I'm not ok, I have depression

Note: This post mentions suicide and may be triggery for some.

In July I was diagnosed with depression.

It wasn't a surprise.

Truth is I've had it since I was fifteen. 9th grade. I started to cry on the bus on the way to school. Everyday. I would rummage through my school bag in order to hide my face. I would tell people I had a cold or hay fever if they questioned my red eyes. I didn't want to be around anymore. I took up smoking which, it must be said, was the lamest suicide attempt in history. When I got my driver’s license at 17 I would skip class to sleep in my car and I'd drink myself to nothingness on the weekends. Things didn't get better after high school. Eventually I had to sell my car, not because it was too expensive to run as I claimed, but because I was scared I'd hurt someone if I decided to plow into oncoming traffic. I kept shedding people to make my world smaller enough that I could just drop out of it.

Why did I live with this cunt of a thing for so long? Depression saps all your energy, your concentration, your concern for others and yourself. It took away everything until all I could do is lay in bed all day watching as many cooking shows as possible. I thought I was going to die. I hoped I would. Why bother seeking help if I'm gonna be dead soon? I thought. They say depression is prolonged sadness in the absence of reason. But I felt I had a reason (tl;dr Muscular Dystrophy). Surely I couldn't be depressed if I had a reason? Maybe I didn't deserve to have a disability, but I sure felt I deserve the sadness that went with it. And besides the physical stuff isn't going away whether I fixed the mental stuff or not. Damned if I do and dead if I don't. I needed to do something. I made an appointment two months ago and told my doctor and his response was the equivalent of "Well, duh", which actually made me feel a little better.

I'm sitting here on RUOK day, having just taken today's little pink pill, at the start of my journey (for the lack of a less X-factorish word) and for now I'd rather not die.

The Time Problem

The problem is time. Considering this blog's inertia you'd think maybe I have been suffering from a lack of time. Sadly, the opposite is true; there's too much of the damn stuff. In fact, the only time I'm in a hurry these days is when I'm trying to squirrel time away down the back of the couch or stuffing it into cupboards before guests arrive to give the appearance that I've been using it since the last visit.

Time stretches out before me in all directions like an infinite radial plain and the choice of direction is crippling: Should do this? Or that? Should I write a novel about this? Or one about that? Should it even be a novel? Short stories, then? A blog?

I make it to the first fork in the road - maybe camp there for the night - before heading home and re-rolling. And there's no penalty. Nothing is lost, only time.

This is made double by a recent and profound dislike in my own writing. I can hardly get through half a page before sighing bitterly, chucking it in for the day and mainlining episodes of Orphan Black.

Last week @AdviceToWriters tweeted a Howard Ogden quote "Hating your own writing is necessary but not sufficient". To me, it means hating your own stuff is a given and not a sufficient enough reason to quit. I need to remember that next time I'm picking fragments of my laptop off the floor.

The Blankets Were The Stairs

CAUTION: CONTAINS WANK.

Twitter is an easy target. A week doesn't go by without someone making a snarky comment about the social network. Whether it is:

- A random old person in the street

- A newspaper Op/Ed columnist (technically the same as above)

- Someone on Facebook (!)

- During the "Best of Social Media" segment on the late news (!!)

- A TV Child Psychologist on the televisual rat’s nest that is Today Tonight/ACA

- Shouted from an apartment as you walk a dog.

There is no dearth of uninformed opinion being expelled from the mouths and fingers of moronic Crum Bums who don't understand what Twitter is.

Twitter is a blanket. It is a vast amorphous patchwork quilt of thoughts and people and ideas and ideologies. All you have to do is stitch the right squares together and wrap yourself up in it to feel its warmth. Like to have an itch to scratch? Sew in some scratchy material - like the stuff Xmas jumpers from Grandma are made from - to rub against. Sure there will always be those who try to sew their odd-smelling damp rag of a patch into your blanky but that can be fixed with judicious use of the block button, which in this metaphor is, I dunno, one of those thread unpicker things? Block and replace with parody felt or squares with pretty but nonsensical horses on them.

And take your blanket with you - pretend you're Linus or Arthur Dent*, always have it on you. Pull it out when you're cold or bored or when in need of an argument (though not Abuse, that's a different room) or a distraction. Do it, it's fun.

Twitter, when used correctly is warm and makes you a better person - it's like The Fonz's jacket or, for a more topical reference it's like... Fonzy's jacket. (Did you ever see a Happy Days where Arthur didn't have the jacket? He's like a more evil version of Bob from Twin Peaks or for a more topical reference, Voldemort. Now, imagine if the villain in Harry Potter was Bob.)

