I would normally agree about the cats being a good antidote for despair, but one of mine just farted on me and that caused despair.
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As someone crippled for my entire life by depression and anxiety, I have to say I’m sick of this bullshit. Weaton’s career and success is proof that that he full of shit on this, ditto anyone who thinks getting sad, getting a little anxious before doing something is depression, is anxiety.
When Weaton and the others self-outing as people suffering from depression or anxiety describe how depleting and pervasively and consistently they’ve fucked their lives I’ll be willing to listen. Right now, it’s little more than exercises in narcissism.
Maybe, just maybe, if Robin Williams had been a bit more narcissistic he would still be alive. Many other celebrities with seemingly great lives have felt that suicide was the only way out because they were unable to go public.
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Hehe I’m crawling through the fog of a long depressive episode hoping this medication is doing some good because it’s goddamned expensive and if I could get my sorry ass to jump up and regulate my diet, take a jog, and get some sound sleep… I would indeed be cured. Too bad the depression fucks with that part of my brain so deeply I worry I’ll lose my job because I can’t think clearly, took a critical hit to any executive function I had, and break into tears when I have to leave my house because I have this deep seated pain that falls through my body like raining spears of fire at the thought of being seen by other humans who aren’t “safe.” Yes I’m aware that’s more than just depression going on in my head but damn please have some compassion man. I’ve been failed by medicine too, mostly failed, occasionally helped. But if there were more I could do alone I’d literally cut off a leg or an arm to avoid dealing with others… but here I am depending on others of the most knowingly and intentionally cruel species on Earth for survival and hoping when I don’t believe in hope. Perhaps it’s easier for me not to worry about drug dependence because my body is technically already dead in places, and now that a couple of the truly cancer corroded parts are zapped out of existence I’m permanently reliant on medication to stay alive anyway. So what’s the difference to me, who I’d be without medicine is a corpse and who I’ll become will have to incorporate these aspects. If medicine fails me and I die young, well may my statistic serve some future researcher well. I do hope your mom is able to find a med that helps with fewer side effects because damn do I know how awful the side effects can be. The truth is none of us may live to see that drug developed. My self-care mantra would be this: Do what you can. Today that may be picking up a sock and putting it in the laundry. Try to take pride in that tiny act of intention because hey… you lived another day. That’s biological success in action.
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Because other people have it worse than you, doesn’t make your situation invalid or fake or pointless.
Similarly, just because you have it worse than other people, doesn’t make their situation invalid or fake or pointless.
Do not play misery poker: the only thing you can win is being miserable.
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Meh but for some one like him even relatively mild depression is a career ender and for some people the thought of life without their calling is a life ender. Sure it can seem like you’ve been carrying a boulder for thirty years and some skipping child stubbed their toe and is wailing about it… but remember the end game isn’t to throw rocks at the child, the goal is to chisel away at the boulder so that you can perhaps even glance at the life you’d have if you weren’t burdened with it. That’s my take on the whole bitterness of neglect angle at least.
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A year or so ago I went to see a performance of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2. (my favorite Romantic composition, one I’ve loved since I first heard it at age sixteen, and the only one I can still hum from beginning to end.)
The pianist, however, had an unusual background: he was a psychiatrist. So before the performance, rather than focus on the musical history of this piece and its significance in the context of contemporary music, he discussed Rachmaninoff’s lifelong struggles with depression, how his second piano concerto was an intrapersonal struggle that eventually became his comeback, and—most relevant to this discussion—how to reconcile the grinding atrophy of something like depression with a demonstrably generative mind like Rachmaninoff’s.
More than once, this psychiatrist made an effort to refute the popular notion that artists suffering mental illness are generative thanks in part to the enlightenment of suffering imbued by their particular illness.
This, as you might already suspect, is about 99% bullshit. Like many such burdened artists, Rachmaninoff created despite his mental illness, not because of it.
Rachmaninoff, he explained, was often mentally exhausted with creeping self-doubt. Composing music was not an escape for him; on the contrary, it only rekindled those doubts. He persisted because he knew it was the only way through for him.
The only way out is through.
Like most truths, however, this one has a particularly dark umbra: not every artist, despite their best efforts, makes it through. I mean this creatively, mentally, and physically. And this was the psychiatrist’s final point: this concerto you’re about to hear is the sound of someone making it through, yes, but on another level it can also be heard as a threnody for all the countless artists who didn’t.
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Williams spent his whole life fighting himself, or at least trying to control destructive aspects of his personality. His health issues towards of the end of his life made that fight nigh impossible. IMO, of course.
David Foster Wallace, based on what I’ve read by him and of him, seemed to have mastered the art of using his neuroses and ruminative tendencies as the very gears for his writing. And it all seemed to come falling apart when (1) he tried to switch from his long-time (and very old-school) med phenelzine to something more recently developed, and (2) began to doubt the very worth of much of what he’d written and also was writing at the time (his unfinished novel The Pale King).
Like Williams, it was as if he’d found a way to make those proverbial demons work for him—until one day when they no longer did. (Though, as you point out, Williams’ case was further complicated by his knowledge of impending Lewy body dementia.)
I suppose my point is this: although these are individuals who were brilliantly prolific, that generativity did not deliver them from their depression and self-doubt. For those of us who only experience the fruits of their creative labor, who only see their names in headlines, on glowing marquees, and through the glass of storefronts, it can be hard to detect let alone understand that.
What you wrote was honest and candid. In sharing those thoughts, you made others aware of a common but much more soft-spoken pain of depression. You’ve started a worthwhile conversation.
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Wow, thanks, I’m cured.
Thank you for expressing what I’m too tired to express right now.
It’s totally conceivable, just as it’s conceivable that a type I diabetic will be on insulin for their entire life.
Clinical depression like what Wheaton has isn’t something that just goes away. It’s a chronic condition. Also, it’s worth noting that he never suggests that everybody be medicated. He suggests that nobody should feel ashamed to get help.
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So much this.
Also, the solutions/coping mechanisms are going to be different. Just because I walk with a cane does not mean that Frank doesn’t need a wheelchair to get around. But it may be worth TRYING a cane before settling on a wheelchair.
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Holy crap, I didn’t even recognize him.
I think you missed the word only? I was replying to another poster, not to Wil. Yes I agree, totally conceivable and possibly quite necessary; just not the only conceivable solution. Each person deserves to be treated as though they are unique - even if they are not.
GO DOGGO! For the WIN!
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It’s too late for me. (house has a total of six cats, and a handful of ‘regular’ ferals looking for handouts outside.)
The ferals are mostly my fault- an ex-roommate started feeding them, and I went and got a good quantity of them trapped, neutered, and released back into the area, mostly because I was tired of loud feline sex outside my bedroom at 3 am and kitten explosions twice yearly.
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One of mine did that to me at 2 am. I bolted awake going “WHO POO’D!!!”, and opened my eyes to see his brown eye staring back at me.
He got kicked out of the room for a week for that.
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I take it you have a heavy duty vacuum cleaner!
I have two and I am constantly walking on dander
It’s a ‘pet’ model, and it’s been abused; When it dies (and it will!) I’m going with a straight up bagged version of the Sanitaire, because I no longer desire to be covered with dust every time I empty out the dust container. 
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