Probably the next major depressive incident that I remember happening to me was when I was a freshman in high school. Over the summer, my sister had been diagnosed with prediabetes. We started to eat a much lower carbohydrate diet so as to reduce the amount of glucose, but still maintain energy levels, as recommended by our pediatrician.
As the year began to grow darker and gloomier, so did my emotions. I was not sure what was going on inside me, so I continued to get worse for a couple months. I am pretty logical, so the idea that my emotions were going haywire was foreign to me.
Eventually I broke down. I spent a couple hours in tears, with my parents trying there damnedest to comfort me. As a side note, if someone says it’s not right for a man to cry, do them a favor and bash their teeth in with a brick. This kind of backwards-assed thinking causes so many problems for both men and women. Fuck the double standard.
Fortunately enough, I was able to see a doctor the next day. I told her everything I had felt. I was prescribed dark chocolate. Fucking. Dark. Chocolate. People wish that was there prescription, and now that is what I was given. And it worked, based on the fact I need more carbohydrates, and chocolate has mood boosting properties. Somehow, all the happiness I had missed out on for months came flooding back over the next few days.
Later on, we had to do a project for a class in which we researched careers we might be interested in. I had always liked human biology, and I liked cooking. On a test, I found I scored high in the nutritionist/dietitian category. I read the description, and thought to myself “damn, this shit is dope.” To this day, I still think medical nutrition therapy is fucking awesome (despite the fact that I have yet to take the class).
After my recovery, I started to figure out who I was more. I stopped trying to appeal to people, because most of them I interacted with were irrelevant assholes anyway. I started to wear and do what I liked, instead of what other people thought were cool or hip. My denim jacket I got from my grandfather became sort of a symbol of my liberation from societal expectations of me. I started to become more punk, in the sense that I went against norms. And I loved, and still love, going against the norms that make life shitty for everyone.
Moral of the story: There is a silver lining for everything. From the deep dark pits that was my own mind, I figured out who I was, and what my future was going to be, and nobody was going to take that from me.
The Nutrition Punk 