What anxiety and depression in a pandemic is like

 I wrote this to show a different side of mental health struggles. This is not a cry for help. It is a plea for solidarity with those of us who struggle even if you can't understand at that exact moment. And maybe ask us if you can help us check anything off our to-do list that day.

Just think happy thoughts. You’ll believe them eventually. That’s what we’re told. That the key to anxiety and depression is just a matter of finding the right combo of positive thinking and medicine to find your way to the other side. While it’s true both of those can help, no one talks about the harder issue. The constant fight.

I wake up every morning and have to remind myself 100 times that my life is worth living, that my friends are sincere when they say nice things about me, that hope still exists. Two hours into a given day and I’m already exhausted. So I take a nap, which makes me feel lazy since naps are looked down upon. I wake up and work on my homework in between zoning out on the internet, hoping the next video will tamp down my anxiety enough to make real progress.

On a good day, I go to a therapy appointment and tell my long suffering psychiatrist all this. She looks on kindly, reminds me to practice self-compassion, and adjusts my meds for the 3^rd time this month in hopes of moving the needle a little farther to the positive side. I log off the appointment, put the remainder of my homework off til the morning, and play some video games in hopes of calming my mind enough to sleep.

It doesn’t often work. I spend the night worried about every possible misstep, sure that every bad thing that ever happened to me is sure to happen again while every good thing was just a fluke. It is morning again. The cycle continues. That is my daily reality.

I say all this not for pity, but to say that depression and anxiety aren’t always about mental breakdowns and staring off dramatically into the middle distance. Most days they’re about fighting your own instincts long enough for better ones to take over. For, one hopes, lack of trust to be replaced by cautious optimism. But I’ve gotta be honest. Most days, I’m too tired. I ran out of steam months ago. Now I’m just here. But I’m still here at least.

The Wolf

 I wrote this for myself as a short prelude to a larger story I'm working on. Maybe some of you will like it?

The wolf saved her

She walked into her grandmother’s house to see the hunter, with his greedy eyes, ransacking the place

Of course, he’ll never be accused of anything

He’s handsome and strong and looks like everyone else

Much simpler to blame the wolf than to suspect one’s own

She knows the truth

She remembers the wolf rushing in and knocking the axe out of the hunter’s hands, telling her to run

She remembers how her parents lapped up the hunter’s story about what happened

That’s why she decided

She decided to run away some day

Let the village keep its stories and its villains

She’s off to the forest

To find a certain wolf with an axe wound

Marvel at the great Achilles

 I wrote a short poem summarizing the story of Achilles. His story is one of my favorites, because as much as it is about him, it is also about the people around him and his effect on them. In a time of isolation when it is sometimes difficult to tell if we're having an effect on anyone, his story reminds us of the influence each of us has on those closest to us, and how easy it is to forget that until it's too late. I invite you to ponder that as you read.

Marvel at the great Achilles.

Glory brought him to war even at the cost of his life.

When that glory was taken from him in front of all, he chose to suspend living and call down curses on his brethren until it was returned to him.

His pride and rage grew in equal measure to the casualties of the Greek army.

When his lover Patroclus begged him to come and fight, to win the glory he so deserved,

Achilles, full of pride asked his lover to go instead, sealing both their fates.

Patroclus fell to Hector’s spear, and Achilles’ hope fell with him.

Achilles’ grief could not be contained, and no amount of Trojan corpses eased it.

When a river refused to contain any more of his carnage, he fought the river’s god himself. Nature was no match for the storm of love and despair that raged inside him.

When revenge did not sate him, he dragged Hector’s corpse behind his chariot for days.

Patroclus could take no more and begged his soulmate to grieve him properly with a funeral.

Achilles relented and admitted the truth. The morning star of Achilles had lost his evening star in Patroclus. His pride cost him everything he held dear. He realized what he lost too late. The wailing of pride deafened him to the whispers of life.

Achilles’ story begs the question. Will we gain the whole world only to lose our soul? One cannot serve the two masters of pride and love. Achilles is all of us. Capable of great love and great hate. What kind of hero will you be?

