John My Beloved

Just watch this.

#sparkofmadness

I was sixteen when I had my first panic attack.

It was at a sleepover at my best friends' house. It was late and everyone was asleep. I was lying in the same guest bed I'd slept in countless times before. I was shivering uncontrollably. My hands and feet were freezing and wouldn't warm up. I was shaking so hard I was sure Molly, sleeping next to me, would wake up. I curled up, tucking my feet underneath me and shoving my hands under my arms, hoping to warm up.

But a wave of nausea sent me lurching to the bathroom down the hall. I was certain I'd be sick. I collapsed in front of the toilet, braced for unpleasantness. But nothing happened. I just sat there, shaking and weak and nauseated and terrified.

I was about to die. Something deep inside was irretrievably broken, a malfunction that couldn't be fixed. I was certain of it. I knew for sure that my body had betrayed me, that some small mechanism in brain or heart had started clicking just out of sync with everything else and that these were my last moments. Dread washed through me, a slow molten lead that carried sparks of helpless adrenaline. My heart pounded, my head swam, and I couldn't. stop. shaking.

It didn't even occur to me to wake anyone up, to call an ambulance, to ask my friends' parents what was happening. Whatever was happening, nothing would stop it. Nothing could protect me. No action I could take, no help from grown ups. Whatever this was, it was happening and it was permanent. Something was irreversibly fractured in the world, in me.

I don't know how long I sat there, huddled on the cold tile, waiting to die.

Eventually the chemicals in my brain started to level out, enough for me to regain some sense of agency. I crept into Becky's bedroom and grabbed a copy of the most comforting book I could think of - Harry Potter & the Sorcerer's Stone - and went back into the hall to get a blanket from the closet. I was certain I was not going to get back to sleep any time soon, so I retreated back to the bathroom. I crawled into the bathtub, cocooned myself in the blanket, and read until the sun came up. The shivering subsided, slowly.

The next day, I tried to explain what had happened, and Molly looked at me, all of thirteen years old, and told me I'd had a panic attack.

I was lucky. For so many reasons. I had a name for what had just happened. I had a diagnosis. I had a starting point for understanding what was happening.

And I have friends who understand mental illness, who suffer from anxiety and compulsive disorders, who have lived with and survived depression and bipolar disorder. I've been surrounded by people who don't stigmatize mental illness. I've felt free to seek out counseling and treatment, because I know my anxiety is not shameful or weird.

My friends gave me a space to talk, and learn, and understand.

My anxiety still interrupts my life. I have heart palpitations and stress headaches that trigger hypochondria anxiety attacks. I have panic attacks (fewer now that I live in sunny Colorado, away from the months of gloom that dominate the Midwest) that cut social outings short. I recently went caving with friends. I love the outdoors, and am fascinated by all kinds of nature. I'm not claustrophobic, but halfway through the cave system, I had to stop. I was overwhelmed with anxiety, and no amount of rational thinking let me shake it off.

I tend to be rational and objective. My anxiety disorder has made me confront the disconnect between logic and emotion, because although I know my fears are unfounded and unlikely, I still find myself unable to power through them. It felt like a failure for a long time.

But I'm surrounded by people who love me. I run in a part of society that doesn't look down on therapy or medication, that sees those things as proactive and admirable, instead of admissions of failure. I learned to hold the cognitive dissonance, to accept that all my rationality is still held in a body controlled by chemicals that sometimes get out of balance. It's okay that my logic sometimes loses against my brain juices.

But not everyone is lucky like me.

In the wake of Robin Williams' death after a long battle with depression, people are talking about mental illness.

He said once that you're only given one little spark of madness, and that you have to use it, and if you let it go out, you've got nothing. He was talking about the part of each of us that sees the world unlike anyone else, that can create things that are new and wonderful.

Becky came up with the idea to use the celebration of uniqueness and creativity to help people talk about mental illness, with the hashtag #sparkofmadness.

Depression is deadliest when it's suffered alone. You feel alienated, and you feel like you're alienating others. It strips you of hope, of objectivity, of the ability to feel the love your friends are giving you. It lies to you.

I had a bout of severe depression at the end of my junior year of college. It was triggered by, stereotypically enough, being dumped, right before my birthday.

I have always been pretty happy, pretty optimistic. I never questioned or really even considered my own self-worth. I knew I was a good person, knew I was loved, knew I was worthwhile.

