Issue 01 - Loneliness

Photography feat.Christopher Lloyd Chang
It is a way of functioning that does not presently strike me as foreign. As a great deal of
curious children do, throughout childhood I held onto little snippets of my parents’ dialogue
which unnerved me and tasked myself with rationalizing those words. Over time, I came to
suspect a genetic component; that they too suffered from obsessive thoughts, despair, and
possibly, that same immobilizing grief. I began to take note of such symptoms as they came
to hamper even my most basic endeavors, such as getting out of bed or eating. In January
of the next year I sought treatment from a psychiatrist in San Francisco and was formally
diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder, an affliction that annually affects roughly 3%
of the US population.
I tell you this not as an aimless revelation but because visibility is important, particularly
among an audience that suppresses each perceptible sign of weakness. Pathophysiological
research suggests that “GAD” is linked to disrupted functional connectivity of the
amygdala, a set of neurons in the brain’s medial temporal lobe integral for processing
human emotion. To disregard this diagnosis with the common notion that teenagers
nowadays are entirely too fragile would be to miss the point entirely. More than anything, the
news indicated to me that more introspective work was necessary.
08