Depressiongrams (Jamie Lauren Keiles, The Message)
For two years I was in and out of psychiatric hospitals, outpatient programs, therapist appointments, and fits of despair, but nothing could stop me from doing what mattered most — getting faves.
两年来，我进出精神病院、门诊项目、治疗师预约和绝望，但没有什么可以阻止我做最重要的事情——获得最爱。
Today, as I scroll the main feed of Instagram from out in the light of the living, I see attractive sandwich, beautiful leather craft, black and white architecture, sponsored content for puppy-related startup, fresh tattoo, cranberry bagel, iced tea selfie, new car.
今天，当我在生活之光中滚动 Instagram 的主要内容时，我看到了诱人的三明治、漂亮的皮革工艺、黑白建筑、与小狗相关的初创公司的赞助内容、新鲜纹身、蔓越莓百吉饼、冰茶自拍、新车。
The Instagram economy trades heavily in FOMO and YOLO.
Instagram 经济在 FOMO 和 YOLO 中交易频繁。
Instagram is a platform for people who, if not actively happy, are at least moderately invested in aggregating the happier moments of life.
Instagram 是一个平台，适合那些即使不积极快乐，也至少适度投资于聚合生活中快乐时刻的人们。
It is not an intuitive place for depressed people — people like me who had long accepted missing out, and instead were just hoping to die.
对于抑郁症患者来说，这不是一个直观的地方——像我这样的人早已接受了错过的事实，而只是希望死掉。
This mismatch didn’t stop me from gramming, multiple times a day.
这种不匹配并没有阻止我每天多次练习。
While my broader feed depicted friends livin’ deep and suckin’ the marrow from life, my own photos focused more on me sucking at life itself.
虽然我的更广泛的信息描绘了朋友们生活得很深，从生活中汲取精髓，但我自己的照片更多地集中在我汲取生活本身。
If Instagram proper has certain conventions (aerial shots of artisanal food, latte art posed beside print media, selfies depicting compulsive leisure), then depressiongrams too have tropes: the medication tableau, the bed selfie, eerie photographs of screens that reflect too much time spent alone on the internet at night.
如果说 Instagram 本身有一定的惯例（手工食品的空中拍摄、印刷媒体旁边摆出的拉花艺术、描绘强迫性休闲的自拍照），那么抑郁症图也有比喻：药物画面、床上自拍、反映晚上独自上网的时间过多的屏幕怪异照片。
It was a sad time, when my Instas seldom darkened the door of an eleventh fave.
那是一段悲伤的时光，我的 Insta 很少能遮住第十一个最爱的大门。
The ten or fewer faves reflected a roster of distant acquaintances and internet strangers who played along with my depression from home.
这十个或更少的最爱反映了一系列远方熟人和网上陌生人的名单，他们在家里与我的抑郁症一起玩耍。
Were they supportive?
他们支持吗？
Were they sad too?
他们也难过吗？
I didn’t know then, and I still don’t know.
我当时不知道，现在仍然不知道。
Instagram is largely a platform for unidirectional storytelling and near-passive consumption of other people’s stories.
Instagram 在很大程度上是一个单向讲故事和近乎被动地消费他人故事的平台。
Its infrastructure doesn’t readily facilitate two-way conversation in the same way that Facebook or Twitter might.
它的基础设施无法像 Facebook 或 Twitter 那样轻松促进双向对话。
Instagram exists mostly inside of the phone, and in this way, it feels cozy and private, if only falsely.
Instagram 大部分存在于手机内部，通过这种方式，它给人一种舒适和私密的感觉，尽管这只是错误的。
There is no share function, which makes it difficult for anyone to challenge the narrative you work to construct.
没有分享功能，这使得任何人都很难挑战你所构建的叙述。
When I was sad, this all felt important.
当我悲伤时，这一切都感觉很重要。
When you are depressed, people who have never been depressed are positively horny to offer advice and assessments of your situation.
当你感到沮丧时，从未患过抑郁症的人会非常渴望为你的处境提供建议和评估。
They say, Pull yourself up by your bootstraps and Fake it ‘til you make it and It can’t be that bad.
他们说，自力更生，假装成功，直到成功，事情不会那么糟糕。
America contends with depression out of both sides of its mouth, treating it with medication like a valid clinical pathology, but blaming its sufferers for shortcomings of character and will.
美国从两方面来应对抑郁症，像有效的临床病理学一样用药物治疗它，但却将其患者归咎于性格和意志的缺陷。
The reality is, depression weaves around and between these two categorizations in an unpredictable way — something that seems irrational and even impossible to someone who has never experienced it.
现实情况是，抑郁症以一种不可预测的方式在这两种类别之间交织——对于从未经历过抑郁症的人来说，这似乎是不合理的，甚至是不可能的。
There is plenty of space in the cultural conversation for stories about what it was like to have been depressed, but there isn’t much space or tolerance for narrating the experience in live time.
文化对话中有足够的空间来讲述抑郁症的故事，但没有太多的空间或容忍度来讲述生活中的经历。
That behavior, especially online, is called attention-seeking, or oversharing, or desperation.
这种行为，尤其是在网上，被称为寻求关注、过度分享或绝望。
The sole exception to this rule is the cry for help , but the depressed person who isn’t sure which help to cry for is given little clearance to talk at all.
这条规则的唯一例外是呼救，但抑郁症患者如果不确定该呼救哪一种，就根本没有机会说话。
On Instagram, I found a corner of the net where I was safe to shit out images of my terrible life in live time, without any imperative to express what I needed or interpret what it meant.