The Comfort Of Crying

I’ve never been good at crying. I try to shut it off as soon as possible. I come up with every reason why I’m not allowed to. I always hide from my feelings in one way or another. As a result, I cry maybe once or twice a year. Now? I’ve cried three times in as many days. I’m not talking about dignified crying with a modicum of sniffling and occasional dabbing of the eyes. I’m talking uncontrollable sobbing that leaves me with a headache and maybe some dehydration. I cry for reasons so large I can’t ignore them. I’m mourning people I’ve never met and now never will. I’m angry at our leaders for causing so many preventable deaths by choosing profit and comfort over protection and safety. I’m upset with myself for wanting to say something, anything, to comfort others and coming up with nothing. But I can be honest with you about where I am.

I should acknowledge that I’m more privileged than most right now. I still have a roof over my head. I have my basic needs met. Many of my friendships were already long distance so I’m used to using the internet to keep in touch. Online classes have been fine overall and are actually better for me since I don’t spend four hours a day commuting. The friends I usually see regularly have been great about keeping in touch too. But the anxiety I feel any time I have to leave my apartment dwarfs everything. I’m constantly worried that I didn’t wash my hands thoroughly enough or that I touched something contaminated while trying to get back in. Taking the dog out feels more like a potentially life-threatening burden than a pleasant excuse to go outside. I often come back to sad news about more deaths or another government dysfunction making things worse. If someone were to ask me how I’m  feeling on any given day now I’d respond with one word: Heavy.

Typically when I feel this way, I either get caught in the past regretting mistakes that led to this feeling or get stuck in the future berating myself for all the things I’m not doing in the present to make said future happen. I can’t do that this time. No one could have predicted this. Last month might as well be last year. No one knows when this will end. All we know is, this is our life now. So I’m stuck looking straight ahead at the giant scary shadow monster that is all the feelings I usually push away. Nowhere in my head to run anymore. In the moments when this monster wraps itself around me and I feel the full weight of everything hit me, I do the only thing I can: Cry.

But that’s not what I’m supposed to do. I was told by society, as many of us were, that men don’t cry in anything but the most extreme circumstances. When I would cry as a child, adults rushed to stop me as soon as possible. Their first response more often than not was “calm down” or “don’t cry, focus on this” or in the case of one person, “ I’ll give you something to cry about.” So I eventually saw crying as some sort of failure. I saw it as the moment when I lost control of myself despite my best effort, and I needed to get myself under control as soon as possible. That’s what everyone around me taught me, in different ways. I don’t blame them. They were trying to spare me unpleasant feelings as best they could. At the end of the day though, I never learned how to cry. I never learned how to let myself be in that moment without rushing to fix it. I never learned how to go through my sadness instead of around it.

But now that our new normal is here, I’m finally learning. I’m learning that I can stop running away and let my feelings tear through me sometimes and still be ok. I used to think I’d never stop crying if I started. Now I cry until I’m ready to stop, and I’m always better for it. Crying is comforting in its own way now. I’ve accepted that the person coming out of all this grief won’t be the same person who went in, and that’s okay. I’ve realized that my negative feelings aren’t a big scary monster, just a side of myself I’m still getting used to accepting. Crying isn’t failing. It’s just kneeling before we stand up again.

The joy of reading

My love of reading began with a video game. In 1998, I was laying on my floor playing Final Fantasy 6, having just entered a town, and I was hungry for the next story beat. I couldn’t wait to find out what happened to a character who flew off unexpectedly and ended up half the world away. Instead, I was immediately greeted with fights. I actually found myself frustrated that the game was asking me to play it instead of just read. After an hour or so, I got what I wanted. I got to lay in front of my TV and read through text box after text box explaining what was happening to these silent, almost completely still, pixelated characters I had grown attached to. I didn’t need flashy graphics or beautiful music to get me invested. The words alone were enough.

As I left the town, now knowing exactly what happened and why, it hit me. This was my experience now. No one read this to me. No one forced me to read it or be invested. No one else was even in the room. The words I read were mine now. The feelings I felt after reading them were mine too. No one could take that from me. No one would have the exact same experience I did, even if they read those same words. That was the first time something ever felt completely mine. Let me tell you why.

Growing up, my family did their best to involve me in everything they were doing as much as they could. If we were having a water balloon fight, I got a hose. If I wanted to play baseball with my friends, they helped me become the manager of the team.  They always made space for me in whatever they did however they could. But I could never escape the feeling that my experience was usually a lesser version of what I wanted.

