Explaining Depression

Celebrity deaths, although sad, don't usually phase me much. There have been a few recently, however, that were particularly sad for me. Maya Angelou, who passed away on my friend Jade's birthday, and Robin Williams, whose suicide brought out the worst in people that don't understand depression. Jade and I have both had issues with anxiety and depression, and we've helped see each other through some pretty dark times. When Ms. Maya passed he was locked up for some bullshit thing. I didn't know how to get in touch with him, so I wrote him a letter. In it I ruminated the depth of Ms. Maya's character, her essence, her spirit. Because it's difficult to be a sensitive person in this world. Some of us feel things deeply and more intensely than others. But you can grow from trauma and devastation; even if you are a highly sensitive person. She was a shining example of that. It's not easy, of course. Probably less so for people that feel more profoundly than many people.

Some people seem like they are perpetually happy. There's certainly nothing wrong with that, but those kinds of people don't understand those of us that aren't. Some people can pull themselves out of a rut with a smile and plucky attitude, but not everyone is like that. And you can't explain it to them. I don't know if they think that they can make themselves happy so everyone else should be able to, as well. They don't understand that when a highly sensitive person experiences something, good or bad, it's exhausting. When it's good it's very, very good and when it's bad it's horrid. That's the Reader's Digest Condensed Version. Unfortunately it's not as simple as that, and unpacking it for people that have no intention of understanding is difficult at best, torturous at worst.

When I told my friend Blue that I'd been dealing with anxiety and depression and was on medication for it he said, “really?? I didn't think you were that kind of person.” That threw me. What kind of person?? A depressed person?? A crazy person?? A person that can't deal with reality?? A person that takes corporate drugs?? What kind of person am I to him now?? What does being “that kind of person” entail in his mind?? It struck my curiosity, but it also stung a little. He's very laid back and earthy, and I'm kind of intense and loner-ish with a wicked case of Bitchy Resting Face. It makes me wonder how people see me now that I talk about the issues I've had. Maybe it was just more convenient for everyone else when I didn't?? It sure as shit wasn't convenient for me. Hiding hurts. Evidently so does being honest.

Another friend, Eduardo, is just such a happy-go-lucky dude, and he constantly radiates positive energy. Most of the time it's great. He's so much fun. He's so friendly. It's so easy to like him and to be around him, except when you're depressed. His “everybody get happy” attitude becomes draining. When you're depressed, even just moderately depressed, you're not just in a bad mood. It's not just a funk or a grumpy day. Your brain chemistry is fuckin' with you hard core. You know you should be able to shake off a few bad days, or even bad weeks, but what my friend Ellie refers to as her “brain monkeys” won't let you. Things stop seeming as important. Your blood boils or freezes for no reason. That part of your mind slowly goes dark, and it becomes increasingly difficult to remember a time when you weren't depressed. The worst part is when you know that what you're feeling isn't rational but you cannot, for the life of you, figure out how to change it.

So when Robin passed away, the deluge of negativity about people with depression (suicidal or otherwise) was intense. I was balls deep in a depressive episode, and when I saw some of the things my friends posted about how fucked up people that are depressed and/or suicidal are and that they should just get over themselves. We're selfish, because everyone has problems. Don't we know that?? How can we just think about ourselves like that?? And what's with the pills?? Maybe when a normie has problems they should just take pills to make it go away, too?? That'll just, like, solve everything.

It's a chore to explain that the pills regulate the levels of serotonin in our brains, which is often the thing making us depressed. They're not magic, and for a lot of people they're a last resort. Diet, exercise, yoga, meditation, relaxation, therapy, teas, steams, long walks, good books, amazing friends; they're all great, but they don't always change your brain chemistry enough to make you “better.” It's not their fault any more than it is a depressed or anxious person. If anything, depressed and/or anxious people feel guilty for all the things they're grateful for not being enough to take the “brain monkeys” away. The anxiety pills are to stop an attack in progress, because happy thoughts are not enough. I want to tell people that if they've never experienced a panic attack then don't act like you know something you don't. It's terrifying. It's physically and mentally debilitating. The level of insensitivity of a person that tells someone with anxiety to “just calm down,” is astounding to me.

One friend in particular, Shasta, had a great deal to say online about the selfishness of depressed / suicidal people. I've only ever known her to be a sweet, amazing, intelligent, affable, lovable person, so it took me by surprise that she had such vitriol in her. She's one of those preternaturally happy people, so for her to get angry about something like another person's mental state was equal parts shocking and infuriating. To hear this nice person tearing down people that are in a bad place changed my perception of her a little bit. This woman is usually so openly loving and accepting of pretty much everyone. For her to have so much wrath for the depressed and/or suicidal struck me as . . . confusing. I made the mistake of trying to engage with her a little bit, just to have a conversation. Her response was something to the effect of “I guess I just have too much to live for.” What a thoughtful thing to say to someone that has just opened up to you about their experience with depression. Is she insinuating that people that are depressed don't have much to live for?? I don't know. That kind of callousness, especially from someone that is usually as caring as she is, made me sad. It's one of those things that shutters people with depression. When I'm depressed I isolate. Her response to what I had to say is a shining example of why.

