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Author, Historian, Storyteller

Not Your Problem to Fix

Depression, Happiness, Live and LearnLeave a comment

I am currently in a funk, have been for a couple of weeks now.  This is nothing new to me.  I have been clinically depressed since I was eleven-years-old.  I know that this is not PC, not “appropriate for polite conversation,” but I don’t believe that people should be ashamed of mental illness.  It doesn’t make me any less of a person, it doesn’t change the way that people look at me after they find out.  The people that matter at any rate.  In fact, I’ve found that talking about it helps.  When the people around me know, I don’t feel the need to put on the act that I do around others.  You see I am a very high functioning depressive.  A common reaction that I get from people when I tell them, is that they had no idea I suffered from depression.

Actually, I don’t like to say that I suffer from depression, because suffer has always implied to me that I am a victim, that I have no control.  I decided long ago that I’m not a victim.  I battle depression. It is a war and one that I will likely fight for the rest of my life.  I take it head on and I take no prisoners . . . most days.  However, like any war I lose battles, and then I’m in a funk.  Sometimes I can identify what caused it, sometimes I can’t.  Some days are simply funkier than others.

And no, that week or two that you felt really low does not give you an adequate frame of reference for what the past 20 years of my life have been like. So please don’t tell me that you know how it feels. You don’t. That would be like me telling a marathoner I know all about it because I ran track in high school.  To a certain extent, it’s insulting.  It belittles my reality.

I know that you want to help, I know that you want to fix the problem and I appreciate that this desire comes out of concern and from a place of love.  But please understand, that this is not your problem to fix.  Suggesting that I get more exercise, or eat healthier, or get daylight lamps, or investigate the different meds on the market is the opposite of help.  I’m doing the best that I know how to do and you giving me all of these suggestions tells me that my best isn’t good enough. It layers funk on top of the funk.  Not to mention, I doubt very seriously that you have come across a study, approach or new theory out there that I haven’t already read about and very probably tried.  I have worked my way through the advice, strategies and gamut of meds available. I know what’s out there.  If there was a med that offered a benefit that was greater than the side-effects, you can bet your sweet ass that I would already be on that sucker!

This does not mean that you can’t help, you can definitely help.  Here’s how.

  1. If we live in the same city, get me out of my house.  Let’s go for a hike, or a movie, or lunch.  Get me out of the house and don’t take no for an answer.  I will have a billion reasons why I can’t; I have to clean the kitchen first, I have no money, I have a bunch of emails I’m behind on, I have to blah, blah, blah, etc.  Come over and keep me company while I clean the kitchen, then suggest we go for a walk because that’s free! Get me out of the house; even if it’s only for 30 minutes.
  2. If we don’t live in the same city, call to say hi, to check in, but don’t make it all about me.  If the entire conversation is fixated on how I’m doing, how I’m feeling, what I’m doing to feel better, I’m going to start to feel like a monkey in a cage.  Ask how I’m doing and if I want to talk about it I will, if I don’t let’s move on with the conversation as normal.  Please don’t tip toe around like you’re walking on egg shells, because then I feel the need to put on an act that all is well and good to make you feel better and to put you at ease.  That is EXHAUSTING, and depression is exhausting enough all by itself.
  3. This one’s counterintuitive, I know, but tell me about an issue you’re having and ask for my advice. It reminds me that there are issues in the world other than my own. The German’s call it schadenfruede, it works. But a word of warning, make it a lighter issue that you don’t need critical advice on, because depending on the level of funk you might get some really crappy advice!
  4. If you do come across an article or study that is interesting and that you think would be of benefit to me, email me the link. That way I can read it when I am in a head space to receive the information and benefit from it. Telling me about it will more than likely feel like you’re forcing the information down my throat.
  5. Understand that sometimes I have to embrace the funk, the silence, wrap myself in the dark clouds and get drenched by the rain before the sun can shine through again. So if I don’t answer your call, please don’t take it personally. I still love and care for you, the clouds have just filled my head so thoroughly that there isn’t room for anything else. Try again tomorrow.  Send me a picture of a monkey hugging a puppy or a sarcastic meme.  All good things that show you care, but give me some space.
  6. Accept, like I have, that this is a part of my reality and I’m going to have down days and down weeks. Don’t be alarmed. However, if I’ve ignored 4+ calls in a row or spent 4+ calls in a row crying and I am cancelling all of my plans except the bare minimum to survive, then some alarm is warranted. I have crossed the threshold into the benefits of the meds now outweigh the side-effects.  Feel free to remind me of this. But if not, if I’m functioning and working through it, let me function.  Support me at my current best so that I can get back to my normal best.