But for about five months, I stopped believing it. I started thinking of myself as someone it was easy to walk away from. I started thinking that all the love and support my friends showed me was unearned and shameful. It felt like I was lying to them, that they thought I was this admirable thing when I had nothing to offer. I didn't see myself as worthy of love or time or effort, from myself or from anyone else.

I took incompletes in half my courses that semester, which my professors were kind enough to grant. I had spent the previous two decades of my life defining myself as a good student, as someone eager to learn, and even that persona was taken away. Or, I let it slip away.

I found myself crying, and hating myself for crying because it was weak and self-serving, and I didn't really deserve the self-indulgence of tears.

The color went out of things. I fell into a soul-sapping boredom and ennui. No highs, no lows, just a constant bleakness. I took hotter and hotter showers, wishing the heater would be calibrated higher, trying to burn some sensation into my skin. I took up idly harmful hobbies, like drinking slightly too much, or smoking the occasional cigarette. I was still enough of a hypochondriac to prevent me from ever doing anything really damaging, fortunately. But I felt a deep satisfaction in the disregard for my health, a quiet, savage pleasure in self-negation. It was like, well, no one else is willing to admit that I'm not worth much, so I will. I would drag my nails across my arms, leaving stinging welts that would nonetheless fade. I didn't want notice or pity, because I didn't deserve it.

What saved me was my best friends, the ones who helped me navigate the rough waters of anxiety way back when.

I wrote a blog post (back when Xanga was a thing) about how I was feeling. I don't think I was looking for pity or reassurance. The last little treacherous part of me that craved the concern of my friends (the last little part that was still sane and didn't believe depression's lies) felt weak and selfish and greedy. What I wanted was confirmation, was agreement with my viewpoint. I wanted them to realize, Oh yeah, that's right, what have we been thinking, of course you're not worth our time! How silly of us! I wanted to get rid of those links of affection, because the affection hurt me.

But they didn't.

They didn't douse me in trite "It'll be okay"s and "Cheer up"s! They listened to me, and didn't minimize my feelings by telling me I'd feel better soon. They just expressed love, refused to let me hold onto the lies I'd been telling myself. They shared their own battles with depression and anxiety. They chipped away at the unfeeling armor I'd been building up. It sucked.

Cracks started opening up in the armor. Everything hurt. Being selfish hurt. Allowing people to care about me hurt. But it let me entertain the possibility that maybe it wasn't that everyone was deluded about me, but that maybe I was deluded about myself. I set up an appointment to talk with a therapist at the local hospital. My college has an arrangement with the hospital; counseling and therapy are provided for any student who wants it, for free.

I only went for a couple months. We didn't work through any great revelations. I already knew what I needed to be doing, had thought through all the logical side of things. But what helped, what I needed, was someone who didn't know me who cared. My therapist called me kiddo, was generous with concern and affection. I know it's part of the job. But it was good, needed, to be cared about by someone who had never known me happy and whole. For someone who only knew me as broken and raw to still find me worth time and effort, in any capacity, helped me start to see myself that way.

Being depressed wasn't itself something to be ashamed of. It happened to me. It wasn't because I wasn't vigilant enough. It just happened. It's something that happens to a lot of us. For me, it was a brief period, a depressive episode. For others, it's a lifelong struggle, a constant battle to care and be cared for.

Mental illness, like most poisonous things, is a danger when it's hidden and not talked about. When its victims suffer in silence. When it divides us and whispers or screams lies at us.

We fight stigmas against mental illness by having conversations. We move forward by sharing. We win when we speak up and reach out.

You know someone who suffers from mental illness, whether it's anxiety or depression or any other disorder. We all experience hardship and grief. We all need support.

Share your stories. We can lift the stigma against mental illness and therapy. The time to talk about depression is not when it claims a life. It's now, so we can know we're not alone.

Here are more personal stories of fighting mental illness:
#sparkofmadness
Becky's story of fighting compulsion and anxiety
Mickey's story of fighting depression
Allie's story of fighting depression

Learn more about depression:
From the Mayo Clinic
From the National Alliance on Mental Illness

Color

(c) 2014 L Keane

It's been a really long time since I've drawn anything. Last week, my friend Becky asked me to draw her D&D character, a cleric of the Raven Queen named Penny Dreadful. It's Penny's sad fate to remain alive to spread the good word about death to the living. As such, she is a cheerful goth chick.

I know it's silly, but I am hugely, inordinately proud of myself. I've always been pretty bad at coloring things; in school my primary art medium was pencil or charcoal. Shadows and light make sense to me, but color has always been messy.

