Tag Archives: Depression

Personal

Confidence (Or the lack thereof) and Writing

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So while I was struggling with my latest article on The Witcher 3, I got a helpful tip from a roaming robot about my blog.

Robot Taunt

First of all, it’s “too” lazy you god damn machine, if you’re going to insult me at least be grammatically correct. Second of all, how dare you impugn my honor!? Being lazy is only like 5% to %10 of my problem.

Okay, 50% at the most...
50% at the most…

To this spam bot’s favor, its comment did get me wondering… why don’t I update more? What the hell is wrong with me? That’s an excellent question. The answer is, as usual, I’m a terrible human being. 

No, not really. But that’s what my mind is always telling me, and that’s the problem.  I have no sense of self-worth I guess, all of my self-esteem is tied up in the opinions of everyone else. Last year I was staying with some friends in Portland when I got to interview for a job with Microsoft to do writing for the Halo series. When I got the initial call from the recruiter, my friend Emma described me as “glowing,” which I’m pretty sure is the only time I’ve ever been described as that. Then I didn’t get it, and I fell into a pretty black depression and didn’t write another blog post for three months.

That post about Microsoft was mostly trying to bluff myself out of falling into a depression, but obviously that didn’t work.

This is Pixar, they're better than you're annoying facebook friends.
I don’t need to say hello, we’re on a first-name basis.

So I lost a similar job opportunity with AT&T a few weeks ago. Of course my brain doesn’t focus on:

The fact that my resume managed to impress a recruiter enough to contact me.

That I got through four rounds of phone interviews with first the recruiter and then various members of AT&T team.

And then actually got an in-person interview.

No what my brain focuses on is the fact that, at the end I didn’t get the job. Sure, being sad you didn’t get a job is a probably a normal reaction, but it probably shouldn’t take my entire sense of self-worth with it. For weeks at a time. 

But then there’s not really much self-worth for these failures to take with them. Let me show you something else:

70 Drafts
Zoom and Enhance!
Yes, that says 70 drafts.
Yes, that says 70 drafts.

That’s a screenshot of my WordPress control panel, telling me I have 70 drafts. Now I’ve always assumed this was just a bunch of half-baked ideas I’d written down and just never followed up on. Spring cleaning that I’d never bothered to do, like the drafts folder of my email. I started hunting through my drafts after I thought I’d lost part of a Witcher 3 article I was working on (turns out the paragraphs that were missing were on my phone, I just hadn’t uploaded them), and about half of it was half-written ideas.

The other half though? Fully written articles that I never published. Just sitting there.

Draft Examples 2

The 5 tropes that need to die article, was just 5 sentences, a bare bones idea for an article (which I’d actually forgotten about but now I’m gonna finish it because these tropes are terrible). The other two pictured though? Total articles, both around two to three thousand words long. Pictures included.

Why did I decide to not post those?

I haven’t the slightest fucking idea. 

I didn’t take an exact count but, out of the 70 drafts I have, there are probably 20-30 fully and partially written articles. I could release one a day and have enough content for nearly a month. I could release one a week and have enough content for half a year.

Well maybe I’m just a really good editor right? I’m like J. K. Simmons in Spider-Man, I know when something is crap and I simply don’t bother my readers with it. Yeah, that’s it, I’m just a really great editor. The best.

Yeah, okay, maybe not.

Because this is another one of my drafts:

Draft Examples

These are two articles (the bottom one is only partially written) about Planescape Torment, and somehow my brain convinced me that no one wanted to read those. Even though one of my amazingly generous patrons (from my Patreon page. which you should still contribute to despite my just admitting how terrible I am) actually requested articles on this very subject, my brain still figured that no one wanted to read any of that.

My brain cannot be trusted. 

So in the interests of posting more frequently, and to stop wasting my time writing articles and then not posting it, I’m going to just post everything. I’m almost going to post everything. I’ll also start going backwards through my collected drafts and actually start posting them.  So look forward to that I guess, unless all these articles really are terrible, then… apologies in advance I guess.