The Wrong Question

Characters, Happiness, Live and LearnLeave a comment

I have been struggling lately, and have struggled before, with why I write.  Who wants to read it? Why does what I have to say matter?  This is probably why the majority of what I have written has never been read, and I’m not fishing for compliments or validation here.  Anybody that has “gone fishing” before knows that all of the praise in the world doesn’t make a bit of difference if you don’t already believe what they’re saying yourself.  That’s the funny thing about praise.  Those who need it can’t hear it, and those who don’t need it, can.  I’ve always pondered this but never shared the question with others, until today.  Today I posited this question to my friend Stacey, who hands down has read more of my writing than any other person.  She’s my sounding board for my novel, she’s my confidant, she is brilliant and beautiful and talented and one of my best friends.  Her response to me, was to share an epiphany that she had recently had herself – maybe you can’t find the answer, because you’re asking the wrong question.  What does your writing mean to you?  How does writing make you feel?  When all is said and done, isn’t that what really matters?

Cue my brain exploding.

But in a good way.  What does writing mean to me? I write because I always have, it’s always been the best way to express myself.  I write because it is a part of me, the best part of me.  I write because if I didn’t the thoughts and stories and imagery would get so backed up and piled up in my head that I wouldn’t be able to see straight for the commotion.  I write because sitting in a dimly lit corner with a notebook and pen, or a blinking cursor, makes me happier and gives me more fulfillment than anything else.  Yes, a blank page terrifies me, but it is also my best friend because there is always more blankness to be filled.  There is always more room for another story, another character, another thought.  There is no feeling in the world like putting pen to paper and letting a world unfold before you.  Like letting a character loose in that world to live their life.  I don’t care how much thinking I do before hand, how much outlining I do, I never know where a character is going to go or what they’re going to say until the pen hits the page.  Sometimes they’re predictable, but sometimes they surprise me.  Captain Henry breaks my heart.  I want to like him, I want him to be a good man so badly it hurts, but he does bad, bad things.  And every time he does my heart breaks all over again.  He does good things too, but the lady of justice stands sentinel in my heart weighing his deeds, and I have no idea which way the scales will tip when the story is finished.  I hope they tip to the good, but I don’t know.  I don’t know that he does either, we’ll have to wait and see.  Maybe I just have to like him despite the bad things that he does, accept him with all of his faults.  I talk about Henry like he’s a real person, because to me he is real.

This is why I write. Good, bad or indifferent, I write because it makes me happy.  Writing completes me.  That’s the answer.

Better Alone

Dating, Happiness, Live and Learn, LoveLeave a comment

I’ve spent quite a bit of time lately talking with a friend who is in a bad relationship – and we’re talking bad with a capital B – and it’s really got me to thinking that maybe it’s better to be alone than with the wrong person.  It seems like a lot of people stay in bad situations largely because they fear being on their own.  As someone that has been a single more than I have been a couple I really don’t understand that.  True, I’ve never been in a long-term relationship, or a marriage so I can’t fully relate, but I can’t help but think that alone has got to be better than bad.

Now that’s not to say that I want to stay single for the rest of my life.  I would love to find someone that I can spend the rest of my life with.  That’s something that I want very much, and there are times that it weighs very heavily on me that I haven’t come anywhere near that.  But I have also learned that I can be very happy on my own, which, I think, is why I don’t put up with guys treating me like crap.  I walk away.  Yes it sucks to watch something crumble.  It sucks to go from “+1” to “1”, but I’ve never regretted the decision to walk.

I’m single now, and I’m in one of those “it sucks to be single” moods.  Which is ridiculous because I have so much going on right now that my brain would probably implode if I tried to throw a relationship in on top of everything else, but hey the heart wants what the heart wants.  I think that’s the saying anyway.  But I know one thing about my heart, it knows exactly what it wants and exactly how it should be treated and listening to my friend’s tribulations has firmly cemented that conviction.  So for now I can leave all the “Mr. Wrongs” at the bar and walk away knowing I made the right choice.  Sometimes being alone is better, because with the right friends even though you’re alone, you’re not lonely.

