My fan letter - that I cannot send -
My new crush is not a sexual thing. Unless I am saying that because I am being bi-phobic. I’m going to call her Sasha. Not that she’ll ever see this. She’s what I call a depression influencer. Plenty of people are performative about their mental health, or lack of it. But her stink has the ring of truth. She shit-posts, not shit talks. She recently completed a month of semi-gross-out selfies on her stories. Each one, if not totally rancid, was close to it. And it’s very clear that she’s doing all this intentionally.
I’m in love.
It might seem something far worse than mere cringe to feast on the spectacle of someone’s collapse. But I think with Sasha, again, who I’m crediting with crystallizing the emergent aesthetics of depression influencer behavior, in the year of our lord, 2026, it’s all intentional. And I want to be clear, she doesn’t go for the cheap seats which I’ve resorted to myself for pity likes whenever necessary: tribute posts to dying family members, hashtags about world tragedies, detailed accounts of an abusive employer or various tirades concerning dickless, toothless men. Though come to think of it, she does allude to the latter. I can tell she has a roster of Jacobs and Trevors hovering right behind her.
Sasha’s moroseness is more classical, philosophical even. Lately, probably a sign of my own depression, I’ve allowed myself to bed rot for hours in the morning and late evening scrolling and scrolling through reels of faces I will never meet and mostly do not want to know.
Then Sasha appeared.
We have friends in common. She looks 45, or thereabouts. I mean I would bet on that. But she could be 25. I don’t know. Like really. I’m so convinced at her projection of psychical unwellness nothing would surprise me now. She’s Gen Z. Maybe she’s Gen X. Who knows.
It started with a series of screenshot text messages she posted about someone she once dated years ago. There was a brief editorial about how she wasted at least a year of existence post-breakup imagining this Connecticut Fuck Goblin leading some far better or far worse life than in fact what was happening. Relatable, sure.
But what really caught my soul was a rant that she posted from her Notes. She frequently collects her disturbing dreams. In the one I think got me started on Sasha the Depression Influencer, she describes being restlessly awake in her bed (very meta for a dream), then reaching into her mouth with her left hand, forcing it down, as she did during her late teenage college days as a professional bulimic would-be sorority sister, and just cramming her pudgy fist deep, deep into her throat. But in the dream the hand squishes through various cavities of her head until she is able to pluck out a random tooth (not hers) that has become lodged in her brain since childbirth and clearly the cause of her ensuing life-depression.
Yes, Internet, I do want this kind of content. Maybe it’s very gay and ethically questionable of me to join the ranks of non-women who enjoy the dramatic sufferings of socialized women: from, I don’t know, Sylvia Plath’s domestic terrorisms to Lana Del Rey’s exquisite frolicking in Southern Gothic snowfall, sticking her head in and out of the stove with her new hubby. I want in on their fantasies. Even as the entrances are all exits.
Sasha feels different. Depressions have flavors, I swear. Some feel more granular and abnormal, like a failed cocktail. My bestie refers to this sometimes as Chemical Head. You feel like someone poured the wrong type of gasoline down your brain-socket. You are not meant to guzzle pure crude. Or sometimes my own brain betrays me because I feel like a minor electrical storm in the back alley of a 7-Eleven in Nevada. Sasha herself however does not go in for metaphors. I love brazen, emboldened metaphors, that are decadent, and unreliable, like the sinking cake in Sleeping Beauty. My whole life I have felt—sometimes—asleep—but like the prince in the red robe, not the Princess. I am waiting for my Princess to wake me. My friend SB likes to tease me (and her) about our shared weakness for BPD Princesses. Is that ableist, even though we are both neurodivergent, mentally ill people? Maybe. I don’t know.
But getting back to Sasha. No cutesy poet shit. Just the visceral. Sometimes her posts have the grotesque of like mood-boarding care of the film Seven. Not that she goes in for gore, exactly. But I appreciate how she auto-documents her enervated, lifeless eyes; the way she poses in a bathtub with all her clothes on, without the water running; the fact that she likes to ostentatiously display her pudge: love handles, finger-fat, back-fat, chin-fat, heavy cheeks, lumpy fingers, weird breast shapes in various blouses that are designed to make her seem completely liberated from Male Gaze, Incorporated. Not that that has been entirely successful.
It turns out there are plenty of straight men, lowkey everywhere, who enjoy Sasha the Depression Influencer’s demonstrations and digressions. She reminds me of certain LA comedians who have sizable social media followings precisely because they have fully embraced their body shapes not being conventionally beautiful, attractive, toxically white, symmetrical, whatever. That said, I think even if Sasha the Depression Influencer was Sydney Sweeney’s doppelgänger, she’d behave the exact same way.
As I was saying: depression has flavors. I got sidetracked.
Aside from Chemical Head (a kind of defective product feeling, very take your complaint up with the corporate office), there’s the standard model of depression. Suicidal Trauma Loop Replay. Which I believe is really our infernal entrapment in the past. The fact that our psychic clock got stuck or shattered and is still somewhere without us, running on some hamster wheel, forever locked, inside a foggy nether-region or blocked territory. Say, for example the Blizzard of 1996 when my brother was hospitalized for his delusions, or fast forward to 2001 when my fake-aunt had the misfortune of dropping dead of a heart attack a day or two before (was it after?) 9/11. So the event of her sudden demise was subsumed in other business, even for us, who knew her so closely. Her name was Annie.
