Stephanie Baswell

She Dreamt She Was a Bulldozer Stephanie Baswell

With Depression, even life in sunbathed hipster-heaven spent baptizing in turquoise springs by day, and live Austin nights listening to slacker-inspired-tunes can get impossibly bleak. For Claire, Isaac, and Diana, a metal show under a blood moon proves to be their one shot at relief. Depression, like anxiety, like OCD, like PTSD, and many other mental illnesses: lies; obfuscates; contradicts; ambushes; and kills. It is a sleeper cell, an agent laying in wait, rising without cause or volition, no more sentient as it is indifferent, infiltrating your day-to-day and terraforming it in the image of heavy despair; disassociation of self; crippling anxiety; cyclical incoherence; using all sides of every argument you don't wish to have pointing always to death as your only reprieve. It is Kilgrave. Waging a war inside your head that wishes to drone strike your body into oblivion and insignificance. It is My Lai every day within your cerebrum. It is the robber in the midnight alley. The bottle of pills and the gun in your bed side drawer. It cares not if you are Black, White, Asian, or Latino, gay or straight, cis or trans, godless or God fearing, unwed or wed, homeward bound or homeless, and is unaware to all of life's random tragedies. It is independent of it all, and it was always there, unfeeling, needing no excuse to bring you down. But every day that you live, you win. Every day that you smile, even for a second, you defeat it. It is undoubtedly trench warfare, therefore no ground stays in one side's hands for long. There is no armistice on Christmas and there are no hearts or minds to win, just as there is no mission accomplished. This war goes on until the day your body can no longer keep up the fight. And even then, you would have won. So keep fighting. Therefore, this book will be contradictory. This book will lie. This book will be ambivalent. This book will be manipulative and alienating. This book will assault you with ideas you will disagree with. This book will brutalize you. Trigger you. Maim you. And stitch you back together. This book will be chaos. This book will give you exactly what you want, what you crave, and what you deserve. This book does not know what it wants to say. This book says it all. And nowhere near enough.