At any rate, I'm happy with how this turned out. I always find myself a little in love with the characters I draw. This one is the same. I think it's because I managed to capture some kindness in her expression, with a hint of wry, self-deprecating humor. Also, I gave her freckles, and I've always been a sucker for freckles. She seems to be a lot of contradictions - goth and sweet, angular and full, luxurious and austere, soft and sharp, kind and severe. She seems like someone I want to get to know.

People often talk about their art coming to life on their own. Despite how many characters I've written and how many pictures I've drawn, this is the first one that ended up surprising me.

I love that feeling.

I need to start creating more. I also need to collaborate more with Becky, because clearly our visions combine into excellent things.






On my trip to Vegas, I got to play music. Like, with other people who play music. It's been such a long time since I've gotten to just sit and indulge in a boring musician's jam session. Taking turns playing songs, following along with chords you don't know, humming when you don't remember the words. The kind of thing that would be desperately dull for anyone not actively participating.

I miss that. Becky and Molly and Meghan and I used to do this all the time, figuring out a new Decemberists song, or four part harmony to something we loved from the 90s, or just messing around on our guitars.

Playing music on your own can be right, exactly what you need - just you and the keys, just you and your vocal chords, losing yourself to the song, shedding embarrassment, silencing the internal critic for just a little while. I miss the practice rooms in the music building at my college. I'd head over there at midnight, have the security guard let me in. I'd find an empty practice room and sit down at the piano bench, surrounded by plywood pegboard walls that were painted a dispirited bluish grey, and I'd run my fingers along the smooth, cool keys, and I'd put the stress or heartache or worry or anger of the week into the instrument. I would play until I was falling asleep over the keys, hands getting numb with cold, the hum of the empty building the perfect white noise to drown out the circular internal monologue. I'd play until I'd bled off whatever extra emotions had been pressing on the inside of my ribs, hammering them into something beautiful as they escaped.

But college was also a time to play music with people - not polished, tight melodies. Just messy togetherness. No technique, just joy or heartbreak. Twining your voice around someone else's, peeled and raw, not worried about sounding great or being impressive. Just sharing.

It's true that musicians can be self-absorbed. I'm speaking as a musician here. It's true that we're showoffs and vain and competitive. But there are times - just sometimes - when you just close your eyes and abandon the ego, when the music is more important than who's making it and the only thing real is being a part of it.

I miss being able to make the space for those moments to happen in.

I think I've been starving the artist in me for too long. I have to remember to take the time to put on the admittedly-sometimes-pretentious glasses (metaphorical ones, of course) and to see the world and myself like an artist.

best friends

Leaving Becky always feels a little like cutting off a limb. I know it won't kill me and that I'll be able to adapt to the sudden space where there used to be something important, but it's never easy or painless. This is what happens when you've had the same best friend since the age of eleven.

Cool kids hanging out by the fire hydrant. I think I was ... fourteen here?
Look, I didn't own a pair of jeans meant for females until I was sixteen,
whereas Becky has always been Fashion (that is a belt made from a jumprope).

Have I ever mentioned how we met? It was early August, the summer after fifth grade. I'd just moved to Illinois from my childhood home in Michigan. I hadn't made any friends and mostly stuck in my room, looking at the books I'd read too much, trying to figure out if my stuffed animals would make me feel less lost (they didn't, really).

But that weekend, our subdivision hosted a big neighborhood potluck with a DJ (usually one of the high school kids) and lots of games for the kids to play, and lots of beer for the parents.

I don't remember what I did for most of the early evening. Probably sat with a plate of potato salad on my lap and my face stuck in a book, ignoring everything around me. But eventually, once the last little gold of sunset had started to go blue, I got up and joined the other kids dancing by the DJ's station. It was probably less an urge to socialize than the fact that it was too dark to keep reading.

At any rate, I turned around and there in front of me was a girl with a handkerchief tied fashionably over her hair. I don't know what we said, but I know we danced like crazy, doing that grabbing-hands-and-dipping-down-and-touching-the-ground-behind-you-with-your-free-hand-and-then-popping-back-up-and-switching-hands-and-repeating-the-whole-process-again thing. Is there a name for that dance move?

