Chapters Step Two: Create A Coping Method
Step Two: Create A Coping Method
In the fourth grade, think of a traumatic event in your current life to make ponies stop asking questions. Especially that overly happy filly Lemon Hearts who just won’t leave you alone. Tell everypony that your pet hamster died and you never got over it. Tell them that a psychic told you that your pet hamster was the reincarnation of your diseased Grandpa, Star Watcher. Pretend like this event was the catalyst for all future misfortunes in your life. Convince everypony that this has been eating away at your conscience for years. Convince yourself that it is the reason why you feel insecure when ponies look at you the way they do. Spend hours burying your snout in stacks of books you’ve piled at the back of the classroom. Read these books by yourself every day so the other ponies will see you are busy reading and leave you alone.
Step Three: Develop A Healthy Rivalry
Step Three: Develop A Healthy Rivalry
In the fifth and sixth grade develop a healthy rivalry with Twilight Sparkle. Decide to study harder than she does and be the best at everything in school. Be disappointed as Twilight Sparkle usually comes out on top but keep trying anyway.
Step Four: Become a Poet
Let the things you’ve struggled with follow you to Junior high. At this point, make sure that you’ve isolated yourself from everypony you knew in elementary school. Take to your room and start listening to Eriskay Princely records on a record player you bought at a thrift store for twenty-five cents. It will be a small blue portable one with tons of stickers all over it. You will buy it with the money you’ve saved from doing chores around the house. Start lamenting over the fact that no one seems to understand you but the Prince . Listen to your records so often that your older sister Jamocha Prism will request to move to her own room, giving you the peace and solitude you’ve sought after since an early age.
Make sure to commit every second not wasted (pretending) to study on writing morbid poetry. Some of your poems can be about the clouds shedding their silver lining to reveal lightning tucked within. Others can be about the way you hate the popular mares and stallions, dressed all prim and perfect. Some can be about Twinkleshine, Lemon Hearts, Minuette, Lyra Heartstrings and Twilight Sparkle who’ve been in every class with you since preschool and won’t seem to leave you alone even though you go out of your way to avoid them. Some can be about how much you’d like to lift that mare’s thong up in science class and rip it right out of her pants, for the whole class to ogle at. She wants everyone to look at it anyway.
Post these poems on your internet blog for all of Equestria to see. Or if not all of Equestria, at the very least the online community of like-minded angst-ridden teens that congregate on those kinds of websites. This is crucial; you must have this community to share your inmost feeling with. On the main forum of the group decide to write one day, “Yes, yes; my hamster died when I was in the fourth grade. It was like my grandfather dying all over again.” To which some mare from a Rock Farm somewhere in Rockville will reply, “That’s really deep, my dude. On the rock farm, my mother appeared to me in a piece of toast and I ate her by mistake. I was never the same after that.”
In time you will both get to know each other well. You both will frequently LOL over the MareSpace chat box. Secretly you will both know what the other party is talking about. Her toast is just like your hamster. Stories you tell the world to make them think you are ok. Or maybe they are tales you spin to show ponies that you might be depressed, but at least you can have a good sense of humor about it. Or else they are stories you tell to intentionally drive away ponies that try to delve too deep into who you really are.
At the end of your seventh grade year, you will need to start keeping a personal diary for all of the suitable ways to kill yourself. You can add little notes like “burn myself alive” and “drown myself in a river of water” or the classic “put a dagger in my heart.” Then underneath each of these suicidal methods, you can list the survivability rate of each one.
Select the methods that will, without a shadow of a doubt in your mind, lead you to a quick and untimely death. Leave the rest of the suicidal methods for your internet poetry. You’d be surprised at how many poems can be written on the subject of death from the perspective of the unwilling living.
