My name's James. I'd rather leave my last name out of it, but I have a story to tell. It's not a happy story, but it has some good qualities to it. It's a story about me, a story about struggle, a story about redemption, a story about depression, and most importantly a story about writing.

So two years ago I was fired from my factory job. The task was quite simple really, I assembled toys all day. To be honest, I was a little relieved, some of the toys felt like they were mocking me at times. The part that made me grief stricken, though, was that the week before my girlfriend had just broken up with me, taking most of my money with her as she left after her furious tantrum. Honestly, I had loved her, but when she left me with 10 dollars to my name and pain in areas that I will spare you the description of, that feeling faded. Depression hit me hard.

At the time, I lived in an apartment. It was in a small complex. My apartment had two darkly lit rooms: a kitchen/living room sort of set up, and only one bedroom, which really was only cornered off by a curtain. The floor often creaked, the electricity didn't always work, water would stop running often, and the walls were thin, so you could hear some interesting things if you wanted and tried hard enough. I didn't mind the downsides, besides, it was cheap, only 500 dollars a month, enough to pay rent with my low paying job.

I was left with one problem after this: I had ten dollars in all, I had to pay rent by the end of the week, and I had no job. Perfect. Like I said, the rent was cheap so it shouldn't have been too hard to scrape together enough money. At first I started selling appliances. I got rid of my TV, computer, and everything else besides my dining room table, one chair, my refrigerator, and my bed.

In all, I made about 5,000 dollars off what I sold. A lot of it was junk/damaged so that brought down the income. But my rent was only 500 dollars, and food for a month would only cost another 100 at most, so I thought I was set for a while, and the depression began to lift.

Then I ran into another problem. I was constantly bored. Without a TV I had no source of entertainment. At first I thought I would be healthy and join a gym, and then I realized I had no fixed income. I thought I would run, but I found out I don't like running. I thought of drawing to pass the time, but I was reminded that I couldn't draw when I tried. I tried to be one of the park goers, but parks just showed me happy, employed people which only lowered my self-esteem. Finally I settled on writing.

I was sitting on my only chair at my only table. There was a pad of paper and a pencil left over from when I tried drawing. I started to fiddle with the pencil, and then slowly I brought the pad closer. At first I thought I'd write a letter to my mom, seeing as I had no phone, but instead I wrote six pages about everything I was feeling. About my loneliness, my feelings of failure, and most of all, how much I missed my girlfriend, Sandra, the one who had just broken up with me.

After all, she was justified in the break up. I was a pig who only cared for her physically and looked at other women, but now I needed her emotional support. I wrote a good 2 pages just begging her to come back to me, reasoning with her in any possible way, even though I knew she would never see this.

That night I reread what I had written. I reorganized my thoughts. Grouped them, elaborated on them, added to them, and then I cried. Everything just got to me then. All the pain. The pain of having nothing or anyone at all, the pain of being a failure, the pain of being alive. I imagined my neighbors listening to my sobs, but I didn't care, I needed to cry that night.

I abandoned that letter completely, but I didn't abandon writing. I kept at it, sometimes scrapping ideas, sometimes saving them for later. Eventually I wrote this story about an assassin, to say the least it was dark, and gory. I had been reading about literary techniques at the time, and I felt strongly about repetition and isolation and juxtaposition. I wrote this kind of numbly, mindlessly. I just wrote the depression out through my pencil. I'll never know why I wrote it, maybe its how I felt about human nature, or it could just be an attempt to capture the mysterious assassin. Whatever it was, it was therapeutic, but not my best piece, although I cherish it, and always will.
As my writing progressively got better I entered my works in local competitions, though there weren't many. When I wrote I still felt my stress lift, it became a way to escape real world problems.

After about nine months, I was low on money again. The winnings I got from competitions helped stretch out my money supply a little, but I knew I needed something greater, I decided to get one of my works published. I contacted a few agencies and sent them each the few stories I was most proud of. The waiting became agony, and while I waited, I wrote more. I wrote about anxiety and stress and depression. My characters became angry and irritable, and my plots became simple.

It took two weeks for the first agency's reply. It said they wouldn't support me, my writing wasn't good enough, and, this came as an even greater slap to the face, I didn't meet the required credentials. The next group said I wasn't yet ready to have a book published. Only one other group responded out of the total seven. This last group said they would publish one of my books, and we're looking forward to working with me in the future. That's when my writing really took off.

I'd like to say my life got better from there, but it didn't. I wound up just making enough to get by then, and still to this day. And the most tragic part is, I still feel alone.

Very alone.