在 Instagram 上，我找到了网络的一个角落，在那里我可以安全地吐出我在现场的可怕生活的图像，而不需要表达我需要什么或解释它的含义。
I often think the worst kind of social media post is the kind that offers a complaint without any identifiable object, as in, “I can’t take this anymore,” or “Done putting up with this shit.” This genre of content feels attention-seeking in a non-productive way, but with the benefit of hindsight I recognize such cryptic agitations as efforts to generate a personally satisfying sense of plot.
我经常认为最糟糕的社交媒体帖子是那种在没有任何可识别对象的情况下提出投诉的帖子，例如“我再也受不了了”或“受够了这个狗屎”。这种类型的内容让人感觉以一种非生产性的方式寻求关注，但事后看来，我认识到这种神秘的激动是为了产生个人令人满意的情节感而做出的努力。
Nothing ever happens when you are depressed.
当你沮丧时什么也不会发生。
It’s boring.
很无聊。
You lie in bed, or pass numbly through life, ruminating circularly on conceptual ideas in hopes of somehow thinking your way out of the hole.
你躺在床上，或者麻木地度过一生，不断地思考概念性想法，希望能找到摆脱困境的方法。
Being cryptic and sad on social media was a way of hitching my detachment to some publicly shared reality.
在社交媒体上表现得神秘和悲伤是让我脱离某些公开分享的现实的一种方式。
I couldn’t have cried for help, for all the available help had been exhausted.
我不可能大声呼救，因为所有可用的帮助都已用尽。
It felt good and real to generate things that felt like plot points in a story as I laid in bed, waiting for the winds to change.
当我躺在床上等待风向改变时，生成那些感觉像是故事中情节点的东西感觉很好而且很真实。
There was comfort in finding a place to advocate for the validity of my world, but this is not to say that depressiongrams are somehow rawer or without artifice.
找到一个地方来倡导我的世界的有效性是令人欣慰的，但这并不是说抑郁图在某种程度上比较原始或没有技巧。
Photos, though seemingly objective and documentary, are often just as constructed and deliberate as language.
照片虽然看似客观和记录，但往往和语言一样是经过精心设计和精心设计的。
Even a candid Instagram, of any subject, is posed in the sense that a) someone chose to take it, and b) someone chose to post it online for others to consume.
即使是任何主题的坦率 Instagram，也是在 a) 有人选择拍摄它，b) 有人选择将其发布到网上供其他人消费的意义上提出的。
Like the sun-flooded Kinfolk-y brunchstagram, the depressiongram has a recognizable aesthetic.
就像阳光普照的 Kinfolk-y brunchstagram 一样，抑郁图也有一种可识别的美感。
I took these photos mostly at night, with a grainy fuzziness that looks as thick and impenetrable as depression makes life feel.
我主要在晚上拍摄这些照片，颗粒感模糊，看起来就像抑郁症给生活带来的感觉一样厚重和难以理解。
Before I was depressed, I was a writer, and after my depression, I’m a writer again, but during my depression I couldn’t make or do anything.
在我抑郁之前，我是一名作家，在抑郁之后，我又成为一名作家，但在抑郁期间，我什么也做不了，什么也做不了。
I couldn’t reliably feed myself, or take showers, and yet I felt burdened and plagued by a sinister and common mythology that genius makes madness, and so madness must produce genius or creative output of some measurable sort.
我无法可靠地吃饭或洗澡，但我却感到一种邪恶而普遍的神话的负担和困扰，即天才导致疯狂，因此疯狂必须产生天才或某种可衡量的创造性产出。
In the throes of depression, my role models weren’t people who recovered, but artists who eventually killed themselves.
在抑郁症的痛苦中，我的榜样不是那些康复的人，而是最终自杀的艺术家。
My friends, who I now recognize were not in an easy position, would offer sordid reassurances like, “David Foster Wallace was depressed, and he turned it into books.
我的朋友们，我现在认识到他们的处境并不轻松，他们会提供肮脏的保证，比如，“大卫·福斯特·华莱士很沮丧，他把它变成了书。
Why don’t you write again?” It’s cruel to suggest that a sick person do the labor of a famous working artist, and even more cruel when the suggestion hinges on an artist who hung himself.
怎么不再写信了？”暗示一个病人做一位著名艺术家的工作是残酷的，而当这个建议取决于一位上吊自杀的艺术家时，就更残酷了。
There is nothing romantic about being sick, and I suspect that if Sylvia Plath or Kurt Cobain ever worked for even a second in the throes of a depressive episode, then their output is an exception, not a rule.
生病并不浪漫，我怀疑，如果西尔维娅·普拉斯或库尔特·科本在抑郁症的痛苦中工作过哪怕一秒钟，那么他们的产出只是一个例外，而不是规则。
I remember shooting the depressiongrams with a sense of purpose, like if I couldn’t fulfill my duty to make art from my experience in the moment, then at least I could bank that experience to make future art, should I survive the whole ordeal.
我记得带着一种使命感拍摄抑郁症图，就像如果我无法履行我的职责，根据我当下的经历创作艺术，那么至少我可以将这些经历储存起来，以创作未来的艺术，如果我能度过整个磨难的话。
Having survived, I resent this logic as grossly romantic, but it’s also a logic that essentially beared out, so I’m not sure what to think.
幸存下来后，我对这种过于浪漫的逻辑感到不满，但这也是一种基本上得到证实的逻辑，所以我不知道该怎么想。
The photos served a practical purpose in the moment, but today they feel like a weird incongruity in the scope of a social media platform that’s often mocked for being too exuberantly full of life.
这些照片当时具有实际用途，但今天它们在社交媒体平台的范围内感觉像是一种奇怪的不协调，而社交媒体平台经常被嘲笑为过于充满活力。