Step Five: Be the Odd Mare Out
Step Five: Be the Odd Mare Out
In the eighth grade make sure to have a teacher that absolutely hates you. You know the type; the ones that go out of their way to make you look like a complete idiot in front of the class. Or even better, the teachers that tell you that you’ll never amount to anything in life and you’ll do the world a favor by quitting school and becoming a janitor.
Or the ones that give everypony in the class an A except for you because your answers are too complex and well-thought-out. Or the ones that crucify you because you are too smart and somehow make them feel inadequate by comparison. Or the ones that teach an entire lesson to the class on how ill-mannered and barbaric you are compared to the rest of their students.
You’ve had plenty of experience with your elementary school teachers to know what I am talking about. If they don’t hate you to begin with, really work at making them despise your existence. For most circumstances, it won’t be hard. Teachers are always on the verge of hating you anyway. Really dig in there and go for the home run.
If they don’t like Seaquestria make sure to only submit papers on the topic of the seaponies all semester. If they’re general grumps, come into class stating how wonderful it is NOT to be them every day of the school year. I’m sure you can think of something to arouse their anger. Just think of it as its own reward. It will be one less pony you’ll have to worry about crying at your gravestone when you work up the courage to end your pathetic existence.
You’ll need to make sure that everypony in the classroom thinks you are the weird mare. There are many strategies you can employ in order to do this. You can wear your hair in a million braids and paint your face white. Every time the teacher calls on you, you can stand up from your chair with a start and yell, “It’s the Crystal Army Generals; they’ve advanced!” and sit down just as quickly as you stood up.
You can dress like an individual; not the spaghetti strap t-shirts that the other mares are wearing, but in gamer gear, head to toe. You can sport a Power Ponies t-shirt. You can wear headphones over your ears connected to a Gamepony DS that you wear around your neck. You can flaunt your unicorn knight character’s boots from Ogres & Oubliettes , even going as far as to wear them outside your jeans so others will take notice of them. Go for the whole shebang.
You can introduce yourself the first day of class as “Little Miss Goody Two-Shoes who always does her best to get straight A’s in school.” On top of that, you can introduce yourself as “a world-class tattle tale” to seal the deal. There is some caution I must draw attention to regarding this personality trait. You may invoke so much hatred in your classmates that they will find the urge to pound you into Dorito-sized pieces with their teenaged hooves.
I suggest (for your own health and safety) sticking with the “I’m creepy and I might eat your soul if you touch me,” fashion statement. That is if you do not want to die before you yourself have an opportunity to end your own miserable existence with one of your listed suicide methods. Dressing Goth most likely will do the trick.
Whenever someone tries to be your friend, pretend like you don’t speak Ponish. Or talk like the mare from Ponygeist; you know the one I’m referring to. Don’t hesitate to talk in a creepy ‘Pony of Shadows’ manner.
Step Seven: Challenge the System
Step Seven: Challenge the System
In the ninth grade, you must go out of your way to avoid joining clubs or pep rallies. Don’t be on the mare volleyball team. Don’t become a cheerleader. Don’t be what the system wants you to be. Go out of your way to be an individual. Spray paint a list written in gold lettering on the gymnasium wall about all of the ways one can prepare potatoes.
Wear pajamas to school every day of the week. Heck, even wear the ones with the back end hanging open. Write one-liners for all of the essay questions you receive on every test your teachers give you. Make them memorable, small poems that stick in your teachers' minds. They may not earn you a passing grade, but they will be the kind of answers that force your teachers to think.
Write papers and make presentations that are off the wall. Write about Yakyakistan Pop Culture for your non-fiction class. Write about toad warts as a pain killer for biology. Make a presentation about the different aspects of fantasy for your speech class. Go wild. Don’t let sensibility hold you back.
Ditch classes when necessary. Wear sunglasses to math class, so the teacher won’t know you’re sleeping. Draw comics in the classes you are forced to take that have no purpose in the grand scheme of your future life. Play the piano every day after school, even though you don’t know a note of it, and your improvisation sucks.
