds, I’ve continued to nurture my substantive dream of being able to make my pecs dance. I am pleased to announce that my pectoral muscles can now shimmy like a pair of inebriated scallops.

I had sex once.

I took a selection of gaming consoles to a homeless shelter in London and wrote an article about it. In my head I was some kind of charitable wizard, sweeping in with gifts of technological wonder to rescue these poor unfortunates from the doldrums of their blighted existence. In actuality I was an ignorant middle-class white guy with dubious morals.

I quit online dating. Then I started again. Then I quit. Then I started again. Somewhere in the middle I scuppered a promising relationship, and only realised months later that it was entirely my fault (sorry, Ruth).

I featured in a mini-documentary on a major gaming website that looked at the relationships between depression and video games. Here I am, putting on my best intelligent voice! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kLdNHiSVjU

As you’ll have already noticed, this post isn’t terribly funny. To be honest, it hasn’t been a terribly funny year. This was the year I came out of the depression closet (an abstract space decorated with skinned cats and perpetually out-of-order vending machines). I’ve almost certainly never been this unhappy thus far in my life. I’m now 26, and I’m single, jobless, living at home, fatter than I’ve been in years, and suffering with a mental illness. It isn’t my finest hour.

This is why I’ve all but abandoned this blog. Although it’s always had a fierce depressive streak, it was always intended to be funny. Self-deprecation is my finest talent. But when that self-deprecation is rooted in very real and profound self-hatred, it becomes increasingly difficult for me to laugh about it.

I am deeply depressed. In the past year I have realised its true extent. I am lonely. I am hopeless. I am broken. There is little more in the world that I hope for more than for the age of 26 to be the year in which I turn it all around.

I would also quite like to get my picture taken with Grumpy Cat.