After All

fuck fear

“Can I play the winner?” My son asked two boys he didn’t know, as they finished a game of Connect 4.They stared at him but didn’t answer.

He asked a second time and one of the boys said “Sure.”

Phew, I thought. Wow, that’s brave, I thought.

We all have so many opportunities in everyday life to be brave.

Twice he asked. Once sure, but twice. Kids are brave. Willing to put themselves out there.

In improv, so much of what helps a performer go from good to great comes from the choice to be fearless, the understanding that there is nothing to lose by taking huge risks. What is the worst that will happen if the scene sucks? The scene will suck. That’s it. AS Del Close said, follow the fear. That’s where the good stuff is.

As I was driving the other day I started wondering :
What am I afraid will happen if I choose to live?

Time to follow the fear.

The Responsibility of Being Healthy

There is a beauty to simplicity. It’s why I love 80s sitcoms. Problems. Solutions. A few jokes. Bob Eubanks has a problem. Mr. Belvedere helps him out. Wesley wisecracks. Twenty-two delightfully simple moments.

Sustain. Stay alive. Feel better. When I struggle, when I am sick, these are my goals.  Achieve these goals and it will be better. There is Problem, a solution, and some wisecracking. Not so simple though, no twenty-two minutes. But it happened. I am healthier. I feel joy. I revel in it. I feel grateful for it and I have also realized there is a responsibility to being healthy;

Figuring out how to sustain it. What works and what needs to be worked on? Is there a way to not go so fucking low so often? These are my questions, Add clean up after yourself and buy some crackers and you have my current to-do list.

So I spend a lot of time these days working with my therapist, and by myself, trying to eliminate the idea of suicide as inevitability. Saying that this feeling is a part of me scares people who care about me. But I am healthier and that is why I have the strength to do this. When we are our healthiest is when we have the strength to battle the darkest. Not having that strength, that is when things feel scarier. How grateful I am not to be there. Nope I am here and I will try to deal with this dark stuff. Because, after all, as the Mr. Belvedere theme song says “Life is more than mere survival.”

beast

It feels inevitable, but it’s not, it can’t be.
I feel okay, yet ending it all feels inevitable
Not tomorrow, just sometime.
There has to be a way for it not to feel inevitable.

What I hold on to has to be something I provide.
It is unfair to hang staying alive on a child who has no choice in the matter.
I must hang staying alive on me. I have the choice. I have it.

I believe what I have often shared with others:
“Suicide is not chosen. It happens when pain exceeds resources for coping with pain.”
But this is different.
I am giving myself so many resources and I know this is a beast to contend with.
A fucked up ugly beast that feeds on untruths.
So many who lose their lives to suicide do not realize this beast is within them

But, though it might not sound like it, I am am a good place.
Now, I am in the healthy struggle of wrestling this beast. I want to conquer it.
A huge part of me believes there has to be a way to conquer it.
I can do it and I will continue to tell myself that.
And I hope one day I believe it.

Embracing the Cognitive Fuckery

When I went to get ECT on Friday I was the most anxious I had felt since probably my first treatment a couple years ago. I had learned so much in the past three weeks and I wasn’t ready to forget it. I feel anytime I talk about the memory loss, I need to say “Of course, I am very lucky, while I won’t get back the memories I’ve lost, I will regain the ability to retain new memories and people with Alzheimer’s, they don’t get that.” That is true, so true. But let’s focus on me for a second (since we don’t do that enough.) I don’t have Alzheimer’s. I have depression, and the memory shit, the cognitive fuckery, was not supposed to be part of my deal.

At some point depressed people will stop using other diseases to explain, feel bad about, or justify depression. Apparently, today is not the day.

Anyway, I was dreading treatment Friday. I was afraid everything I had learned at my new job would be lost. I pictured myself going into work today and saying “Can you remind where the bathrooms are, oh and also, re-teach me every other thing you taught me in the last three weeks?” I didn’t imagine that would go over so well.

Also I had the most amazing night with Rafi last week, a night of us doing nothing special and having the best time at it, and I didn’t want to forget how that felt. I know other nights like that will happen, but this one, it was so, so great. So, I took a shit-ton of notes and reluctantly had Friday’s treatment. I woke up and could still picture Rafi and I lying in his bed making up a silly story together and I smiled. And today, I went into work and my supervisor asked me to do something and I remembered how to do it and it was awesome and I was so grateful.

People mistakenly think that those with depression always see the negative side of things, but I imagine most of the people who think that, didn’t pause this morning and take a moment to be thankful just for being able to remember how to use a computer program. But me, this person who lives with this disease, I did and I am all sorts of thankful. My thankfulness just has a tinge more gray.