Tag Archives: Relationships

Mental Wellness, Decisions, and Living in the Moment

For those of you who’ve been following me for a while, you may be aware that I’m not … entirely well, mentally. Clinically, I suffer from bipolar type 2, meaning I am often depressed, but pass through phases of unusual energy, activity, and productivity. Internally, that feels like I can’t trust myself from day to day to know how I might feel at any given moment, and that’s given rise to a sense of despair in and of itself, only because I feel like I really don’t know myself very well at all.

In some ways, it’s easier to deal with my condition when I’m severely depressed, because it’s a familiar old feeling. Somehow there’s a comfort in despair, in misery and loneliness, in knowing that nothing will ever change. It’s difficult, of course; but comforting. During those depressive phases, I sleep too much, get nothing done, can’t clean the house or even take care of myself to a large degree. It’s a huge stressor on my personal and professional relationships, and the worst part is that it’s often triggered when I forget to take (or run out of) my meds, at which point I spiral into a downfall of self-pity in which I continue to not take my meds. It can take weeks, if not months, to emerge from these cycles of despair, and when I’m down in it – to quote Trent Reznor – there’s really nothing to be done to bring me out of it except the slow progression of time.

Because of the frequency of these depressive episodes, I’ve taught myself to try and take life not even one day at a time, but literally one moment at a time; where I might be laughing at a joke one moment, I could turn into a stone wall of misery the next. It’s a rollercoaster, to put it mildly, and the only way I know how to cope with it is to not think about it. I dissociate from my own internal sense of self, and simply allow myself to feel – whatever feelings those might be, in the moment, for the moment. What’s to come is unknown, and what’s happened is forgotten in the past; there is only the present, ticking away one second at a time.

While this works well enough as a coping mechanism for when I’m depressed, it becomes a hinderance to a functional adult life when I’m not. Most people (I guess), by the time they reach middle age, have some semblance of a sense of self; they know who they are, what they like and don’t like, and how they might react to any given situation. I … do not. Living life perpetually in the moment is not as liberating as it might sound, because I really, truly don’t know how I feel about anything. If something seems like a good idea in the moment, I’ll probably go for it – even if, in hindsight, it was a terrible decision. And I can’t remember how I felt about it after the moment’s gone, nor can I predict how I might feel about it in the future. It’s a hazy mist of indecisiveness that leads me to sometimes rash decisions, and sometimes a crippling inability to make a decision.

For example: I am trying to apply to graduate school to continue my education that I left behind almost twenty years ago. This is the longest-term, biggest decision I have ever made in my life, and I still don’t know how I feel about it. Some days I’m anxiously excited to hear about my application, to know if I’m going to get in to my chosen college and be able to pursue a new career. Other times, I feel terribly overwhelmed, and questioning whether I’m making the right choice at all. I worry that I made a decision in the heat of a manic episode, and now I’m going to be dealing with the fallout for the rest of my life.

This is what I deal with every single day. What I have energy for today, I will lack tomorrow. What I feel happy about today, I will regret tomorrow. And what I did yesterday is a mystery, unknown to me why I did it or how I felt about it.

It’s a difficult way to live, but now, almost four decades into my life, I really just don’t know how else to exist. I might splurge on an excessive expense because I feel like it, and pay it off on my credit card for the next two years. I once bought a car on a whim because I wanted a new one. As a teenager, I put my hand through a window because I was annoyed at something.

But, despite it all, I know I am capable. I have written books, albums and symphonies. I have completed projects that some people only dream of starting. I know I have a strong person within me; I just can’t find him most of the time. And when I do, it feels fraudulent, a kind of self-reflected imposter syndrome. Yet, I persevere, because – at the end of the day – I don’t know how else to live.

Just one single day at a time.

The Complexities of Human Interaction, or, How to Know Your Friends

A thing happened recently that put my connections with other people into question. Unfortunately I can’t go into specifics, but it brought to light a few different things in relation to my personal relationships with quite a number of people, and made me wonder exactly how strong the bond between people is – and what kind of tests those bonds can withstand.

To put things into perspective, let me offer an analogy. Imagine, if you will, that you are a doctor. One day, a friend tells you that someone you both know has cancer, but doesn’t want to talk about it. They’ve refused to see a specialist, haven’t started any treatment, and don’t have a plan to deal with it – but they are telling everyone around them what’s happened. (If this seems an unlikely scenario, I actually have an uncle who once did exactly this.)

As a doctor, you feel a responsibility to help this person, but you’re not an oncologist, and don’t have the knowledge or skills to treat them. Instead, you approach someone who is a cancer specialist, and describe the situation to them. You don’t tell them any names, and you don’t give them anything that could identify the person you’re talking about – you just provided a general idea of what’s going on, in order to gain advice and perspective on how to help.

