Sometimes, I get an urge to just write stuff. Today is one of those days. This webpage DID start out as a personal blog and not my cosplay page – I used the name Skymone for many, many years as my online identity, even way before I got into cosplay. I spent a lot of time writing the following post. Then a lot of time wondering if I should post it or not. It’s very personal stuff. But I feel in a world where everyone online appear to be perfect, I owe those of you who bother reading this some honesty.

Life has been a roller coaster for me lately. Few of my followers know this, but there is a lot of illness in my closest family. For the past decade or so, my sister was diagnosed with schizophrenia. She was sick even long before that, so a lot of my childhood, I grew up with her being sick. A couple of years ago, my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, despite being fairly young. One of my closest and dearest friends has also been struggling with her ADHD and depression. My sister now finally had her doctors reconsider her diagnosis, so now it has been established that she doesn’t have schizophrenia, but we still have no idea why she feels the way she does.

So I have had diseases of the mind really, really close to my heart for most of my life. And in large part, growing up with it has meant that I have been able to deal with more than most people need to deal with. I have listened to highly detailed suicide plans, I have been first on scene in attempts thereof. It’s a very harsh and brutal thing to experience, especially when the person so desperate is someone close. But I have managed to keep myself afloat.

Lately, every single of these people in my life have had setbacks that caused them to fall deeper into the pits of depression, and despite usually being a cheerful and motivated person, I was pulled a little into it. There’s a limit to how long a tiny candle can keep lighting up in a thunder storm. Some days are great – full of inspiration, a lust for life, excitement. But some days, I just fall into the pit and spend whole days doing nothing except feeling utterly sad and demotivated. The worst part is that when you’re the one who’s not sick (on paper, anyways), you feel obligated to be there. To be strong and normal and on top of everything. It’s a whole part of myself that I feel I have to push down, because someone else needs me. I end up feeling like I’ve split myself in half: There’s the me that I am and want to be, flawed but working with what I’ve got, and there’s the me that others need me to be, normal and totally able to handle life as is dictated by society and to just respect anything they throw at me, because they are sick. Which I do a long way down the road. But I demand a lot from myself. It’s how I stay upright. I force myself to do things sometimes even when I don’t want to. If I’m feeling down, I don’t want to craft or go work out or do other stuff apart from just sitting and staring at my computer screen. But I know I NEED to do it. It’s my fuel. And even if – at the time – it seems like I don’t want to do it, it’s a distraction that helps clearing the mind, and getting back to that “me” that is a creative and mostly cheery person. But other people seem to think it comes easy and natural to me always to do these things. And therefor that I have an unfair advantage, when in reality, I struggle with a lot of things myself, too.

I’m not sure what the point of this post is. I guess I just see a lot of people online – cosplayers, celebrities, regular friends – who seem to have the perfect life. I know some people think that about me as well. I just want to show that behind every perfect life, there’s a darkness. NO ONE is perfect. And the people who try to appear to be are often the ones with the biggest problems. Next time you feel the world is unfair and everyone else has it better, remember that!