If ever I had it, I’ve lost the ability to cope with despair. The night four years ago that I checked into the emergency room for the first time in my life, I was hoping for one outcome: drugs. I could have untruthfully said the things I needed to to trigger the “patient is depressed *bing!* referral kickback!” alarm in the doctors’ heads, but I didn’t need to be dishonest. Antidepressants were an easy out, allowing me to run like chicken shit from unsavoury emotion for the past four years.

Sometimes I miss a dose or two and they break through with a vengeance, and because I’ve lost the ability to cope with them, to do anything but run, I’m overwhelmed, completely incapacitated. This is my current state.

I’ve decided to try to write because it used to help. It used to be my outlet. It used to be all that was available to me, the only thing I knew how to turn to. Journal pages marred by whip lashes of tear-streaked ink.

It’s dawned on me that Valentine’s Day upsets me.

Now, the amusing knee-jerk reaction of most is to accuse me of being lonely and jealous, but you’re wrong. I’m not lonely or jealous—I’m happy and comfortable in two open relationships, kthankyouverymuch; I suffer no lack of amourous sentiment or activity.

What I object to is the day’s overpowering reek of Pavlovian conditioning. An arbitrary day that makes you feel socially obligated to shower the object of your affections with material garbage. Because if you don’t, you’re thoughtless. Even if you make your feelings clearly known at every other random time you feel like expressing them, you’d better somehow top it on month X day Y, because it’s been appointed an Official Day of Celebration™. It’s a party, motherfucker. What, you don’t want to be one of us? Is something wrong? Yeah—you’re fucking lemmings. I don’t want to feel like I owe it to “someone I love” to “show them I care.” Anyone I love already knows that I care; when and how I make it known is my fucking prerogative.

It’s as I said to a friend today, “It’s as if on Valentine’s Day there is only a *certain kind* of love to be celebrated, and there are only *certain ways* that are ‘acceptable.’” I reject this implication and deeply resent the manufactured social “norm” that’s caused me to even entertain it. Yes: I’m aware that I’m “irrationally overreacting” because I’m a goddamn hippie libtard with an emo-revolutionary desire to rebel against the arbitrary-societal-construction po’-leese, but really. What the fuck did Saint Valentine ever do for me that I should celebrate him in any way whatsoever? As a matter of fact, Saint Anyone was some churchy motherfucker and I’m a goddamned atheist, not to mention that he was dead centuries before I was even born and I don’t even give a fuck anymore about my own late relatives that have bitten the dust in the past two years. So the only reason I’ve ever given a fuck about this holiday is that society told me to. It rang the bell and I drooled and I’m disgusted. Consider this despicable habit broken.