However, after you see the specialist, word gets back to the cancer-sufferer that you spoke to a specialist about them. They accuse you of name-dropping, going behind their back, and suddenly cut you off almost completely without giving you an opportunity to explain what actually happened.

This is the scenario I find myself in today, not with someone I know suffering from cancer, but rather with an extremely toxic work environment. A number of people at my place of work have started ostracizing me for sharing their feelings with managers, despite having done so anonymously, and with the sole intent of trying to lessen the toxicity of the atmosphere and make it an enjoyable place to work once more.

It’s particularly frustrating because virtually no one who has behaved like this has actually approached me, asked me what was going on, or even shown the courtesy to judge me based on what I’ve actually done, and not on what they’ve heard second-hand.

It’s also fascinating from a human interaction perspective, because it has really highlighted to me just how easily people can fall into a dark place of mistrust and paranoia, just from a few tidbits of misinformation. Quite suddenly rumor becomes fact, and in the space of a few moments, someone who was once trusted and liked becomes a pariah.

The most hurtful part is the fact that these are people I trusted myself, people I connected with … people I thought of as friends. For my part, of course, I still do, but I don’t really know what they all think.

There are couple people, however, who didn’t buy in to the hype; a couple of folk who either trusted me as a friend, or at the very least approached me to know the truth of the matter. Some of these people I would have expected; others were a little bit of a surprise, but a welcome one, naturally.

Fear and mistrust are terrible things, and lead to toxic, destructive relationships. I don’t know whether these broken relationships will ever be repaired, and if they are, if they’ll end up as strong as they once were. I understand that this is how people feel, and I understand that I might have done things that, on the surface, appeared to support those feelings of mistrust.

However, the one thing I’ve learned is that a person’s feelings, thoughts and emotions can override logical observation – but in people with a higher level of emotional maturity, they don’t allow it to. To those who came to me, and those who trusted me, and those who stopped to ask what was really true – I thank you from the bottom of my heart. You are the reason I can still face going to work.

For the rest of my friends … I still love you. I don’t blame you, and I hope we can soon mend the rift between us.

And for everyone else in the world, please remember: things are not always what they seem. Someone who might seem detrimental might actually be trying to help, and those who profess to help might not be so altruistic in their motives. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t trust your friends – only that, if you actually value their friendship, provide them the courtesy of asking them the truth directly, rather than relying on second- and third-hand rumors.

Movie Night: The Lobster

Year: 2015
Genre: Black Comedy … ?
Cast: Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Jessica Barden

In a dystopian near future, single people, according to the laws of The City, are taken to The Hotel, where they are obliged to find a romantic partner in forty-five days or are transformed into beasts and sent off into The Woods.

There is very little lobster in The Lobster. In fact, I don’t think there was one at all.

This film carries with it the dubious accolade of being one of the most bizarre movies I’ve watched in recent years. I read the above description before watching it, and I’m not sure whether I should or shouldn’t have; it certainly helps explain a lot of the exposition, but there’s a sense of utterly nonsensical mystery that stems from not knowing the premise from the outset.

The Lobster bears many of the hallmarks of an indie film trying its best to not fit into any particular genre; billed as a black comedy, there were moments I laughed perhaps only because I thought it was meant to be funny, and not because it actually was. In fact, there were more scenes I found outright disturbing than I found funny. It’s interesting, as these are some of the same comments aimed at my alter-ego young adult novel, 22 Scars – that it tries almost too hard to be edgy, at the expense of plot and character clarity.

For example, very few characters are named, and only when necessary; even Rachel Weisz is known only as the short-sighted woman. Another key character is referred to throughout the film as the heartless woman. There are no place names – only The Hotel and The City – and even when these settings are abandoned for the wild woods, there is very little reference to anything grounded in reality.

In fact, the very premise – that single adults are transformed into animals if they fail to find a partner in 45 days – becomes something of a MacGuffin to the themes of love and lust. The point of the movie – if there even is one – is tenuously that love can’t be forced, but can be found in the strangest of places. To this end, it hardly matters that the threat hanging over the characters’ heads is transfiguration – it could have been death or exile, for all it matters – but rather that there simply be some impetus for the characters to connect with each other in a context where they have very little other reason to.

In the end, there are enough bizarre moments to elicit a kind of disbelieving guffaw – in some ways, a funnier film than Crazy Rich Asians, which we had watched earlier in the day – but they are overshadowed by the wide brushstrokes of disturbing insanity, including a woman jumping from a window and breaking her neck but not dying, and a frankly cringe-inducing final scene. I would hardly label The Lobster as a comedy – black or otherwise – but perhaps closer to an essay on love; a kind of parable for a society that praises social relationships for their appearance rather than their substance.

Either way, The Lobster is a film that I would recommend only to those who have the nerve to stomach some truly troubling material, and despite that recommendation, hardly one I would watch again any time soon. As one of my friends put it, there were multiple moments throughout where I asked myself why I was still watching it at all.

4/10 would watch again.