Step Eight: Play the field
Step Eight: Play the field
Get a boyfriend in the tenth grade. Make him the only other pony you talk to besides the girl that is so over-the-top she makes Bulk Biceps look like Iron Will. Let him be one of those controlling types, who watches your every move. Don’t be surprised when he becomes possessive. Count it as another reason to end your life.
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Step Ten: Have A Pony You Admire Let You Down
Step Ten: Have A Pony You Admire Let You Down
Prepare to be devastated as one of the ponies you’ve always looked up to also just up and leaves town, completely ditching the party you invited her to. It will be the first time you’ve ever put yourself out there and tried to invite those ponies who have bothered you all through your school years Twinkleshine, Lemon Hearts, Minuette, Lyra Heartstrings and Twilight Sparkle to do something fun. But it won’t be fun. It will be a disaster. Only Twinkleshine, Lemon Hearts, Minuette and Lyra Heartstrings will reluctantly show up. Twilight Sparkle will ditch your party leaving you feeling miserable and awkward around classmates you barely know.
Spend the next couple of years finding a house to rent on the outskirts of town and avoiding everypony you once knew. Start burying yourself in your studies to cope with the feeling of being left alone by everypony you’ve ever taken the time to care about.
Step Twelve: Get a Degree
Step Twelve: Get a Degree
Enroll in Canterlot University a few years later. Come to the realization that psychologists are full of horse apples after your first semester there. Change your major to Ponish your sophomore year. After all, poetry has been what’s keeping you alive all of these years so you might as well give it ‘the good college try’. Have some amazing creative writing teachers that tell you you’ve got what it takes to be something in the world of literature. Make it your goal to be more famous than A.K. Yearling one day.
Write stories about gothic chicks and outcasts. Win prizes at your university for outstanding fiction and poetry. Forget about the online journal communities and sever your ties with those twenty-something-year-old-emo-chicks. Try to get to know people in your class. Continue to hang out with your friends Twinkleshine, Lemon Hearts and Minuette after your classes each day. Spend time with Lyra Heartstrings and Twilight Sparkle whenever they are in town.
Keep a book of all of the reasons to live. Remember all of the reasons your best friend used to give you and record them alongside the ones you’ve made yourself.
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Step Thirteen: Get A Scholarship…I Mean Quick Cash
Step Thirteen: Get A Scholarship Quick Cash
Start a small business where you buy books low and sell them at discounted prices on sites like eNeigh. Earn so much extra cash that it funds your book addiction and you fill the back library of your ~~stolen~~ borrowed tower home with hundreds of books you’ve probably read a million times. Oh and it will also help fund your education. There’s that too.
Step Fourteen: Start a Diploma Collection
Step Fourteen: Start a Diploma Collection
At your graduation, tell your parents that you love them. This seems like a simple action, but it will mean a lot. Thank all of the teachers that made you believe you could be something. Apply for the graduate program of Creative Writing at Canterlot University. Continue to write stories about ponies that overcome impossible odds to achieve their goals.
When ponies ask you why you’re so happy all of the time, just smile and tell them it’s because of a hamster. One that you thought was the reincarnation of your dead grandfather. It died when you were in the fourth grade. Tell them that the story always makes you laugh. Have them laugh along with you. Start making hamster jokes and use them excessively in your fiction.
Get your master’s degree in creative writing. Go for your doctorate degree in creative writing, no matter how redundant your father says it seems.
Step Fifteen: Have the Courage to Teach
Step Fifteen: Have the Courage to Teach
Apply as a creative writing teacher at another university. Find the potential in students that write about Mares whose souls live on pieces of toast after suffering untimely deaths in toaster ovens. Continue publishing your own work. Ignore the critics that accuse you of being too perky or unrealistic in your characterization. Listen to the voices of your colleagues and peers in writing workshops held across Equestria.
