BEGINNINGS
First of all, my real name is not Kyoko Sagaki. It's just an alias I use so that I can be free to do whatever I want without fear of people I know Googling me. I also have another alias, Nami, which I use for my various artistic pursuits, such as music and novels.

But all that is beside the point. To begin at the beginning, I was born in Ohio way back in 1983. I've lived in North Carolina, South Carolina, back to Ohio, and back to South Carolina again. I wouldn't say my childhood was happy, but I wouldn't say it was unhappy, either. It was a time characterized by a very slight depression and a not so slight immaturity, though the depression was enough to threaten suicide at one point in the 5th grade.

Then we moved to South Carolina, which was traumatic for a while. I was situationally depressed (self-diagnosed, mind you), and I did disturbing things like make up a dead boyfriend from N. Carolina and write letters to him in a notebook. I still have them. I was also a bitch in middle school, especially sixth grade. I cut class and hung out with a bad crowd and bullied people. When I believe in karma, I figure these times are what caused me such shit later on in life.

HIGH SCHOOL
I hated the first two years of high school. I didn't really feel close to anyone. I kind of floated around groups for a while, and when I finally did settle on one, they were closer to each other than to me for a long time. I almost changed high schools because I hated it so much.

My Junior and Senior year were better, but in a paradoxical way. I was close with a new group as well as my old one, but what they did to me after high school ended tainted my experience with them forever. And even though I was more comfortable in the school than before, Junior year was the time when I became depressed, as opposed to just unhappy. And I also fell in love with a guy named Devin, a love which I still have to this day, and wish I never did.

THE AWFUL SUMMER
The summer of 2002, the one after high school and before college, was the worst of my life. I was betrayed and/or abandoned (and I'm really not using those words lightly) by almost all of my friends, spent the summer alone and almost insane with grief. I was truly disturbed around this time. I was cutting myself, starving myself, started smoking -- basically abusing my body almost any way I could. I took long late night drives screaming and singing sad songs.

THE COLLEGE EXPERIENCE
The combination of the trauma of being abandoned by all of my friends by this point and living alone in a new place knowing nobody was too much for me, and I did horribly in college. In the five quarters I was at Ohio State, I passed two classes. During Freshman year, I was quite suicidal, but the old methods of hurting myself were no longer available to me (with the exception of cigarettes, which I eventually quit anyway, since I never really got into it). I hated living in a four-person room as well, as I've always valued my privacy, and I would stay up late at night just to be alone and even go on late walks, even though it was dangerous. I took off a quarter in Winter of my Freshman year, and it was then I first started getting treatment for my depression.

By Sophomore year, I was in an apartment with my own room, which I loved, but I was still very depressed. It's hard for me to tell, really, which year of college I was more depressed in. I had a hard time getting to classes for any entire quarter and stayed in my room a lot sleeping and generally being sad.

My depression escalated until May of 2004, when I tried to kill myself. My roommate, who was supposed to help me, instead took me to the hospital. I'm still bitter about that, because she is suicidal as well, and should have known where I was coming from. I spent three days in the mental hospital. I was kicked out of school that quarter anyway(I never told the school I had been in the hospital), and so I went home.

RECENTLY
Surprisingly, my life has gotten better since the suicide attempt. I'm not such an extremely private person anymore (though I feel that at the time the privateness was necessary, since I didn't have anyone really to confide in before). But I reconciled with one of my friends (Yumiko), have an incredibly good friend in Jake, and am dating someone for the first time in four years. I'm also in the local technical college, which is still not going as well as it should, but at least it's much better than when I was at Ohio State. At least, my depression has lessened a lot, to the point where I'm becoming much stronger and growing up a bit. I hardly ever think about suicide anymore, and my serious depressive episodes have become more infrequent. This is not to say that I'm out of the woods or anything, especially since the improvement is due mostly to outside and not inward events, but I'm probably less depressed than I have been in my entire life, even counting early elementary school.

PROFILE
ALIAS: Kyoko Sagaki
NICKNAME: Nami
BIRTHDAY: October 25th, 1983
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Scorpio
HAIR COLOR: Brown
EYE COLOR: Brown
HEIGHT: 5'9"
RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION: Atheist/Secular Humanist
POLITICAL AFFILIATION: Democrat/Far Left-Wing Liberal
HOBBIES: Japan/Japanese, France/French, webpage design, music, reading, writing, drawing
LIKES: Ayumi Hamasaki, Robert Miles, Raise the Red Lantern, Clerks, JPOP, Banana Yoshimoto, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, skeptics
DISLIKES: fundamentalists, music elitists

CONTACT INFO
I have a lot of e-mail addresses. Pick your poison:
candy_red_lollipop at hotmail.com
k.sagaki at laposte.net
serialthinker at gmail.com