Why I Love Depressive Work

I wrote this last summer, a few months after graduating, but I forgot to actually post this. It’s a good expression for where my mind was at the time.

I’ve made many a friend over the years. Some close, and some less so. Many of them I have good memoires with. A couple of them I have bad memories with…those ones tend not to be friends anymore. But there’s a select few that I’ve been able to turn bad memories into good recollections with…and those are the ones that stick with me.

2020 was a year. 2020 made me realize time is relative. 2020 stole my girlfriend. All of these phrases you’ve probably heard to explain the weirdness that year felt. A global pandemic brought more than fear and economic pain, it brought to light a whole host of issues. Mental health. The state of social media. Value, internally and externally for a lot of things. But what I remember 2020 the most for was this sense of melancholy. I felt it in myself. I felt it in my friends. A hope that life would get normal, somehow in the eventualities of time, closed off by a reality that we were in the middle of something abnormal. Something that would change us. Something that wasn’t right, but was present.

Might not have been the best time, then, to read Goodnight Punpun.

While I won’t go into detail now, as I’m planning on doing a full dive into Punpun later this year, suffice it to say that Goodnight Punpun is a depressing story. It follows the life of a young man who made and broke a promise, and the way that promise reverberated through his life as he grew up. It’s a story about coming into your own, learning who you want to be, overcoming trauma, and a whole lot of other big meaningful buzzwords. But one of the biggest themes of the manga is the absence of hope.

Hope hurts. Hope reminds us of who we are not. Hope tells us that the future will be better, yet can do nothing about present circumstances. And while hope may be a motivator, it can never be a vehicle for change. It’s fuel. Without a means to utilize it, it’s empty, useless, meaningless. And it’s this nearly nihilistic, perversely explorative reaction to the idea of hope that Punpun does so well, and that Inio Asano weaves into a lot of his work. Asano makes the mundane feel as plodding as it always does, sprinkled with youthful dreams weighed down by the reality of life’s shortcomings.

It hurts to love. It hurts to change. It hurts to care. It hurts to think. Why, then, do we do what we do? Why are we the people that we are? Questions like those are more than present in Asano’s works, and they were questions I was assaulted with over the course of 2020. What does graduation from college really mean? Who am I gonna be once this journey is over? Are my dreams even worth pursuing? What are my dreams? Who do I wanna be…and is that even realistic or feasible? Am I better off just doing the least I can and hoping that I can get something better later on?

I didn’t know the answers to those questions back then. I wasn’t even sure how to go about answering them. Yet something in my mind wanted to give myself a chance to figure it all out. Processing, and one of the ways I was able to chew on my own inner life musings was through media like Punpun. For the longest time, I’ve seemed to go on a junk food binge when it comes to my media choices. I’ve gone from thoughtful literature and music to strictly trap and replacing reading for scrolling on Instagram. Mind you, I was the kind of kid who hit the book limit at the librar every time, so this kind of change wasn’t exactly precedented. I think it was mostly due to me going into survival mode: my fellow STEM majors will understand the “just get stuff done and turn off your brain” mentality that is so prevalent when you’re immensely busy.

Yet, given the time to think and actually reflect, I gravitated towards media that was darker, more tinged with sadness than I had in a long time. Was it because I was sad? Partly…yet I think more than simply sad, I wanted a means to self reflect and self assess. Something that sad music and time alone has always helped me to do.

Being forced into quarantine forced me to be alone with my thoughts. Being alone with my thoughts forced me to process what was going on in my head. And needing to process brought me to outlets that helped my feelings and my ideas to coexist. Music, stories, communication with friends. These all helped me to understand myself in a time where there seemed to be little to understand about anything. And even now, when there’s an imbalance in my spiritual life, there always follows a collapse of using those three main outlets of emotional/mental processing. I need to face my emotions in order to overcome them.

To stop being sad, I need to feel sad.

I value depressive works of art because they force me to ask myself what my reactions are and why I feel the way I do. It hurts. It’s not always fun or easy. But it helps. It grows me. And above all else, it gives me a reason to hope. Pain isn’t eternal.