I was calling out teammates’ names in the dugout when I really wanted to be running around the field and swinging bats with them. I was spraying my family with a hose because I couldn’t chase them around and throw balloons myself. My mom would pick me up and dance with me to whatever song happened to be playing, and I loved it, but I often wondered what it would feel like to be dancing with my own feet. I don’t mention any of this out of a need for sympathy. My family was and is wonderful and those things are simply the nature of the beast, but the one common thread in all of these things is that my experiences of the physical world were mediated. It was like eating butter flavored things but never being allowed to eat butter.

Reading was different. I was good at reading. I taught myself to read at 5 and was reading far above my grade level all throughout elementary and middle school. I wasn’t just good at it for someone in a wheelchair or someone with cerebral palsy. I was genuinely good at something. So when I had that moment alone in my room, it was like a thousand lights came on. I wasn’t experiencing a watered-down version of what was intended. I was getting exactly what the writers hoped I would. More than that, I made something. The thoughts and feelings I had about it were my creation, that I made, just for me. Nothing was the same after that. I found a part of myself and I never let go.

But maybe your thing isn’t reading. Maybe your thing is art or music. Maybe your thing is gardening or exercise or dancing. Maybe your thing is helping other people find theirs. Find whatever makes you feel alive. Find whatever gives you something that’s just for you. Find whatever makes you love yourself just a little bit more, and hold onto it. Just don’t forget to share.

The Joy of Accepting Myself

The beginning of the year is a strange contradiction. It’s a time we tell ourselves is different even as it feels exactly the same as days before. It’s a time where we look back on our accomplishments and resolutions, often finding that we accomplished little of what we resolved to and much of what we didn’t. For many of us, it’s a time when our own journey always seems to pale in comparison to everyone else’s. You may say that all depends on how one defines success. I’ve found that many people, myself included, define success in terms of happiness. I don’t mean immediate happiness. Most adults have made peace with the fact that one must sacrifice the immediate happiness of doing whatever you’d like for the sake of securing long term contentment somewhere down the line. The obvious question that follows is: does that contentment ever come?

I think this is the wrong question to ask. The real question is: Do we let ourselves see it and feel it when it shows up? Let me explain. I realized recently that I used to imagine happiness and sadness as meteors that crashed into the ocean, leaving giant craters and overwhelming me with tidal waves of one emotion or another. I always hoped that I’d be able to predict the next one, that I’d build stronger walls and be more observant and avoid getting swept up next time. If I’m particularly happy, I never let myself fully enjoy it because I know the wave will pass eventually. When I’m sad, I often ridicule myself for not building stronger walls, for not moving out of the way in time since I should have seen it coming. What I’ve begun to realize though, is that my emotions are tides rather than meteors. The high tide of happiness was never going to drown me, and no sandcastle wall could stand against the tide of sadness forever.

This isn’t what American culture tells us. The pursuit of happiness is engraved in our minds seemingly from birth. Never mind that we often sacrifice life and liberty for it. If we just keep running toward the horizon, we’ll catch up to our happier self in the distance. If we just keep running fast enough, our sadness can’t keep up. It’ll get tired and collapse even though that’s often exactly what’s waiting for us when we end up collapsing ourselves. We put our emotions in boxes to do our jobs, to be the people others need us to be, all to avoid letting our humanity catch up with us.

For most of my life, I thought of my low emotional moments, my low tides, as a crisis. American Christianity reinforced this idea by telling me over and over again that people are responsible for their emotions. If they’re happy, it’s because they chose to focus on the right things and have a positive attitude. If they’re unhappy, it’s because they deliberately choose to ignore positive things and focus on the negative. This is what I was explicitly told by countless adults growing up.

What this led to during my low tide moments was a scramble to find anything that usually made me happy in an effort to pretend everything was normal until happiness showed up again. I was a kid on the beach carrying water from kiddie pools and dumping it on my feet while telling myself and anyone around me that I loved swimming in the ocean even as the water disappeared underneath my feet. Fake it til you make it was the my creed and anything else was giving up. I was so busy making sure no one was uncomfortable around me that I never gave myself permission to be uncomfortable. Discomfort was a defect that needed to be changed rather than listened to.

