Wanzology

Depression

 You know what day it is. You know what day it is. It's Wednesday, which means, you know, it is time for another stirring edition of WANZOLOGY!! Hi, Wanz here. How are you? I hope you and yours are doing well as we enter into another holiday season filled with hijinks, mayhem, the spending of way, way too much money for all the wrong reasons, and of course, the ever entertaining, let's say strategically placed conflicts between family members, redefining the dynamic that binds us all to each other.

Seriously, though, the holidays are fraught with peril and we all know it. We love it. We, we really try hard not to make it that way, but it's just highly stressful, highly stressful because there's a lot of pressure of expectation in the holidays, isn't there? It's really difficult to try to match what's giving the joy and festive nature of the seasons that you remember as a kid from the perspective of being an adult because your perspective now is completely different because you have to pay for everything.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not down on the whole retail aspect of the holidays. I'm not down on the capitalistic based system that we live in here in America. I'm just down on the mental aspects of it. I'm down on the pressure that one feels to ‘measure up’ or ‘conform’ or ‘be compared to’ others or other times, other places. For me, this has been a very, very, very big sinkhole of a mental problem and it feeds the topic of this week's episode, which is depression.

Depression is my wheelhouse. I've been battling depression for going on 24 years. In one way, shape, or form, I've been on medication, I've been in and out of therapy. I've tried a lot of different angles to try to get a handle on why I always seem to end up feeling completely and totally melancholy in the happiest of times. I have almost zero confidence in my abilities, even though I have decades of memories and what one of my psychologists called ‘evidence’ to the contrary, I still question my abilities. When people compliment me, I always wonder who the hell they're talking to. Because I don't see who they're talking about. I have to kind of manufacture that person and be gracious and thank them, and then walk away going, “Who the hell are they talking about?”, I don't, I don't, I look in the mirror, I don't see who that is.

Depression is, for me anyway, I can only talk about what I know and I'm only going to talk about my experiences and my thoughts on said experiences. Depression for me is kind of like trying to swim with one arm tied behind your back in the open ocean. It's extremely difficult. And if you don't get your technique right, if you don't fortify your mental stability correctly, you end up in what I call the pit, in the hole. You're in the hole, man. And it just doesn't seem like that dark place is ever going to ‘surrender’ you.

Depression can be so debilitating that you have no desire, no strength, no drive to go and be amongst other human beings. You have no compunction to want to be any part of the human race, let alone your own human race. That's why it gets to be way too much of a hassle for some, and they take themselves out.

I've thought about it many times, still do think about it every once in a while, so depression can affect the insides of a person and have no clue given on the outside. A lot of depression has you suffering in silence because it's that four inches between your ears that is really, really, really active. And sometimes quite determined and successful to make sure that you never elevate your feelings above ‘eh’, ‘meh’, ‘whatever’. Depression takes the joy out of things that you normally find pleasurable. People you enjoy the company of, even the wonders that just exist in this ecosystem of nature and stuff that we live in.

When I first got sober, I really, really never really had noticed how beautiful a sunset could be. Because I really had never paid attention. In the throes of depression, I try very hard to get to see a sunset to remind myself, one, that I've made it to the end of another day. And it wasn't because of luck, it was because of my past experiences and recalling actions that got me from the beginning of the day to the end of the day. Even when I'm really, really down, a sunset will remind me that there is purpose and possibility. The purpose is to live. The possibility is driven by the fact that you've made it through another day. And if all things go right, you'll wake up for another one. Because some people don't.

Some people don't know that this is their last time on Earth. They don't know that if they go to sleep, that they're going to wake up, it's an assumption. We all have it. Planning out this, and then I'm gonna have lunch with so and so, and I'm gonna do this, that, and the other, and then my job, and I'm gonna put up with this coworker who drives me nuts until I just have to leave and go home. But what happens if you don't wake up then wish granted, you don't have to deal with that work person. You don't have to be in that situation, which is part of the attraction of suicide. People who commit suicide have given up all shreds of hope that anything in their life is going to change and it's always going to be painful, life itself is torture. It's a perception. Most people who are in depression, in the throes of it, I don't mean being depressed, I mean in depression, to me it's different. Being in depression is, it's recurring. Sometimes it's never ending, or at least it feels that way. If you could imagine what it would be like to jump off, oh, I don't know. Let's say you jump off the tallest building in Chicago. It's going to take you a little bit to get to the bottom. So what happens while you're falling? That's kind of a long time and you know how it's going to end. Now imagine a whole day of that feeling and not knowing how it's going to end. It's kind of stressful. The stress creates worry and the worry is fed by doubt and doubt keeps one from acting. Doubt keeps one from actually attempting to do something, to do something from taking action to counteract the feeling of doubt. You start believing your own talk, reading too much of your own damn press, and you start believing that you're not so many things. When in fact, it's just a perspective. You don't feel like you're these things because you're looking at the things in other people that you wish you had which totally, totally ignores the things that you've got.