Love is Not a Cookie Jar

Happiness, Live and Learn, Love, MothersLeave a comment

My nephew was born this weekend.  Okay, disclaimer, he’s not really my nephew.  Not by blood anyway.  His mother and I have been best friends since we were two.  I have no memories pre-Jolene.  We grew up together and went to college together.  I have a standing invitation at her parent’s house and her Aunts’ house whether she’s there or not.  She is my sister from another mother and therefore, I reserve the right to claim this new little bundle of amazing-ness as my nephew.  I am Crazy Aunt Kat and I come armed with pirate onesies!

Despite the fact that I have not yet gotten to meet him in person and hold him, I am so in love with this little boy.  My heart melts every time I get a new picture, and I am not one of those people that generally gets all mushy over babies – puppies yes, babies no.  So for me this is a very new thing and got me thinking about the very nature of love.  How something so small, whose only accomplishment/contribution to date is being born, can elicit such fierce emotions so quickly.  In fact thinking about him makes me feel so good, it bubbles over into the rest of my life.

Then in contrast I saw this extreme jealousy today, because someone paid attention to one person instead of the other.  It was almost as if by paying attention to Person A, it meant that Person B wasn’t loved.  I seriously think that there are people out there who believe that love is a finite thing.  There is only so much to go around, so you better Bogart all you can when you have the chance.  I know people like this, I’m sure you do too, and I just want to grab them by the lapels and shake them into better senses.  But that’s not really an accepted form of dealing with other people so I restrain myself, and instead would like to say to them:

Love is not a cookie jar!

Let me explain.  I think that there are people out there who believe that love is like a cookie jar; I will use a completely fictional person named Jill as an example.  Jill started out life with a cookie jar, chock full of cookies, and every time she showed someone love she had to give them a cookie.  As a child she gave love freely, her jar was full, there was no conceivable end in sight.  But as she grew older, and discovered that she had maybe given out some of those cookies to people who didn’t deserve them, she became more covetous of her cookies.  She realized that she would eventually hand out her last cookie and then what would she do?  So people had to earn her love, they had to work for their cookies.  Worse yet, she became jealous when someone that she loved gave a cookie to someone else because that was one less cookie that they could then give to her.  So Jill sabotaged those relationships until the only person left for her significant other to give cookies to was her.  She hoarded her cookies and congratulated herself on the fact that her partner only gave cookies to her.  Life was good . . . except that it wasn’t.  Life was actually very lonely because she had driven most everyone away, despite the fact that she still had plenty of cookies in her jar.  The sad thing is that if Jill had simply taken the time to look inside of that jar when she pulled out a cookie for someone, she would have seen that no matter how many cookies she took out there were always some left.

I truly believe that love is not a finite thing.  It is not something that can run out.  For every person that I love, for every person that I show compassion towards, I get some of that back.  Sometimes I might not get back the same amount that I gave and sometimes I might get back far more than I gave.  You never know, but the point is that you always get something back.  Love is infinite and no matter how many times you dip your hand into that cookie jar you will always come out with a cookie.  The more that you can give truly and freely, the more you will get back, until that jar is overflowing.  In my mind, that is how love works.

So I guess that love is a cookie jar.  It’s just happens to be the best damn cookie jar that ever existed, because there will always be more.

Cookie Monster

Who wants a cookie?

Why do you always have to be so funny?

Change, Happiness, Live and LearnLeave a comment

I studied theatre in college – and no I don’t want to hear your stories about how you did theatre in high school.  Why do people always do that with the arts?  You tell anybody that your career aspirations are in an artistic field and they HAVE to tell you about how they once, or sometimes still, dabble in that too.  I swear I’m gonna start telling engineers about when I used to play with Lego’s and business men about my lemonade stand and how those experiences make me a kindred spirit in their chosen career path!

 

Any who . . . not the point I’m driving towards, so I’ll step down off of THAT soapbox.

 

I studied theatre; namely acting and directing.  In my first BFA acting studio we did a Sanford Meisner exercise where you stand about two feet apart from your acting partner, face to face.  Then you both repeat the same thing back and forth to each other until organically the words change into new words.  The idea is to let your brain disengage so that you can truly feel and communicate honestly with your partner.  Well after repeating back and forth absolute nonsense for lord knows how long, my conscious brain disengaged and before I knew it out popped, “Why do you always have to be so funny?”