Step Sixteen: Be a Star
Become a legend in your own right. Be the pony who puts a spin on your murder mysteries. The pony who knows what it’s like to come close to death. The crazy writer featured in Equine magazine who likes to kill all of the disagreeable shoe pebbles you’ve encountered in your murder mystery novels. Become an eccentric. Become the talk of the town.
Give yourself a reason to wakeup each day and laugh about the morbid poetry you used to write in junior high. And Eriskay Princely? How could you have ever listened to him? Question this for the rest of your life, along with the ponies that tried so hard to weigh you down.
Have pity on those ponies and wish them the best. Shoot, even invite them to a Summer Sun Celebration BBQ. You know the one you hold annually in the University’s Biology room, much to the headmaster’s constant complaints about your disregard for tradition.
Step Seventeen: Make Reconciliation
Step Seventeen: Make Reconciliation
Try to contact the friend that used to tell you to smile who moved away all of those years ago. Discover that she has taken her own life after divorcing her husband of fifteen years when she couldn’t get her life back together. Feel shocked that her suicide took place only one year ago. Mourn over the fact you could have been there for her if you had thought about visiting her sooner. Realize that there’s nothing you can do now and fall into a deep depression it will take years to recover from.
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Step Eighteen: Dedicate a Book in Someone’s Honor
Step Eighteen: Dedicate a Book in Someone’s Honor
Write one final story at the end of your career. Make it about the Mare you used to know. How you used to think she was crazy. How you wanted to bury her alive for being so god dammed perky all of the time.
How you would have liked to drain the life out of her neck with your bare hooves for always having a bounce in her step. How despite all of that, she was crucial to you surviving your junior high and high school years.
How you only realized how important she was to you in retrospect. How you wish that you could have had a chance to tell her that she was your best friend. How she was the thing (not poetry or Eriskay Princely) that ended up saving your life. That she will never know how much she meant to you then and probably never will.
Step Nineteen: Forgive Yourself
Step Nineteen: Forgive Yourself
Let this eat at you a few years. Let it tear a hole in your heart that cannot easily be mended by the empty words of comfort spoken to you by your university students, colleagues, family or friends. Let it make you appreciate the life she has given you, through the sacrifice of her own.
Visit her grave sometime during the summer when you have time off. Read her the one poem you never had the courage to recite. The one about an old stallion that could talk to his guardian angel. The one that was crammed between the pages of an otherwise Goth-filled portfolio of crap. The one that takes you back to the days when you’d read all of the poems in your journals to her, and hesitate every time you tried to draw it out of the pages of that stale, lifeless folder.
Don’t cry; she wouldn’t want to see you cry. Lay the poem on her grave with a smile. As you walk away, promise yourself that you will never come back. As you get in your car, watch the wind blow the poem from the top of the grave into the hands of an aspiring poet sitting on a park bench. Watch her as she reads it and a large grin creeps over her face. Be reminded of the reason you became a writer in the first place.
Step Twenty: Write a Self-Help Book
Step Twenty: Write a Self-Help Book
Come out of retirement and write a self-help book for people with ~~depression~~ overactive imaginations. Try to think of a suitable title. End up ripping it off of an obscure videogame nopony has ever heard of and hope nopony notices. Give back to others through your writing the way your friend gave back to you.
Step Twenty-One: Become a Mentor
Step Twenty-One: Become a Mentor
Sign a copy of your new book to the aspiring writer you saw at the graveyard those many years ago. Learn that she is the daughter of your best friend who committed suicide. Become her best friend and mentor. Encourage her to dream about dragons and griffins in her junior high classes. Be the role model you always wished you had; the guardian angel to a young girl on a funeral park bench.
Step Twenty-Two: Don’t Worry, Be Happy
Step Twenty-Two: Don’t Worry, Be Happy
Be happy when you learn that she still keeps that poem with her. You’ll notice her pulling your poem out now and then. Every time she does, you will find a reason to smile. You’ll take out a faded notebook you keep in your handbag and add it to your list of all of the reasons you have found to live over the years. All of the reasons you’ve found to forget suicide.
