Sasha Perigo

These days it feels like everyone and their brother is concerned with determining whose emotional support animal is legitimate and who is “taking advantage of the system.” I’m mentally ill. I’m also much more concerned with these busybodies than I am with fake emotional support animals.

With major depression comes major exhaustion, which means I’ve spent the majority of time I’ve been on health leave from work laying around at home. On my worst days everything feels challenging —getting dressed, finding something that’s appetizing enough to eat, or even finding something I can focus on long enough to occupy my waking hours.

I am twenty-two years old. I started coding less than four years ago when I enrolled in my first computer science course in January of 2014. Still, I have enough stories about sexism in technology to populate this blog post.

Different bisexual people define bisexuality differently. Two of the most common definitions I’ve heard from other bi folks are: • Attraction to two or more genders • Attraction to your own gender and other genders

The first step towards getting more reading done this year has been to forgive myself. In the past, struggling to get through books has been both discouraging and embarrassing for me. It’s not that I don’t want to read; my Goodreads to-read shelf is 50+ books and ever growing.

We’ve all experienced exhaustion before, but the exhaustion I experience with depression is hard for me to comprehend. Today is the first day in months that I have enough energy to feel bored. You’ve probably never conceptualized boredom in terms of energy, and neither had I until recently. When I say that I have enough energy to feel bored I mean that today I had the energy to get dressed, shower, and eat, and I still have enough energy to need something else to do. That feeling is new to me.