It's Kind of a Funny Story

by Ned Vizzini

I always look like I’m about to cry.

Of course I wasn’t abused. If I were, things would be so simple. I’d have a reason for being in shrinks’ offices. I’d have a justification and something that I could work on. The world wasn’t going to give me something that tidy.

“I didn’t want to wake up. I was having a much better time asleep. And that’s really sad. It was almost like a reverse nightmare, like when you wake up from a nightmare you’re so relieved. I woke up into a nightmare.”

which meant I wasn’t going to get into a Good College, which meant I wasn’t going to have a Good Job, which meant I wasn’t going to have health insurance, which meant I’d have to pay tremendous amounts of money for the shrinks and drugs my brain needed, which meant I wasn’t going to have enough money to pay for a Good Lifestyle, which meant I’d feel ashamed, which meant I’d get depressed, and that was the big one because I knew what that did to me: it made it so I wouldn’t get out of bed, which led to the ultimate thing—homelessness.

If you can’t get out of bed for long enough, people come and take your bed away.

I want there to be a Shift so bad. I want to feel my brain slide back into the slot it was meant to be in, rest there the way it did before

I just want to not be me. Whether it’s sleeping or playing video games or riding my bike or studying. Giving my brain up. That’s what’s important.”

The stuff adults tell you not to do is the easiest.

I don’t know how I can be so ambitious and so lazy at the same time.

Who hasn’t thought about killing themselves, as a kid?

I knew I had problems, but I also knew I wasn’t crazy.

“We’re going to start you on Zoloft,”

Relatable

my Anchor, that’s easy: it’s killing myself. That’s what gets me through the day. Knowing that I could do it. That I’m strong enough to do it and I can get it done.

If there is a next life, I hope it’s in the past; I don’t think the future will be any more handleable.

I’m young, but I’m already screwing up my life. I’m smart but not enough—just smart enough to have problems. Not smart enough to get good grades. Not smart enough to have a girlfriend. Girls think I’m weird.

There’s so much more for me to be doing. I should be a success and I’m not and other people—younger people—are. Younger people than me are on TV and getting paid and winning scholarships and getting their lives in order. I’m still a nobody. When am I going to not be a nobody?

I haven’t even had sex—I’m going to die a virgin. Does that mean I go to heaven? No, according to the Bible, suicide is a sin and I go straight to hell, what a gyp.

SUICIDAL IDEATION. That would be a good band name, I think.

Sometimes I just think depression’s one way of coping with the world. Like, some people get drunk, some people do drugs, some people get depressed. Because there’s so much stuff out there that you have to do something to deal with it.”

I’m not better, you know. The weight hasn’t left my head. I feel how easily I could fall back into it, lie down and not eat, waste my time and curse wasting my time, look at my homework and freak out and go and chill at Aaron’s, look at Nia and be jealous again, take the subway home and hope that it has an accident, go and get my bike and head to the Brooklyn Bridge. All of that is still there. The only thing is, it’s not an option now. It’s just…a possibility,

You deserve them because you chose them. You could have left them all behind but you chose to stay here.