But Twitter is also another country. Get directions. You don't heli-drop into the Hungarian highlands without some kind of guide (unless you're Wesley Snipes, but chances are you're not. If you are reading this, Wesley, I hope you have your blanket with you. It may even be a tax write-off, if you're into that kind of thing). It has its own customs and vernacular that may be difficult to grasp at first - which can make it seem cold. Thankfully the locals speak your language and are mostly nice and know how to sew -they will help if asked, they will tell you who to follow (#FF) and they will point out the damp rags.

Join me next week when I compare tumblr to a tumble dryer (get it?)

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*: Yes, Dent had a towel not a blanket whatevs.

50 Funny Women Off The Top Of My Head

That place for grandmas and advertising, Facebook, is once again a-buzz with the Women Aren't Funny schtick - well, as a-buzz as it can be between the pay-to-win 'videogames' and iPad 'competitions'. This is quite obviously hogcock. Women are funny. This is not a debate. However, if you were to point this out even with a comment as innocuous as "What are you doing?" you’d be shouted down with cries of "White Knight is gonna White-Knight" and demands to name a funny woman.

Yeah well, here's fifty:

Lucille Ball
Katherine Parkinson
Olivia Colman
Carol Cleveland
Roseanne
Sarah Millican
Dawn French
Jennifer Saunders
Tina Fey
Julia Davis
Kitty Flanagan
Roz Hammond
Sue Perkins
Jo Brand
Betty White
Emma Thompson
Portia De Rossi
@Brocklesnitch
Judith Lucy
Lily Tomlin
Marieke Hardy
Katy Wix
Miranda Hart
Deanne Smith
Andrea Anders
Judy Greer
Connie Booth
Nina Conti
Nora Ephron
Cal Wilson
Tress MacNeille
Kat Stewart
Julia Zemiro
Amy Sherman-Palladino
Maria Bamford
Goldie Hawn
Shelley Long
Peri Gilpin
Megan Amram
Amii MacDonald
Jane Turner
Gina Riley
Lisa Kudrow
Shappi Khorsandi
Meera Syal
Jennifer Crittenden
Allison Janney
Hannah Gadsby
Kristen Schaal
Tamsin Greig
Helen Fielding
Mindy Kaling

Again, this is just off the top of my head. There are of course hundreds of other women who are professionally funny and to suggest otherwise is either incredibly disingenuous or unreasonably ignorant (there was a time when folks were rightfully ashamed to broadcast their ignorance. Sadly, that's gone the way of the dodo (or Google reader)). THERE ARE HUNDREDS of them. From all generations and in all genres. FFS some are the best in their field regardless of gender (Ball, MacNeille).

There are two kinds of men (and it is men) that think women are not funny: Those that opine that men are funnier than women then use this 'evidence' to extrapolate further to imply women aren't funny at all. Christopher Hitchens falls into this category. The other category is apes men who don't like women. The first can be corrected - I mean that in a cruel Victorian posture teacher kind of way, not a Nazi Germany way. The second group will eventually discover fire and die out from smoke inhalation.

In this time of imdb, Wikipedia and YouTube there is no excuse to be ignorant of funny women. Here’s fifty to get you started.





 

Children Die In Hot Cars. So Do Sandwiches.

Picnics don't exist. Now, before you go all jazz hands and I wake up one morning with a shredded tartan throw in my bed what I mean is they don't exist in the sort of idyllic Norman Rockwell, Sense & Sensibility way. For one, there are insects, ants and bees mostly. And wasps. Don't think there won't be wasps. Secondly, something they neglect to mention in their vivid depictions of breezy luncheons is fields, or any expansive grassed area, are nearly always muddy - moisture being prerequisite for grass. A blanket in a field is not entirely dissimilar from the skin that forms on the top of a Latte or that crust on the top of the sewage trap on a dairy farm (for two universal analogies). Plus there's a high probability of an arctic wind - the kind that gets deep into the bones. In fact, for regular, down-home country people the difference between picnicking and being a tramp is blankets. And bindles. And I'd rather give both to an actual homeless person than participate in one of these alfresco shams.

I have no doubt that in Austen's time picnics were probably quite nice. Not having to prepare and transport food yourself would make for quite the leisurely afternoon of flattering young ladies with tales of derring-do or, if you're an old woman, planning your daughter-based pyramid scheme. But in her day people had grounds and people had people to tend those grounds - "grounds people" I believe they're called - who could search out a few square feet of unsodden terrain for brunching on. It's funny that those who had grounds had no jobs and people that didn't were actively employed. Hahaha.

Maybe my experience is not everybody's experience. Maybe my antipathy towards outdoor lunching stems from teenage trauma - if acute boredom can be deemed traumatic.

