Tag Archives: mental health

The Only New Year’s Resolution You’ll Ever Need: 2024 and Beyond

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THE ONLY NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION YOU’LL EVER NEED

 

 

Do one pushup, with a straight back, chest to ground, perfect form.

 

Can’t do that? Do one pushup from your knees.

 

Can’t do that? Do one push-off from the wall.

 

(Can’t do that? Call your doctor and make an appointment now, you are in a bad, bad way.)

 

Then tomorrow, do it again. Do it every day until you get comfortable. Then do two. When two becomes comfortable, do three.

 

Can you already bust out 50 pushups? Cool. Bust out 51.

 

Can you walk comfortably 10 minutes? Walk 11.

 

Can you jog for 60 minutes straight? Jog 61.

 

Do you need to reduce your added sugar intake? (Spoiler alert: Yes.) Total up all your added grams of sugar on January 1, and on January 2, eat 1 gram less. When that’s comfortable, eat 2 grams less.

 

You do not need to join a gym. Save your money. You do not need expensive running shoes. Save your money. All you really need is your body, and a clear space on the floor about the size of a prison cell.

 

The only resolution you ever need to make is to get 1% better every day. For the rest of your life.

 

Do that, and I swear to you you’ll be stunned at how many goals you’ve crushed this time next year. Physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, financial, creative. Whatever.

 

That is how I went from weighing 120 pounds and in the worst depression of my life to weighing more than 150 pounds (lean muscle!) and completing 13.5 hours of a physical crucible coached by retired Navy SEALs.

 

When a 60+ year-old retired combat veteran Master Chief who just an hour previous was screaming in your ear to GET OFF YOUR KNEES, LEVEN! shakes your hand, looks you in the eye, and says, “You did it! I’m proud of you!” you feel that shit in your soul, and it lasts forever.

 

The first time you bust out a Murph (1 mile run, 100 pull ups, 200 pushups, 300 squats, and another 1 mile run) in 75 minutes, you realize your old way of thinking about limitations is over.

 

The first time you bang out 50 pushups in 2 minutes, you start to re-evaluate your creative, artistic, and business goals.

 

The first time you knock out 5,000 words of a novel in one day, you realize the old paradigms don’t apply anymore.

 

Do not compare yourself to anyone else. You are only competing against your own baseline to get 1% better today than yesterday at your goal.

 

That’s it. You got this. 1% better than yesterday.

 

Happy New Year 2024!

 

 

What is your “Location?”

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Another school assignment I thought some of you may enjoy. So…enjoy!

The assignment was to write two pages answering these questions:
Where are you from?
What are your stories to tell?
Who are you writing for/to?

LOCATION
I am from Scottsdale, Arizona, a small city that abuts the capital city of Phoenix, Arizona along its western border, and connects to other smaller cities like Mesa and Tempe. You can tell who’s native here because we pronounce the latter temPEE, not TEMpee or, worse, temPAY like commentators are apt to do on television for our pro sporting events.

The term “small city” is relative. Phoenix proper recently attained 5 million residents, and at last check was the fifth largest city in the U.S. by population. The state clocks in at 7.2 million.

Until moving to Canada last year, I had lived in three houses total. No apartments, no dorms, and not including a few weeks here and there at my mother-in-law’s house in between buying or selling homes.

Forty-eight years old. Three houses. This sort of stat is true for very, very few people, I think.

I’m not ashamed of it. On the other hand, my 11-year-old has already lived in three homes, and one of those is in another country. I don’t mind that I didn’t move a lot, but I do sometimes wonder what positive and negative impacts it had on me. Certainly I accumulated a lot of stuff, and most of it is useless. I have toys from early childhood still. (Which, happily, are put to use by my children.) I think living in the same town my entire life instilled a sense of place in my heart, but also gave me a certain fear of change—even when change would be for the best.

Part of my reason for moving out of my country was specifically to get out of and hopefully alter (or at least interrogate) my Location. Just before leaving, I livestreamed a tour of my hometown, talking about memories and nostalgia; about lessons learned. What I realized at the end of the stream was that I could no longer be in the same city as the house I grew up in and still make forward progress in my own emotional well-being.

I owned a VHS video camera from sophomore year of high school through to after the turn of the millennium. Thus, not only do I have vivid memories of where I grew up because I lived in one place for so long, I also have literal, visual proof of what it looked like, what I looked like, what my family looked like; how we interreacted; and the ways in which that place affected me and continues to affect me today.

I lived on Windsor Avenue, just a block or so from the border of Phoenix. I had a large backyard and a large house. My mother and father both divorced their first spouses, and then had me, though I’ve learned recently the pregnancy was likely an accident. I have six older brothers and sisters who, when I was born, were being forced to live Brady-Bunch style in this house. The next-youngest is at least ten years older than me, so I have few memories of them. They were out of the house while I was very young.