This leaves me at an impasse. You can't force anyone to listen, or to communicate, or to understand. I wish I could, but I can't make people think. Some people are just going to be insensitive and think they know about things that they don't. It's how life is. And the more depressed people, or anyone on the spectrum of mental illness, feel like they need to shut up, the more they do – and the more depressed they become. For something as common as anxiety, depression, or even just being a highly-sensitive person, when you're shit on for it and made to feel weak and silly, a lot of the time we do just shut up. No one wants to hear it, so we clam up. We shut down. And that makes it all worse.

I don't know what the solution is. I do my best as a person that has experienced depression and anxiety and sensitivity to be honest and open as I feel comfortable with, to keep my weird moods in check as much as I can, and to be thoughtful about how, when, and why I communicate with others about what's going on. That's all I can do. Of course, I wish people would extend the same courtesy to me, but no one can make another person do that. I do wish more people would.

Names have been changed to protect the privacy of pretty much everyone.

Football Has Turned My Friends Into Zombies - From a Former Fairweather Fan

I'm really starting to detest football, and not because I actually detest football. I've just reached a saturation point. Which is unfortunate because the damn season has just begun. It's bad enough that it begins in the fall and continues through the darkest, most depressing months of the year. I used to enjoy going over to a friend's house on Sundays, having some beers and congregating around the tv, laughing and cheering and bouncing kids on my knee. I've never been a football person, anyway, but it was fun to be included in the festivities. Even during the SuperBowl this year, which as a general rule I give less than an entire shit about. But it was fun to see your hometown team doing well and partying with the neighbors.

However, since the Seahawks won the SuperBowl, things have taken a turn for the macabre. We now live in a Seattle where if you're not a rabid “12 Fan,” then there is something culturally wrong with you. I mean it. It's a full-blown obsession; the kind some people get mental health counseling for. Game days are like the beginning of a zombie movie: town overtaken by a consumptive fever that makes everyone lose their minds, falling under the possession of the blue and green. The Legion of Boom says “scream” and they say “how loud??” If you go out to the store and have the unmitigated gall to not be decked out in full regalia, the cashier asks you suspiciously if you're from around here. If you go to a restaurant or a cafe, everyone around you will be shrieking and foaming at the mouth. If you stay home, your neighbors will be wailing from their homes, causing all the neighborhood dogs to become apoplectic, including your own.

I have to sit in my room with the doors and windows closed and the tv on just to get away from the goddam noise in the privacy of my own chambers. Heaven forbid I'd like to do something like sit somewhere quiet and write or read a book, because there is no place that's quiet. I have to wear earplugs or noise-canceling headphones or listen to the barking; barking dogs, barking people, barking mad, for three hours. They think it's hilarious. I worry about their well-being.

I set my social media filters accordingly. I unfollow certain friends during football season and unsubscribe from several publications. Sometimes I get away from it at all. Filters are not enough. If you live in Seattle and you haven't been infected by the Blue Fever, then that's too damn bad. So I'm on social media blackout. I'm all for social media blackout time if it's for a reason that doesn't suck. Football is a stupid reason. I'm just sick to death of hearing about it. I have this feeling deep in my gut that there is something happening somewhere in the world that would be interesting to know about. Unfortunately, I live in Zombieland. The Seahawks are playing. Nothing else exists.

Kansas City recently usurped the title of loudest stadium in Christendom. If the level of noise around me is any indication, The Legion is not happy with that. It sounds like they think that even though we live fourteen miles from the actual stadium that “we” can take that title back!!

You know what would be rad right now?? Laryngitis.

Oh, and GGGGGGOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, GGGIIIIIIIIIIIAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNTTTTTTTSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WWWWWWWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORRRRRRRRRRLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLDDDDDDDDDDDDDD SSSSSSSSSSEEEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRIIIIEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sometimes I want to post that every five minutes and see how quickly everyone hates me, too, but I have other shit to do.

Of course people have every right to do as they please in their own homes and on their own social media. Conversely, if I have to sit in my own home and listen to it for hours on end, I have every right to comment on it. I think they're annoying, they think I'm annoying. I try to make it light and fun online when I can. Admittedly it was difficult the day I was in bed with a sinus migraine and surrounded, as I was, with barking dogs and fans wilding out, I was a bitch online. I'll own up to that. It's perfectly legal for your overzealous neighbors to make noise during the day. It just sucks when you're sick and there's nothing you can do about it. Y'all go ahead and make you noise and I'll make mine.

Unpacking "God Made Girls"

Okay, so I just heard the song for the first time and I want to get my first-blush response down. I know nothing about RaeLynn that I didn't learn from watching the video, so I have no reason to malign her as a person. I mean, yeah. When she sings she sounds exactly like the “dumb girl” voice I do that makes my mom crazy, but that's a critique of her lack of talent, not her character.

However . . .

God made girls to make boys get dressed and clean up and go to church?? God made girls to flirt and wear cute clothes??

“Something beautiful and breakable that lights up in the dark.”

Fuck you.

Now, I'm certain that most of us ladies have done one or more of these things at one time or another. I don't want to traduce the “girly” girls for being a certain way. All girls are real girls, whether they wear pretty skirts or not. Shit, I'm from Seattle – lots of the boys wear pretty skirts, too. If that's your genuine personality, you go!! But to intimate that girls were put upon this earth by some deity specifically to do these things?? Make him wait for us to get cute, “drag” him around, pressure us to have sex (“flirt” but “put up a fight”), I have to call bullshit. I think the song was meant to be sweet and innocent and cute, but it's really destructive.

I guess now that Taylor fucking Swift has come out of the feminist closet, straight, white, Christian, conservative Nashville needed a new it-girl; someone non-threatening that could drive home the message that girls were not meant to be self-sufficient or complete or okay unless they're straight, white, Christian, and conservative.

I usually avoid YouTube comments, but the ones attached to this monstrosity of a “music” video are doozies. Things like “who said anything in this song that's sexist??” Or, according the geniuses on YouTube, “sexest,” “sextest” or “sexiest.” Were we listening to the same song??

Just an aside, fellow feminists, but maybe that's where the movement has gone wrong all these years?? Some people don't know the difference between “sexist” and “sexiest.” Maybe they're not misogynists at all?? They're just dumb as a bag of hair.

I kid. Anyway . . .

Maybe I'm just old and bitter and gross, or whatever, but this fucking song is sexist. Saying in no uncertain terms that God made girls for boys is inherently sexist. That we were put on this earth to keep them clean and straight and to be “fragile” and their passenger - “singin' in the front seat” - smacks of patriarchy. I'm of the school of thought that a young woman can be flirty and pretty and wear a dress while being intelligent and funny and cool, but the song doesn't mention any of the latter. Some of us aren't soft. Sometimes when we're “loud” we're doing something other than crying and berating the men for not holding the door. Once more, none of these options are on the proverbial menu. The song doesn't say that God made girls to read books or sit in the driver's seat or go to law school. It's all about how we're here to be sweet and soft and fragile and difficult and to take care of our men. Those are lovely things, but that's not all we do as women, is it?? Ever?? That doesn't mean that every girl that doesn't go to law school is any less of a woman, but the song paints us into a corner. God made girls to do these simple-minded, silly little things. Don't get me wrong, y'all: some of the smartest, most hard-working, sass-mouthed women I know are SAHMs, conservatives and proud wives. But that's not all they are. God didn't put them here on earth to be decorations or nannies to their men.

It's pretty fuckin' degrading to everyone to assume that men need women to make them want to clean themselves, is it not?? Men are capable human beings. They can feed and dress themselves and get themselves to church of their own accord. I think that messages that they can't are why I know so many grown women that say things like, “oh, he's just a dad. He doesn't know anything.” Women with smart, educated, successful, nice, caring husbands can't be expected to remember to pick up their children from school, or to wear clean clothing because he's just a dude?? You have got to be kidding me. That is such a vile, condescending idea to sell anyone, especially young people. It does appear to explain to me, to least on surface level, the right-wing talking point that gender equality is bad for women. If they can instill the idea from childhood that women are meant to do these things and men are meant to do those things and everything else is against God's plan, well, then the conservatives are rescuing all the sweet, soft damsels in distress from the evil feminists that believe everyone is capable of choosing his-or-her life path and should be able to do so. 'You don't want to go out there into the world by yourself, sweet girl. Stay home. Look cute. Take care of your man. If you don't you're not only disappointing God, you're a militant ball-buster.' It's taken me a long time to even be able to get from point a to point b on that one. Believe me, without a map to follow that logic I became disoriented more than once. I still can't comprehend how or why that's a good thing. Hey, if you believe that God made you to be the way girls are described in this song, then that's all gravy. Yo go, girl. What I cannot get behind is the idea that it's how your God made all girls to be. I don't accept that.

I'm not always sure about the whole God thing, but I'm sick to fucking death of hearing how those of us that don't fit into this demarcated category are somehow doing it wrong.

God made girls to wear pink. And black. And sweat pants. And swimwear.

God made girls to argue and get loud, be opinionated – not just in the home but in the world. Vote. Teach. Run for office. Raise kids. All of the above. None of the above, if that's what blows your proverbial dress up. Hell, be Wendy Davis and wear a pretty skirt and pink running shoes while filibustering for hours.

God made girls “for dancin' to our own beat.” Ours. Whether that's bubblegum country or punk rock is for us to determine, with or without God and definitely without paternalistic condescension.

I can't wait for the parodies of this song, and I really can't wait until the drag queens get a hold of it. God's 'bout to tell everyone, “I'm 'bout to rock your world.” Because God also made gurls.

Place that in your narrow mind and stretch it, y'all.