Queenie #1

(This is actually a really small zine, that picture makes it look huge!)

By Rachel Lindan

Rachel has chronic fatigue syndrome and is often depressed. She tries to deal with both of these things through her writing, and reading this zine kind of catalyzed a number of things in my mind. For the last few days I've been thinking a lot about depression, anxiety, self worth, love, and other similar things that it seems Rachel is also trying to deal with.

Our society seems to create no end of depressed and self critical people (I just got an email from a friend of mine that, in a few short paragraphs, used the word 'depressed' to refer to three different people, and implied it (at least a little) about a forth), and yet to some extent I feel as though society itself is to blame for some of this depression. Movies and culture create the idea that if we are not happy all the time then we are failures. Yet if you think about it, who is actually happy all the time? Nobody. Depression (and anxiety, and all that other stuff) is part of life, but by thinking that we are wrong/not good enough/inferior/whatever because we exeprience depression, we only end up even more critical of ourselves ("Why aren't you happy like everyone else? Why can't you be more normal?") which only leads to more depression.

Rachel also talks about how she longs to be in a loving relationship again, but feels betrayed by both the people she has gone out with in the past, and by her own body. Our society/popular culture also seems to think that the only way we can be happy is to be in a monogamous relationship. Yet more and more I wonder about this. Why must I limit my love to one person? Why must love almost always seem to be sexual? Why do I feel as though I need to be in a monogamous relationship with one other person to the exclusion of all others? If I have friends to talk to, to hang out with, to care about (and yes, to have sex with), do I need to have a monogamous partner? I don't know, and perhaps I should just write about this stuff in my own zines instead of reviews.

I don't have the answers, and neither does Rachel, but she does have a recipe for chocoalate chip cookies, and a list of the top ten fringes, both of which are supplied in this zine. I recognized maybe three names on the list of fringes, and would only actually recognize one of them if you showed me pictures, but I still like the idea. Just like how I like this zine.