About a week after that, our moms conspired. My mom told me to walk down the street and see if Becky wanted to play. And that was it. From that point on, I spent almost as much time at her house as I did at my own. I got to know Molly (who had to write my name on her hand so she wouldn't forget it). We spent our time thundering up and down the stairs of their house, pretending we were rock climbers, or nurses during the Revolutionary War, or reenactors working the tourist trade in Sleepy Hollow when weird things start happening, or students at Hogwarts.

Yes.

And when we outgrew playing pretend, our conversations turned to music, books, boys, politics. Almost all my fond and formative memories from adolescence take place with Becky.

On this trip to visit her in Vegas, we talked about how friendship, and pretty much any worthwhile relationship, requires effort. "I think friendship has to sometimes feel like work," she said. Otherwise, what's the point? If you never have issues, you're just existing on surfaces, never digging deeper.




We also meditated on the nature of kindness. It's only partly the conscious curbing of one's naturally selfish instincts. If selflessness and kindness were the same thing, then human doormats would be universally praised. But selflessness taken to the extreme strips you of agency, and without agency, what use can you possibly be? How would you be able to offer anything to anyone? Kindness requires clear perception, objectivity, honesty, agency, generosity, and the knowledge that being kind doesn't necessarily mean being nice. Being kind is about giving, to yourself and to others - not about just sitting there and having things taken from you.

I had a brief conversation with Jamison, too, and he wanted to know if kindness was based upon intent or on actions. That's not an easy question to answer, because an individual doesn't act within a closed system. Kindness is partly intention - although if one's actions are used to further a cruel cause, does that make the act ultimately unkind?

Despite this murkiness, and despite the side of me that demands consistency and logic, I know - with a nonfactual and entirely emotional, body-resonating sureness - that kindness is important.

Tavi Gevinson, creator and editor of Rookie Magazine, has said, "You don't have to be special; you just have to be kind."

And, shit, this sums up my feelings about what kindness is by illustrating what it isn't: the drive to be thought of as better than or more than others. It's okay to be regarded and well thought of - but if that's the end goal and driving force behind your actions? Then, okay, that's a life lived unkindly.



I don't know what it is about visiting Becky in Vegas, but I always come home with an extra dozen pages filled in my journal. Must be something about the sere simplicity of the desert juxtaposed against the tangled wayward mass of humanity that kicks the introspection muscles.

A good influence

 I know I've been referencing my old college blog a lot lately. I promise to produce some fresh material soon.

In the meantime, a recent conversation with Becky and Austin reminded me of something I'd written back in 2008.

Sweat in my eyes. I don't really care. 

I'm sweaty right now. I just ran a mile and did some sit ups and some push ups and core exercises. It hurt. It was great. I can't do the splits anymore. At least, I can get all the way down, but it hurts like hell. But there's still hope. 

My iPod died halfway through, but I didn't notice for a while, and when I did, it didn't really matter. It was nice being completely mindless for a while.

It struck me, as I was walking along an uneven sidewalk early this afternoon, that I no longer care. I've spent my life identifying myself as weird or nerdy or, most recently, awkward. And while I may be all of these things, I think I'm done with categories. It's the cheap way out. An excuse. A reason to avoid taking risks. A reason to run away.

If I act, I want it to be my own action - not the inevitable result of fate. And I want to stop labeling things as awkward. They are what they are. I've let too many things go by, left a lot of things unsaid or undone, or have said or done too much, because of a word. Because of awkward. 

It's stupid to let a word govern my life. 

I realize that being awkward has been a shield. I've held it between myself and everyone else the way some people hide behind their hair, or behind the excuse of alcohol, or whatever other guards we manifest to take the blame instead of us when we fuck up. I've used the excuse before - even recently - saying with a shrug, "I'm awkward," which really means "I can't be held accountable, it's fate, it isn't my fault."
But I think, now, I want it to be my fault. 

My actions, or lack of actions, my words, my thoughts, and doubts, hesitations, recklessness, caution, wins, are my own. When I succeed, I want it to be by my own hand. When I fail, I want it to be me failing. Without grace, without frills or excuses, just me alone. Responsible. 

Austin had mentioned that "awkward is a state of mind". I went back and reread my post and was gratified to realize that, although I've forgotten to keep a weather eye out for self-limiting labels, I've done a decent job of living without them. (Maybe I've gotten a little too self-congratulatory instead.)

At any rate, I hope I can take more risks, live a little more open, let the definition of who I am gain a little more depth, a few more colors.

As maudlin and self-important as my teenaged self might have sometimes been, she was also pretty perceptive. Gotta remember to let her have a good influence on me now.