My high moments were never any better. I was afraid to fully enjoy any positive moments for two reasons. One, I was constantly aware of the fact that whatever happiness I experienced was temporary, and I was afraid that the more I enjoyed it, the more I’d feel its absence when it inevitably left. Two, I was raised in a tradition that attributed everything positive to God and everything negative to humanity. Enjoying something too much ran the risk of either arrogance or a lack of gratitude, and both were seen as deadly in the long run. This is the kind of mindset I grew up with, subtly reinforced by well-meaning people who were just doing the best they could to make sense of themselves and the world around them.

I grew into adulthood, and in my 20s I finally hit rock bottom. I finally decided to try getting counseling at my school as a last resort before I did something drastic. Coming in and admitting that I needed help, admitting that I couldn’t hold my emotions alone anymore, was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. The process of untangling my feelings and making space for them instead of shutting them out never stopped being uncomfortable. But slowly and surely, through a combination of medicine and therapy, I started to recognize myself again.

I started to sit with that version of myself on that beach. I didn’t try to fix myself. I didn’t go scrambling for water anymore. I sat with my fear and loneliness, the bruised and battered parts of me that I always ignored in favor of focusing on other people, and I let myself feel. I let myself feel anger over things that happened to me instead of constantly telling everyone I was fine. I let myself feel the grief of losing so much of myself in favor of being who others wanted me to be. I let myself mourn the relationships that would inevitably fall apart when I finally showed others that I was not the straight, happy, pleasant Christian they expected me to be. I was, and continue to be, a queer disabled man frustrated by and dissatisfied with a form of Christianity and a society that seek to minimize and contain emotion and hardship rather than confront it head on and be forced to change as a result.

That too, was an incredibly painful realization. A lot of my friendships and important relationships didn’t survive. The ones that did though, were changed radically. They were no longer flimsy things dependent upon our adherence to the status quo. They were two way lifelines, and we laid everything out for each other. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t afraid of my fire and intensity burning up everyone around me anymore. I had always done my best to encourage others’ passions and ideas, but now I was beginning to see my own ideas and voice as valuable too.

 Things are still far from perfect. There are still occasional meteors, and I find myself dazed and confused more often than I ever expected. The world is scary and it’s impossible to not be overwhelmed by that sometimes. Now though, even on the bad days, I can sit with myself, knowing that the tide will come back. It always does. I know now that my low points do not make me less valuable than my high points. Both make me who I am, and I wouldn’t trade who I am for anything, and neither should you.

The joy of stating the obvious

I can’t stop thinking about one particular song lately. The song is called “Obvious” and it’s a cut song from the musical Dear Evan Hansen. The song starts with a simple statement from the main character: “When we know something is true beyond question or doubt/ there’s no particular point in pointing it out…it’s something you don’t need to hear. It’s just clear.” This is a trap that I fall into all the time. Someone’s good qualities seem so obvious to me that I don’t say anything to the person because I don’t want to embarrass them or waste their time.

And so, I never tell them my friend how I love watching their eyes light up when they tell me about what they’re interested in. I never tell my professor that the way he cracks up at his own jokes makes my day. I never tell my other professor that the way he winks at me after saying something clever reminds me of my late Grandpa, that it feels like he’s right beside me again, if only for that moment. I never tell my friend that the few extra seconds she puts into a hug make all the difference. 

I neglect to tell the people in my life how much I cherish all the little things we do for each other, every day, sometimes without even realizing we’re doing it. The song echoes this when, after listing his crush’s endearing habits, Evan says: “sometimes the words we tend to withhold, well, they’re exactly the words someone needs to be told/ but oh, thinking they know, we never say I love you.”

Our culture tells us to reserve this kind of thing for romantic partners, but we miss out on so much if we limit ourselves like that. We miss out on the chance to tell people about what makes them who they are. The half smiles, the small eyebrow raises, the silly walks, all these small things that as much a part of them as their face or voice. These are the small things that remind us why we love them.

So today, I’m going to be a little more brave. I’m going to say the obvious thing because that might just be what someone needs to hear today. It might not be much, but that’s okay. Moments like that are tiny lanterns, not noticeable most of the time, but just bright enough when the lights go out. Maybe, just maybe, the light will be enough to help them see themselves when they need it most.

P.S. Here's a link to the song in case anyone is curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01--GmFBnls