There is the sacred suffering that’s like depression for those who are persecuted and oppressed unfairly. I think most gender minorities, straight or not, fit into this category more than only somewhat. It’s not that Sasha is or is not a feminist. I would argue she of course is. Especially with the compulsive foregrounding of her body as contagion and confrontation, as enjoyable revulsion. But her performances resist any type of familiar heroism, self-congratulations, pride in resistance.
She stares into the camera from her car and you swear, her eyes are catatonic, lifeless, dry, flatlined. I find it RIVETING.
My life is a little shit lately. I can’t complain. I don’t have her joy in decay, however. Her braveness. To flaunt one’s ugly. To make public one’s I-have-nothing-go-on, her “Oh look, you want to see something? How about nothing. I have nothing. I am nothing.” It’s like an updated medievalism for the Age of Looksmaxxing voids. We are all normalized now to be creepily voyeurs. Exhibitionists. Sad sacks. There’s no escape. We don’t want one.
The thirst trap economy is based on actually seducing strangers to want to become your sexual partners solely because they find your vanity (status)—which by its very nature excludes any kind of real authentic relationality—appealing. Imagine wanting to be picked by a barbed-wire fence? Well, that does sound a little dumb and hot. Transgressive, sure. But there’s no fence behind most of these gym rat, twink model boys, and I’m thinking primarily of the ones I am most attracted to yet am entirely uninterested in. I’m not one to talk.
Sasha the Depression Influencer has convinced me, while I study the exaggerated lines of her face, the curated slop mess of her apartment, the many vomit-colored beige rugs she owns in every room (there are not that many rooms yet they somehow feel different each time)—who needs sex. Who needs a partner. Who needs an ex. Who needs touch.
It turns out screen culture is profoundly asexual. Perhaps I should say de-sexual. Sasha is the desexualized goddess of our time and for our time. She will pose in a way to flex her shoulders, somehow neatly sculpted. While she looks drugged out on Zyprexa. She will press her boobs (not something I am prone to fetish in any way whatsoever, mind you) in recognizable ways that scream: sex, fuck me, I’m an object, I’m a toilet plunger, I’m a sneaker to piss in, etc. But then she drains her self-image of its necessary emptiness.
She is never vapid. Not even in her post-ironic pretense of vapidity. Or the opposite. Sasha is just Sasha. Clearly depressed and fully on view. Yum. I also have no idea. Behind the camera maybe she has an army of successful, buxom, bright-eyed friends, and they spend elaborate weekends at clubs all over the city. I doubt it. But the internet’s an illusion.
She posted one text-rant recently. About how exes aren't supposed to go away. They're horcruxes. Emotional debris lodged somewhere between your lungs and large intestines. (I really enjoyed that “somewhere.”) How the correct response is never healing culture. Destroy healing culture. Evil. Rather, her stance is study. Self-fascination.
To become a faraway stalker. To bathe in the glow of their digital waste. I bristled, wide-eyed, reading this. I could care less about the writing. The art. It’s her content I find refreshing. We are all, in fact, very sick. So she’s conducting the orchestra.
Fatness is still so hated. It’s not the world’s ultimate oppression. But it’s interesting how it’s safely there in both gay and straight worlds. It’s anti-woman, it’s anti-Black. Sasha uses it, like a weapon but also safety blanket. She describes it as repellant, sometimes a mask, sometimes a cudgel. I find that hot. But I don’t mean sexually hot. Unless I do?
Sasha may not even be considered thicker-bodied or “fat” (her word) to some. Her body might be read as only pudgy, a little lopsided, or whatever. I don’t know. There’s a whole neurotic pseudo-science to the world of skinny-fat, its meticulous tiers, credited and discredited labels. I am not a body positivity expert nor any trusted source. But I trust Sasha’s hatred of being objectified, her willingness to be objectified. I suspect she’s great in bed. Not because I think she necessarily “performs” sex well, or would want to. But there must be something thrilling to anyone whose consciousness is clearly so painfully there.
Like the exposed tacks in certain wall-to-wall carpet.
I grew up in the suburban homes of New Jersey in the 1990s.
Sasha does not own a pet. Sasha sometimes seems posed in proximity to parents or relatives that I assume live in the same city. She is not very interested in posting about them or strangers. She posts her writings which are musings. Both smarter and less polished than a “professional” writer’s amateur clickbait.
I worry about some of her politics, which I can only project, half-imagine. I just know this: her hollowed sadness; her deadened gaze; her messy bed. Her books and clothes strewn about a table; on the floor of a new-condo bathroom; some tchotchke objet in the backseat of a smallish car.
She must have money from somewhere. She must have some kind of job. She is not happy. But she does not brandish any victim narrative of the dejected. She only has this vital, angering force, centered around, I don’t know, life is shit, I’m over it, this is all there is, it’s not enough, don’t bother me, wake me when it’s over.
Who fucking knew it. Depression influencers are now a thing. I’m so into it.
Does that make me sick?
Mama, I want to be ugly.
