About Me

It's high time I put this up here so I might as well let you know who and what I am. Please keep in mind that this will change as I change.

Online, I go by a lot of names; offline, my real name (and the one I use a lot online as well) is Osnat, which isn't pleasant for people who like to give nicknames - but I do get called Ozzy and Oz sometimes, although I prefer you don't give me a nickname. (I also have pet names given to me by my family, but those are off limits unless you're a family member.) I was born on the 18th of January, 1996, at an ungodly hour of the morning, and since then I've done nothing but be a spanner in the works and generally cause misery to people and systems. I'm a white, cis, abled middle-class female who lives in London but is an immigrant; I'd rather not say from where, because I'm ashamed of "my" country (I don't like the idea of nations).

At the moment I'm a student hoping (one day) to become a theoretical or mathematical physicist, though I don't talk much about it due to not actually being in the loop; I find mathematics and indeed any quest for knowledge a beautiful thing. In the spare time I don't often have, I sing, draw, blog (I used to write and gave up when I discovered that I was shit), listen to music, think, go for walks, spend quality time with my cat (I love cats!), translate Latin and French, and read tons and tons of books, generally the classics; 19th-century Russian literature is probably my favourite, especially anything by Tolstoy, but I also like other, non-Russian writers such as Hermann Hesse. I think this world is messed up on all sorts of levels and want to do more to fix it; I'm a virulent anti-capitalist, a self-described atheist without adjectives, someone who opposes oppression in any form but is acutely aware of her privilege, but I don't follow any particular ideology except for doing my doubting and questioning schtick; I've tried in the past, but I generally get disgusted by groupthink and leave. It brings me a lot of misery. Any ideas I do have are founded on the idea that preventing and alleviating suffering is a good thing and that people are autonomous, sapient and equal in suffering, therefore we should be free, equal and treat each other with compassion. Many people disagree with me, including perhaps myself; I swing wildly between idealism and cynicism and I can be very, very misanthropic, because I see what humanity is as opposed to what it can be and it kills me.

My thought processes work differently to most people; I'm shy, used to be bullied a lot as a child and I'm often lonely, as well as being a self-loathing, self-destructive perfectionist. I find people very, very difficult to understand and get on with, so I tend to retreat into my shell, especially when I hear loud, banal voices. If by chance I find someone I understand and who understands me we'll probably hit it off.

I am in a state of constant flux and I am very, very ignorant, sometimes to harmful levels. I have said and done some very stupid things, and while I regret them, I have left them on display because I think it would be dishonest of me to delete them.

Lastly, I am not often a happy person. My brain is an upsetting and scary place and I get constant self-destructive urges. Often I will not respond to positive stimuli, or simply be unable to feel pleasure, and I will sometimes lack motivation to do even basic tasks. I sometimes feel like a big, empty ball of psychogenic pain running on empty and I just give up on caring about anything. This has been going on without respite since I was thirteen and while I try to control myself, I do sometimes end up whining about it because living like this is sucky. It's the reason why I often act erratically here and on Twitter, and I am forced to admit to myself and others that it's because I suffer from chronic depression.

Snowflake saying "Nobody knows what I'm going through"
I am not this. That said, people who
call "special snowflake" on things
can sometimes be very dickish and
minimise or dismiss people's
experiences.
I don't say this because I want to be a special wecial snowflake; firstly, depression is not an uncommon condition (hell, mental illness as a whole is not that uncommon; figures range from 1 in 3 to 1 in 5 people having one at some point in their lives, and that's just the people diagnosed so I'd bank on the true figure being higher) and secondly, if I did want to be a special snowflake I wouldn't have picked a shitty, debilitating mental illness that has messed up my life and health and nearly killed me multiple times. In fact, I've been very ashamed to tell people about it out of various fears that I could probably write an entire blog post on, and I only went to see a GP about it (for those who think they only deal with physical problems, they can diagnose mental health conditions and refer you to specialists) very, very recently. I don't self-diagnose, which is why I've avoided referring to it as depression (indeed, I've avoided telling people that I'm ill) until now.

Please note, too, that this isn't a first-world problem; it's an illness that appears to not just occur in rich countries, contrary to what some people say. It being chronic doesn't necessarily mean that it won't respond to therapy or medication; it just means that I'm stuck with it for the rest of my life. Hopefully I'll learn some coping mechanisms and things to deal with it, but I'll still unfortunately have to live with it.

Anything else you want to know about me? Read my blogs or leave comments.

Comments

  1. Dear Osnat; I am sorry to hear that you often feel down. The best thing for that is socializing. Tiny victorys are the way to progress. Small constant changes that will improve what ever you want to do. Life is bizarre, people are selfish & unreliable at understanding their own motivations. Peace & Love;Brian CapitainOmega on twitter <3

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment