This is All Arnie's Fault

I’m not super clear why I’m doing this and I don’t expect anybody to ever read it. There’s a lot of stuff on the Internet and you can surely find something better to do with your time. But I’ve been writing online for thirteen years and I’m trying to get a writing job and also turning a pilot script into a podcast and lately I can’t write anything because I’m depressed.  So I’m going to try writing about depression just so I can stay in the habit of writing.  This is extremely self-indulgent, I know.  But I expect this to go unread, so what does it matter?  I’m not apologizing to a non-existent audience.

And let me clarify that I’m not an expert in depression.  I know how I feel, and I didn’t know that’s what depression was until I saw that episode of BoJack Horseman about his internal monologue.  I’m a giant Midwesterner and I don’t know how feelings work or how to talk about them, so I can only learn from TV. Point is, I’m not coming at this from a place of knowledge or insight.  It’s how I feel and that’s all I’m able to comment on. Maybe it helps somebody, maybe it’ll help me.  Maybe it’ll just sit here on the Internet and die of exposure. I don’t know. 

So why now? The depression, I mean. But, you know, duh. The world is on fire. Between the pandemic and the encroachment of a police state and the fact that we all know Trump is actually going to be re-elected no matter what we do, it’s a lot. We should all be depressed. But this has been an issue for me in the past without me fully understanding it, and part of how I deal with it is by focusing on things that don’t really matter. I’ve been writing about TV since 2007. I love it. And I’m arguably too emotionally involved. At the very least, pop culture nonsense puts pins in the calendar for things to look forward to. Every month, on my website, I used to do a piece on the first of the month about the things I was excited about and that really did a lot to help me manage. This movie is opening on the fifth, season premiere on the eleventh, new Mario game on the 23rd. 

And I don’t mean to imply that’s all I have in my life.  I have friends and I like them.  They’re good people.  But part of my whole deal is that I don’t believe anybody would remain friends with me if it takes any additional effort, so I try to keep all this to myself.  There are a couple of people that I feel comfortable coming to when I’m having a bad time but given the overall state of things, I don’t want to keep putting extra burdens on them. 

There are other things – obviously a pandemic means that I don’t get to go to movies anymore and that’s something that really made me happy. No restaurants or bars. Home and work and one of those two things is terrible. So even when I want to retreat into dumb stuff because the big things are too much to process, the dumb stuff isn’t there anymore. I’ll admit I should have maybe dealt with this sooner or in a healthier way, but that also wouldn’t exactly be the first thing I did with a time machine. 

Also, I realize that I’m in a supremely privileged position as a straight white male. I don’t mean to imply for one second that my problems are in any way important and I’m incredibly lucky not to be the victim of any systemic prejudice in any form. But I still have to deal with being me and as comparatively easy as it is, I’m having a hard time with it. But by all means, if you have a choice between reading this and reading the work of somebody from a marginalized group, go check them out. EJ’ll be just fine.

So what convinced me I finally needed to do something about this depression? Well, it was the podcast Hello from the Magic Tavern. Which is already weird, but specifically it was an ad read. Host Arnie Niekamp did an ad for an online counseling service and he mentioned early on that being from the Midwest, this wasn’t something that came naturally to him, and I felt that. And then he closed out the ad by saying “I’m rooting for you”, and I burst into tears at my desk at work. It’s not like he was talking directly to me, but just for a moment it felt like somebody was rooting for me and It was overwhelming. And that’s when I realized this is maybe not going to go away on its own and I have to start taking some steps.  

This is the first of those steps. An utterly self-indulgent blog that nobody will ever see.  But it might help me to figure out what my deal is and I think just performing the mechanical act of writing regularly will be helpful in and of itself. If I can keep in practice, maybe I can get back to writing jokes about mad scientists and butts again. That’s the dream, at least.