The Nutter Butter Follow Up

Nutter Butter crop (1 of 1)Just wanted to give everyone who contributed to the Nutter Butter fund a HUGE thank you. The limp she had turned out to be a symptom of bone cancer, but it hadn’t metastasized beyond the the leg, so an amputation seems to have gotten most of it. Even if it does return, with your help, my parents have another year with her at least. So thanks everyone!

Newly three-legged Nutter, who doesn't seem to notice her missing leg.
Newly three-legged Nutter, who doesn’t seem to notice her missing leg.
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The Trouble with Irony

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What do you think of when you hear the name Machiavelli? If your like most people, and like I was until only recently, you imagine a devious plotting egotist who is willing to do whatever it takes to achieve power. Someone willing to cheat, steal, and even kill in his relentless drive for power. You know, someone like me!  (Did I say that outloud?)

You know what Machiavelli really was? A writer, and he was a damn good one (also like me). So good, in fact, that his name is to be forever linked with corrupt politicians, opportunists, and psychopaths.

Portrait of Niccolo Machiavelli
To be fair, he does kind of looks the part.

So how did this happen? I’ll tell you. He was a master of Irony. Now stop right there! If you just started singing Irony by Alanis Morisette, you are wrong! That is not the irony to which I’m referring, that’s cosmic irony, but I’m talking about a different kind of irony. Namely, this kind (as presented to you by Bender the educational robot):

You see The Prince by Machiavelli was written after the corrupt Medici family hired some thugs to reduce Machiavelli into a fleshy bag of broken bones. The Medici family had recently overthrown the Florentine Republic, a o that Machiavelli both worked for and found incredibly sexy. Nothing turned him on like a good beaucratic process. In fact most of his writings dealt with the the inherent superiority of republics over dictatorships. Well when Medici took over again, the first thing they did was torture and exile Machiavelli for his dangerous ideas of liberty and such. Machiavelli wrote The Prince as a giant literary middle finger to the Medici government and tyrants everywhere. Unfortunately for Machiavelli, the context of The Prince was lost over the centuries and became a how-to guide for tyrants, completely unaware that the satirical work was actually mocking them.

And that’s the trouble with Irony, the risk of the reader taking it literally. With sarcasm, spoken irony, it’s easy to understand because we can detect the mocking tone of voice. Though even then people sometimes take it literally. However there is no sarcasm punctuation mark, and putting sarcastic quips in quotations just makes you look like a pretentious ass. So your left having to very carefully word your ironic statements and try to make it clear that your being sarcastic. Mark Twain was a master of irony, in fact his books are irony distilled into a perfectly refined oil. You could liquefy Mark Twain’s books, inject it into someone, and instantly transform them into Jon Stewart.

The trouble I’m having is that obviously I know when I’m being sarcastic, but in order to tell if anyone else will be able to tell I need to let them read it. But of course isn’t that the point of writing? To let others read it?

Well yes, at a certain point. However, I’ve made the mistake of letting people read roughdrafts of my stories, friends who have insisted I let the read it, who then swear they understand what roughdraft means. Only to find that, after they’ve read it, they’ve renounced all their worldly possessions and moved to Tibet to pursue a life of quiet tranquility.

Half these people are here because they read a roughdraft of mine.

So, with these experiences in mind, I’ve taken to not letting anyone read anything until its a second or third draft, which takes loads of time and work to actually get to. By the time someone gets around to reading my story, it might end up that half the story didn’t come across right because the irony was lost in translation. Which is a royal pain in the ass because I then have to go back and rewrite half the story (yeah I use irony alot), but that’s just part of the writing process. The real trouble is when the irony backfires so horribly that I come across as an arrogant and pretentious asshole.