I was seventeen when I attended my first and only non-compulsory picnic. Someone had the idea for the picnic - probably me as I had just read Washington Square and imagined myself as one of its characters (possibly Catherine)

We decided to be classy. This meant beer in bottles rather than the canned variety. And with seventeen-year-olds being famous for their sommelier abilities; there was wine. Two bottles of pink fizz and a cask of the fruitiest of Lexias - which having travelled in the back sill of the car was as tongue-blistering as it was tannin-heavy. Being the designated driver, which I must say was news to me at time, of course meant basically no drinking (one already hot beer nursed for hours somehow makes you more sober). And when you're not drinking your sloshed friends can be incredibly boring.

The highlight of the day was when my good friend John*, cigarette in one hand chicken wing in the other jokingly calling another picnicker a "cock" over his shoulder as he relieved himself, only to have said cock shove him forward so he got piss all down himself. He spent the remainder to the afternoon pointing his crotch in the direction of the sun and demanding new pants.

The Observer Effect, in science, is the theory that you can't measure the outcome of an experiment without changing the outcome. Maybe that's the same with picnics: planning a picnic spoils the picnic.   

Oh and as we were packing up Sally* got stung by a wasp. I guess that's the real moral of the story: DON'T THINK THERE WON'T BE WASPS.


*: Names changed to protect the urine-encrusted and throbbing

Lying Liars & Labels

I have Muscular Dystrophy. Specifically the Becker variant. I was diagnosed at the age of four and being a degenerative, muscle-wasting disease my body got progressively worse until seven years ago, at the age of 21, I ended up in a wheelchair. There were years of tears and anger and frustration and bullying in between. I didn't realize this at the time, but it also quite likely that I had depression.

When I joined Twitter in August of 2009 (!!) I decided to keep this a secret. "Decided" isn't right - I convinced myself I didn't need to mention it. That it didn't matter. It was a choice. And one made of fear. Fear of not being taken seriously. Fear of being talked over; of having my opinions discounted. Fear of being bullied; of being called a retard; of being excluded; of being ignored; of being alone. I couldn't hide in real life no matter how desperately I tried. But on Twitter, and online in general, I could and like a coward, I did. And it was easy. For a while.

Had I been a different person this mightn't have weighed on me as it has. I lied - and secrets are lies - because I was scared. But I was also ashamed of being afraid. And of being dishonest. It was a lie told to keep from feeling alone and one that had the opposite effect. The more online interactions, the more friends - and they are friends - the lonelier I felt. Keeping part of myself hidden from view made friendships seem false. I felt worthless. Trying to be not me hadn't worked offline and, obviously (now), nor does it online.

Six months ago I seriously considered deleting my account. Rather than own up to (or worse be found out) a lie that's making me lonely, I'd disengage from everyone and be completely, properly alone. It seemed only fair. To me, these relationships were attained feloniously, I didn't deserve them; I was willing to cut off my nose to spite my face. I don't what changed my mind. Maybe it was that people in my Twitter periphery were speaking up even though they were afraid (#1reasonwhy and others). Maybe I was just tired of it. I spasmodically sent out a few vague tweets here and there in a craven attempt at testing the waters, hoping someone would ask me and I could be open. But mostly this is for selfish reasons. I don't want to feel like a liar anymore. I don't want to be a liar anymore. I'm fucking tired.


* * * * *

A vegetarian is vegetarian. A feminist is a feminist. A Greek is a Greek. They are not “People with Mediterranean Needs” -try saying that at the local bouzouki disco and you're likely to get a face full of moussaka and not in a good way. How good is moussaka by the way? I don't know, never had it. But then, I'm an incredible racist. That is a joke. Some of my best friends are sweaty Greeks.

Some time in the last fifteen years or so the tweedy boffins at the political correctness lobby decided “disabled” was exceedingly offensive and the suffix “with disabilities: was preferable. Personhood First became the mantra. People apparently had to be reminded that the disabled were people as opposed to, say, umbrellas or marmosets. Excuse me. My personhood was never in question -My manhood, on the other hand, is questioned with impunity, particularly when I'm watching Bunheads. To imply my personhood is anything other than obvious is downright offensive.

You only have to look at Monday night's QandA Education Special to see what a cack-handed approach "personhood first" is in practice. A question was asked about disabled students. Both men, but particularly Garrett, though that's probably because he spoke more, struggled with what descriptor to use to refer to the students. Disabled fits -the students are not only disabled by their disabilities but are also disabled by an under-funded, under-resourced education system. Personhood First lays the responsibility at the feet of the disabled - "with disabilities" implies ownership - instead of at the feet of society.

I'm sure this sounds incongruous given the above but I'm nothing if not a hypocrite. What I would say is "Disabled" is not, to my mind, offensive. The stigma associated with it is. You don't fight stigma by locking words away. And you definitely don't fight it by throwing a minority's humanity out with the political incorrect bath water.