Now mind you, this was a classmate that I had known for a couple of months at best.  This is not something that you say to someone that you hardly know, especially in front of a group of people!  Naturally, she was offended by my question, but following the rules of the game she had to repeat the same thing back.  She had to use the words that I had thrown at her to convey her emotions back to me.  So she was offended, which made me victorious because clearly I was succeeding in the game (and I do have a bit of a competitive streak, not gonna lie), which made her even more offended (rightfully so!), which made me realize that I was being an ass and so on and so forth.  We worked our way through an entire argument using words that had quickly become nonsensical, until finally all we could do was stand staring at each other and break out in giggles.

It was one of the most surreal, honest, genuine moments I have ever had in my life and definitely as an actress.  I am no longer an actress.  It is a skill that I possess, but not a career that I want.  I learned very quickly that I am not brave enough to be an actress.  I am not brave enough to stand face to face, every night, with a character and do them the honor and justice that they deserve by opening myself up and allowing them to answer through me why they’re so funny, or sad, or strong, or whatever.  I prefer to spill my soul on paper in the privacy of my own head.  I tend to be fairly introspective that way.

But, if I were able to go back in time, to when I was in college in that BFA studio, I wish that I could have stood in front of a mirror and turned that question in on myself.  Only slightly different, “Why do you always have to be so strong?”  That was my thing, my mantra.  I didn’t ask for help, I did everything by myself.  Because to need help was weakness and I was “too strong” for that!  Which I now see to be total and complete nonsense, and really wish that I could have figured that out much earlier in life!

I think it’s absolutely healthy to realize that you don’t have to be strong and put together and “perfect” every day.  Because putting that kind of pressure on your self is exhausting, and life is hard enough without adding all of that on top.  Some days are “eat the Nutella straight out of the jar” kind of days, and there is nothing wrong with that!  I think I could have been a lot happier if I had figured that out all those years before.  After all, truth be told, it takes a hell of a lot more strength to ask for help, than to suffer in silence.

Today was not an “eat the Nutella straight out of the jar” kind of day, just an introspective kind of day.  Although some Nutella does sound pretty good . . .

The Camel’s Back

Change, HappinessLeave a comment

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the things that we put up with because we know the result at the end of the day makes it worth it.  Every single one of us does things, sometimes on a daily basis, that we don’t necessarily want to do, but we know it’s worth it.  I mean seriously, who genuinely likes using a stair stepper?  I can think of a hundred other things that are a lot more fun and a lot more fulfilling than that.  However, I like the way that my legs look when they’re toned and I know that cardio is good for my health.  So despite the fact that I basically hate, loath and despise my stupid little stair stepper, I still use it . . . occasionally . . . when I have new Netflix that I can watch while stepping.  But what happens when the end no longer justifies the means?

Maybe your priorities or goals change, or maybe, like in my instance, you decide that the crap just isn’t worth it, regardless of what the payoff might be.  It seems obvious to me, that at that point it is time for a change.  It is time to make changes and probably drastic ones.  But there is something so alluring and safe to the familiar.  Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.  After all, your new destination might be worse than where you are now.  So you put up with more crap.  You say that you’ll fix it tomorrow, you’ll make changes later, you’ll look for a new job next week.  In the mean time you carry on, business as usual, putting up with more and more crap until finally that proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back falls.

Have you ever noticed that there is always a straw, always a breaking point?  And it is rarely something big or noteworthy, it is generally something small.  I can’t think of a single time in my life when a feeling of disquiet, of discontentment, didn’t finally end in some straw falling that finally propelled me to action.  I’ve never sat back and said, “You know what, I don’t absolutely love my job, I’m going to actively fix that.”  I’ve always allowed myself to be just shy of content, just shy of happy because it could always be worse.  Or I think that I should be grateful for everything that I do have.  Trust me, I remember when I didn’t have a job at all!  So I stay where I am until that proverbial straw falls, pushing true happiness aside.  Which really leads me to question why happiness isn’t at the top of my priority list.  It should be.  It should be above everything else!

I would like to say that I didn’t have to wait for a straw to fall.  I would like to say that happiness is #1 on my list.  But this morning there was definitely a straw and I honestly question whether happiness even makes the top ten of my list right now.  So I’m going to make changes, the first of which is rearranging my priority
list.  I don’t know that happiness will be #1 – I’m going for realistic goals here – but this time around, it is going to at least make the top ten.  Along with using that stupid stair stepper more often . . .