Everybody has a lot of things and a lot of people are very, very good at staying focused on those things and gaining strength from those abilities and those characteristics. No matter what they look like to you and I on the outside. Inside, people generally don't really think about these kind of things, which is why not everyone suffers from depression. And then there are those who kinda look at it, they're, they're mildly affected, but then there's people like me, who at almost every turn, and in almost every situation, can't stop comparing himself to either what he has done, or who else has done it and how much better at it they are compared to me. I am always in a constant struggle validating my own abilities and existence. I mean, hell, this podcast was an idea that was planted five, six years ago. I think back in 2016, 2017, and I was like, who's going to listen to me? What do I have to talk about? It took me losing a job and not being able to find one for almost a year to get me to the, ‘what have you got to lose’ thing, to actually believe that my experience could be beneficial to someone else if they heard it. Why? I could not see myself sitting in front of a microphone, talking about something, and then on the other side of that, people listening to it and actually giving a damn. Why would they? Why would they? But I tried it, and people ask, “How's your podcast doing?”, and I tell them, “I don't know.”, because I know myself and what'll happen is, what I'll do is, I'll go and look at whatever analytics there are, and no matter what, I won't be happy. I haven't done ‘this’ and I, I don't even understand what ‘that’ is and I'll end up feeling ignorant. I only know this because, like, I've tried it three or four times and it's just safer for me to concentrate on, “You know what? I'm trying to be consistent in putting out my thoughts to the universe via the interwebs every week.”. Every week I think about what's going on in my life and how I feel and how I share that because it helps me stay out of ‘The Pit’, ‘The Hole’.

Depression is real. And from my experience, the most consistent way, the best defense is to do the very thing you don't feel like doing. If you're depressed because, “I'm stuck in my house.”, get out of your house. “I'm depressed because my job sucks!”, get another job. “I'm depressed because my relationship is in the toilet.”, fix the relationship or get out of it. If you reach for the stem of a rose and you put your finger on a thorn and it hurts, do you grab the stem of the rose in the same place if you want that rose? Why would you do that? You enjoy the pain? I think not. Depression has a way of making you expect the worst and most painful outcome is going to happen from no matter what action you attempt. In a way, you're playing a game against yourself.

You have to prove to yourself that you're lying to your-self (two words, your-self) and the mind is a terrible thing. I've been saying it for decades, the mind is a terrible thing. It will tell you things that are not true and you'll believe it. “She's going to like me ‘because’ “, “I'm going to be…”, because I have…, because I did…, fill in those blanks. When you can’t figure out how to become happy with every single failure that happens to you, your depression will persist. If you can’t figure out how the little voices in your head can’t spin disappointment and fear into motivation and action, your depression will persist. I've always wanted to talk to someone who has skydived for the very first time, because I can't imagine being up in a plane two or three seconds before you jump out of it. If it's me, those two or three seconds are imagining what it's going to feel like, “What's the last thing I'm going to feel before I die?”, “What's the last thing I'm gonna feel before I lose consciousness when I hit the ground?”. People skydive all the time and don't die, but that's the way my mind works. I suffer from depression. If it's bad, the odds are pretty good, I'm thinking that's what's going to happen to me, and I have to act ‘as-if’ I don't believe that.

I've been a performer as long as I can remember and I still get asked, are you afraid when you go on stage? No, I’m not afraid to go out on stage. I'm afraid of what I'm going to do once I am out on stage. That inhale before I sing the first word or say the first word into a microphone. I have all kinds of fears going on. Microphone might not work, I might trip going on stage, there's all kinds of little things that are going on in my head that will probably never happen and I have to remember, “Name a time when those things did happen.”, and it's very difficult because they don't happen very often, even though I'm prepared and think that they're about to happen. ‘Manifest destiny’ is a real thing!

So when you're feeling defeated, when you're feeling like you can't do or say or be whatever, I want you to remember this phrase:

“You have to live your way into a new way of thinking. You can't think your way into a new way of living.”. Let me say that again, “You have to live your way into a new way of thinking because you can't think your way into a new way of living.” Every single day, you need to remind yourself of that very fact and when you don't feel you're able to do something, you is exactly the time you should do it. Because, I mean, if you can’t, go figure out why and you'll get to a place where, “Well, if I do it this way, maybe, I can!” Think of it this way, you ever try to put the wrong key into the lock of the door when you get home and you gotta pee really, really, really bad? Time kind of compresses and slows down at the same time. There's an immediacy because you don't want to wet your pants, but it's so slow coming up with the right key, or putting it in upside right, and then turning it the right direction, it takes forever until the door is open, and then the longest distance in the world is the distance between once you get in the door and the toilet. And all that lasts, what, five seconds? But it seems like an eternity. See what your mind can do to you? I'm pretty sure everyone can relate to the example I just gave and if you can't, huh, watch out. It may be coming.

Action is the key to counteracting depression because if you sit and do nothing, that means your mind is at work and your body is not. When your body is at work and your mind is at work, generally, everything's cool. When your body is at work and you're not really thinking, I bet you're the happiest you've ever been because that's really being in the moment when you're acting and not thinking about it. Action. Action. Action. Is the key to defending ‘your-self’ (two words) against depression.

That's my story. And I am sticking to it. You may have similarities with what I've talked about, you may have differences, which is expected since none of us are the same, but I can tell you this, I didn't make it to this point by not taking action. Life is like that. It's a verb, you have to do something. One of the pearls of wisdom that I figured out in college, “You have to fail in order to figure out how to succeed because not everybody succeeds the same way at the same time.”, just because someone else failed, doesn't mean that you will, get it? Find an action, execute that action, figure out what happened and then it's something that needs to be improved, figure out what the improvement is and then try again, always try again. Like my dad always said, “Nothing beats a try but a fail.”, and if you keep trying, you haven't failed yet.

I wish you all the best only the best of things! Thanks for listening, hang in there and I'll talk to you next week.

Later 😊