Working on It’s Always a Sunny Day I’ve found myself using irony a lot to provide juxtaposition from some of the darker moments in the book when I talk about my depression. After all, the point of It’s Always a Sunny Day is that things get better, and to give people suffering from depression hope. Last thing I want to do is drown them in 100,000 words of crushing despair. But, I also don’t want to come across as bragging or preachy either, and I find irony is often a great way of getting a point across without appearing to be either.

So what’s my solution to this dilemma?

Well I may just have to bite the bullet and let some people read the early drafts of this story. In all honestly, it’s not just a fear of subjecting people to a horrible first draft that I fear. This book represents something I’ve never done before, exposing my flaws for everyone to see. To let people inside my mind and rummage around to figure out what makes me tick. I wasn’t a very pleasant person when I suffered depression, and of course no one suffering from a debilitating illness is expected to be pleasant, but to reveal my unpleasant past to friends who have only known me post-depression and to complete strangers, makes me apprehensive to say the least.

I may end up posting excerpts on here and testing out my Irony skills on y’all to see if it holds up. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

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What Depression Taught Me

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It’s that time again folks, time for my one sentimental post of the year. I’m going to lay it all down on the table, and you better damn well enjoy it, no matter how depressing it gets!

So I was watching Oprah’s Life Class last night. Yeah, that’s right, I was watching Oprah. There, I said it and don’t you dare judge me. Anyway, on her Life Class, she touched briefly on how we are all constantly learning, even from horrible situations. It was at this point that I wanted to counter her with my years living with clinical depression, I mean what the hell could that possibly have taught me? And yet as I reflect back on those years, I find that I did indeed learn a lot from living with depression. In fact I wouldn’t be the strikingly handsome, and cuttingly witty man you see before you without those years teetering on the edge of oblivion.

I was diagnosed with depression when I was still in elementary school, sometime around age seven or eight I think, and I lived with it until it finally went into remission at the age of nineteen. Like most things I think you need to live it in order to truly understand it, but depression isn’t something I would wish on anyone, so I’ll do my best to describe it.

What is it that you care about? What’s your greatest passion? Now imagine that one day you wake up, and that you no longer cared, or worse yet, felt physically sick at the very idea of pursuing what you once loved.

Imagine waking up every morning wishing you hadn’t. Imagine going to sleep every night wishing you wouldn’t wake up the next morning. Imagine feeling physical pain when you did something as mundane as go to school, or work. Imagine having a voice in your head telling you your a worthless human being not worthy of the air your breathing, repeating in an endless loop, and drowning out your other thoughts.

Now imagine these kittens and cheer yourself up!

What I’m trying to say is that suffering from depression is like being in a nightmare you can’t wake up from. For nearly twelve years this was my life, from the age of seven until around nineteen when it finally went into remission. I’ll be talking about my recovery, and my upcoming book, next week. Right now I’m going to share with you the three things that depression taught me.

1. Setting Small Short-Term Goals

In the darkest days of my life, I didn’t see myself having much of a future. My fellow classmates would talk about college, and careers, things that I couldn’t possibly imagine for myself. Hell sometimes they’d talk about parties they were going to go to that weekend, and I couldn’t see that far ahead either. Luckily for me, there was one thing that I could see. Every night I would sit down at my computer and boot up Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries, a computer game about gigantic walking death machines blasting each other with lasers.

Every night I would join a group of people online and play Mechwarrior like it was the only thing that mattered, because at the time it was. My online persona was a Galaxy Commander, and it was just as badass as it sounds, I was in command of thousands of mechwarriors cutting a bloody swathe across the galaxy. Okay it was actually only a dozen or so people, and my rank was purely symbolic rather than functional, but for a couple hours a night I was no longer a sad depressed teenager who couldn’t even get through a day of school without breaking down in tears. Mechwarrior became a refuge for me, a place to escape, and where I could interact with other people and not feel threatened or inadequate.