Preface: A Guide to Reading This Guide
Preface: A Guide to Reading This Guide
Welcome to forgetting happiness 101. I will be your instructor today. You can call me Resident Bookworm. Everypony calls me that now. My real name’s Moon Dancer, but that’s not important. Well, except showing you one of many reasons I would like to wallow around in misery. So this is how things are going to go down. You are going to read this helpful guide on how to foster emotions of angst and helplessness. Make sure not to miss a single step in my how-to guide for optimum results. We will start at the beginning. And by beginning, I mean the first years of school.
Step One: Have an Overactive Imagination
Step One: Have an Overactive Imagination
At Princess Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns, have a really overactive imagination. Read tons of books on every subject. Never pay attention to what the teacher is telling the rest of the class. Instead, draw pictures of seaponies and dragons. Let yourself dream of places that nopony else can see. Tell your peers that you talk with Hayscartes, you are on a first-name basis with Princess Celestia, and that breezies live in your back yard. Let this weird the other foals out for a bit before explaining to them that you were just pulling their hoof (well, mostly).
Get called to Vice Principal Neighsay’s office (in the days before he became Chancellor Neighsay) to have a surprise meeting with your parents in the first grade. Have your first grade teacher join the little get-together. She will be dressed up really nice, in her Sunday’s best. She will tell your parents that she thinks you need to be on a Moondust Mood Enhancer or Moondust for short. Pretend not to understand what she is talking about, but secretly despise her for trying to discourage you from being yourself.
Take Moondust all through your second grade year. Don’t remember anything from it. Understand that the drug will affect your mind. You won’t want to do anything. You won’t want to sleep, eat or play with the other foals. Have your parents get worried sick over you.
Have them get so worried that they take you off of Moondust when you enter the third grade. As soon as you’re taken off of the vile enchanted powder, return to your old self again. Remember the pain that your peers, teachers and own flesh and blood has put you through. Let it rest unprotected like a deep cut on your heart. Learn bitterness at a young age. It will serve you well later in your quest for self-pity.
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Step Six: Get a Perky Sidekick...I Mean Friend
Step Six: Get a Perky Sidekick Friend
For all of the time you spend repelling ponies, spend a smaller fraction of time letting one very special friend get close to you. This is crucial. This pony will be your lifelong mediator between life and death. Every time you mention suicide they will give you a book called “1001 ways to cheer yourself up” or else slap you until you snap out of your current state of distress.
The most important attribute this one friend must have is perkiness. I don’t mean the false perkiness that flight attendants have. This pony has to fart rainbows. They have to be like Mr. Neighbors after too many cappuccinos and a sex change operation. They have to tell you to “just keep swimming” and to “not go towards the light.”
You will often want to estrange yourself from this overly perky individual but hold onto them like you hold onto those Eriskay records. This person is your key to temporary (if not permanent) survival. You must read all of your Flourish Prose, Quilland Ink and Exmoor Altai Posh inspired poetry to this pony and anticipate their scolding with a smile. You have to endure the pain of them telling you to “buck up” and “look at the glass half-full” when you would prefer to be somewhere moping. It will be hard, but you must resist the urge to bury them six feet under a cactus in the middle of the San Palomino Desert every time they attempt to bring a smile to your face with one of their horribly executed knock-knock jokes.
Resist the urge to stuff them in their locker and make a break for it. You may think it will bring you joy to see their happiness destroyed by your sinister dreamed-up deed, but trust me when I say that it will just add to your remorse and bad conscience in retrospect. You don’t want to give yourself more reasons to be depressed about your life than absolutely necessary. No need to rush the process. You’ll want to end your life in due time.
Step Nine: Value Creativity Over Drugs
Step Nine: Value Creativity Over Drugs
Continue writing sophisticated ways to murder yourself if a notebook. Have your mom find it and cry for days. Get loaded into the car and taken to a psychiatrist. Have him tell you that you suffer from clinical depression with acute social anxiety disorder. Have him prescribe hardcore mystic mushrooms to help you cope.
Take them for two years straight. Miss the fact that your boyfriend has cheated on you, dumped you, and left you for another girl that has suffered the same fate. Be unaware of the fact that you are conforming and getting good grades. Feel numb at the fact that your best friend can’t reach the real you no matter how many times she has cried out your name. Graduate without really appreciating the sacrifices you had to make to wear that blue robe and walk down that crowded stage.
Almost try to end your life by stepping in front of traffic at the end of your graduation, not because you want to, but because you're too drugged up to know where you are going. Get off mystic mushrooms two months later. Be comforted in the fact that you may be depressed, but at least you care whether or not your best friend has moved away. You learned that she did earlier that year after going to rehab. Your mom will tell you and you will hardly believe it. Consider entering college as a psychologist to help other people with your same ~~condition~~ life experiences.
Step Eleven: Unwillingly Deal With Changes
Step Eleven: Unwillingly Deal With Changes
Many years later run into that annoying mare Twilight Sparkle at the library again. Have her stalk you for days until you finally agree to hang out with her. You won’t want to but she’ll keep bribing you with learning how to jump into books with magic and offering you to stay in her tower home that’s filled with books.
Reconnect with those stupid ponies Twinkleshine, Lemon Hearts and Minuette at a local donut place because Twilight Sparkle forces you to. Deal with the ‘Princess of Friendship’ meddling in your daily life for weeks until you are lured into some party with your old friends, the librarian Multifarious Tomes, the bookseller Monograph Hive and of all things your sister Jamocha Prism.
End up venting your frustration about Twilight Sparkle leaving you at the lowest point in your life when you could have used a friend. Have Twilight Sparkle show you that the ponies at the party are all willing to be your friend and spend the rest of the evening talking to them and getting to know them. Stay in touch with all of your friends at the party the next couple of years and even Twilight Sparkle and Lyra Heartstrings when they occasionally visit town.
Secretly move into Twilight Sparkle’s tower home as she said you could stay there and read as many of the books as you like. Besides, you will kind of be tired of paying rent on that property falling apart at the edge of town anyway. That money should be saved for better things, like goals you’ve been setting for yourself to become a better pony.
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Epilogue: All’s well that Ends Well…I Mean More Crap for You to Read
Epilogue: All’s well that Ends Well More Crap for You to Read
It’s me Moon Dancer again. I hope you found my guide useful. I wish that I had a guide like this when I was growing up. I’d be lying if I said it was an easy guide to follow, but I have faith you can do it. I think Eriskay Princely records are a little cheaper these days. Journals are expensive, but you can always keep an electronic one. Poetry is a good gateway into writing, but imagination is even better.
If you happen to get this guide later in life, follow the guide step by step anyway. Make them your own steps. Use whiteout liberally. Insert your own experiences and solutions. By the time you are done, I want to see a whole new book.
One with you as the author. One I can sign when you are handing out copies at a book convention somewhere. The one that has my name crossed off at the bottom and has yours inserted instead. Oh and a new title, ripped off from the last line of my guide. “All of the Reasons I found To Forget Suicide” by aspiring author one.
Let’s open a whole library of books for everypony to read. All of those experiences. All of that white out. All of those ripped-off titles, ones taken from the other. The same stories told over and over again with whiter and brighter pages. And then, mine at the end of the library. Old, shabby and forgotten. Outdated and misused. Useless to those who have already read the other five thousand copies in their various forms.
And now you’ve learned all of the ways to forget happiness. But that’s okay. It’s part of the process. In the mix of everything, you gain something more. You learn to rely on yourself and others. You learn how to truly love. You learn how to perfect the magic of friendship.