So instead of wondering how I was going to make it through high school, or how I was going to make it through the week, it all came down to how I was going to make it through the day. All I had to do was last a couple hours and I could go home and play mechwarrior. That one goal, the 1’s and 0’s contained on that now well used disc, allowed me to survive some of the worst days of my life. Even on the worst days, when teachers gave me trouble or some particularly cruel comment was thrown my way, I would remind myself that I was needed that night for a game. Who was going to pilot the Vulture if I wasn’t around?

I still use the same techniques today. I don’t worry about how am I going to write an entire book, I work on one chapter at a time, and sometimes if that’s too daunting, one paragraph at a time. I tackle this blog one subject at a time, I don’t worry about what I’m going to be writing about a year from now, I go week to week, day by day. I let myself enjoy the small triumphs in life. Speaking of which:

2. Enjoying the Small Things in Life

When your severely depressed, you don’t have many big triumphs, or if you do you don’t realize them at the time. The big things that most people enjoy (parties, dates, success at work/school) just don’t come easily to someone who’s constantly having to fight his own mind in order to simply exist. For me, it was the small things that I was able to find happiness in. Going out to dinner, seeing a good movie, or even just making it through the day without crying was a triumph for me. The little things are what kept me going.

And looking back I had my share of big triumphs, I simply didn’t realize it at the time. I once got a misogynistic and borderline abusive teacher fired (well he “resigned” but I can read between the lines), because I spoke up when one else would. I was told by a member of the school board that they’d been looking for a way to get rid of him for years, but it wasn’t until a student finally spoke up that they could do anything. I also once went to a week long program at WSU, visiting their Veterinary Medicine program as part of Cougar Quest. So if you’re depressed and reading this, don’t feel like you’ve not accomplished anything because I’m sure you have. The only problem is that you can’t see it yet.  But the point is, don’t worry about seeing it yet, that will come in time. For the moment just live…well in the moment.

Even now that I can see my bigger triumphs, I still take pleasure in the small ones. I applaud myself for going to the gym, I allow myself to feel joy for doing something as simple as writing this blog entry, or enjoy a sunny day (which is a rare thing here in Washington).

A Sunny Day: Nature's way of saying "Hey, it could be worse. The sun could explode!"

3. I Learned to Write

Oh of course schools had taught me to write the English language of course, but there’s a huge difference between writing a class assignment and writing for yourself. And that’s who I write for, me. I’m thrilled that I have an audience that seems to enjoy what I write, but even if you all left, I would still write. Probably less often, but I would still write.  And that’s the most important lesson depression taught me, that I’m meant to be a writer.

Even before Mechwarrior, writing was there. Before I came to enjoy the simple things, pen and paper brought me peace. Dozens, maybe even hundreds, of half written stories, brainstormed novels, and fan fiction stories lay scattered in my wake. During classes, when I was too stressed out to listen to the teacher, I would write a story. When life got too unbearable I would sink myself into a fictional world I’d created. Once, even a suicide note turned into a story, saving myself from actually following through on the note.

Oprah said on her Life Class show that you should pursue what you believe you can contribute to the world, not what the society tells you to contribute. I used to make myself miserable during high school, thinking I should be a star athlete or Valedictorian, because that’s what society was telling me to do. Would I still have become a writer had I not been suffering from depression? Or would I instead have pursued being a football or basketball star? Would I have spent hours on hours on hopeless manuscripts and stories, and by extension would I have learned the lessons about writing those disasters had to teach me? Probably not.

That’s why, even if I could, I wouldn’t change a thing about my life. I once looked on my years of depression as a waste, but now I can see those years for what they were, a valuable part of my life. I learned things during those miserable years that might have otherwise taken decades to figure out.

Don’t get me wrong, depression is a terrible thing, and if you’re suffering from it get treatment immediately. What I’m trying to say with this post, is not that depression is a wonderful teaching tool, but that you can learn from even the most terrible of situations. If you’re in a place right now where you feel nothing is going right, that you’re up against the wall, just take a deep breath and look around. Figure out what that moment is trying to teach you.

And then push your way out of that corner, using the very lesson you learned from it.