Only later in life did I realize my family was wealthy while I grew up, at least by modern American standards, though we possessed few of the trappings of wealth. My parents drove the same cars for twenty years. They didn’t go out shopping or take expensive vacations (in fact, they rarely travelled). When I was young, we belonged to a country club, but while I did learn to play tennis and sometimes used the pool, fundamentally I did not fit in with the other kids there. Eventually we left the club, though I’m not sure why and will probably never know, because one Location my family shares is that of secrecy.

No—that’s the wrong word. It’s not secrecy so much as brushing all negativity under the rug and pretending (insisting!) that Everything Is Fine.

Especially when it is not.

But I grew up with enormous pine tress that I’d climb to the top of. This large back yard became the scene of fights with monsters, fights with pirates, wars with foreign invaders. (My early moral compass originated from 1980s action films, for better or worse). I climbed and swung and hid and spied. At 13, I missed the state record for pullups (18!) by one, only because I’d spent my whole life pulling myself up in my favorite tree in the yard.

I went to an ELCA Lutheran preschool, then to a Missouri Synod Lutheran school for K-8. The impact of those years cannot be overstated. The education was good, but the physical punishments were not. It was a small school with a graduating 8th grade class of perhaps 30. I had many enemies, but I also learned from one friend in particular the truest, deepest meaning of friendship that I carry to this day. This school, in hindsight, got many things wrong about childrearing and my education (this was 1979 to 1988), but they also got a few things exactly right: for instance, being given the chance to use a teacher’s VHS editing deck to make my first movie, or being the only student taken to Arizona State University’s “Young Authors Conference,” where I presented my 30,000-word fantasy, Derro The Warrior. I still have both the book and the movie. They were far too formative to let go.

After grade school, I attended a public high school (culture shock!), where I became a part of a group of chosen family. These are people who made deliberate choices to love me at my best and worst, and I them. This Location matters more to me than any physical locale. Later my Location became the intentional part of another family, which informs many of my choices today, particularly as it pertains to how I raise my own children.

My Location is the heat and sun and lack of rain. My Location is the little hills we call “mountains” because we (Phoenicians) have never seen the Rockies or Appalachians.

My Location is a time in U.S. American history before school shootings, Internet, cell phones, or Covid. It is decidedly European in descent (English, Swedish, and German), with the attendant ignorance of privilege that comes with such ancestry; my current Location is trying to understand, question, and repair that ignorance.

My Location is the first hand knowledge of violence enacted upon my body by my own hand and by others, and the lifelong repercussions of that violence.

My Location is alone, and I am grateful for that, because it is what fostered my imagination and led me to become a storyteller. And as a storyteller, I take my responsibilities to my readers very seriously, particularly if they are young. Particularly when I see myself in them. Too many of them.

I am happily from the 1980s and 1990s. I am from couch forts on Saturday morning, sugar cereal, and Godzilla movies on “World Beyond” (KPHO TV 5 Phoenix!) long before they were eviscerated on MST3K. I am from bike rides to Thomas Mall to go to B. Dalton and Waldenbooks and buy the newest Judy Blume. Or Stephen King. The aroma of ink and paper suffuses my being. I am from winning a bike at Your Movie House on the corner because I rented so goddamn many horror movies when I was far too young to be watching them.

The stories that are mine to tell are the stories of young people who were or are not seen. My stories are often about dismissal, which is different (and I argue, worse) than rejection. I am here to tell stories of fear, pain, loss, grief—and triumph in despite of them.

I write for the weirdos and drama department kids. I write for the punks and the outcasts. I write for the kids who were legally beaten in school systems and who knew instinctively that family in its truest sense was a selected relationship. I write for the abused, abandoned, and neglected. My goal is to give them escape and entertainment and confirmation of their trials; I want my work to tell them, Yes, I see you. You are safe here.

Because my earliest Location was the opposite of that. My later Location embodied it. I want to pass it on to anyone who needs it.

Book Review: Amy Chelsea Stacie Dee by Mary G. Thompson

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Amy Chelsea Stacie Dee may appear at first glance to be a YA thriller along the lines of my own novel, Shackled. That’s certainly what I thought I was getting into when I picked the book up in preparation for the World Fantasy Convention where I was going to meet the author, Mary G. Thompson. Mary is a brilliant woman who holds about eighteen different degrees including a J.D. and an MFA. While I’m sure some of that education played a role in the crafting of Amy Chelsea Stacie Dee, there are some aspects of storytelling that are harder to learn than others, some things that just sort of have to come naturally. One of those things is Voice, and that’s an aspect of fiction writing I’m constantly trying to hone in my own novels and in the work of the students I have in various writing classes or critique groups.

Amy Chelsea Stacie Dee is about one girl once named Amy, then named Chelsea, and now trying to reclaim her identity as Amy again after escaping from the kidnapper who took her and her beloved cousin Dee. The kidnapper, a disturbing man with a doll fetish, re-named both girls during their six-year-long incarceration with him in the forests of Oregon. How Amy came to escape is not something I can share without spoilers, but it drives the central plot of the book and explains why, after returning to her old life as a teenager, Amy is now plotting to go back to that scary cabin in the woods.

Overall this is an emotional journey through severe trauma, and I think it has great value for those who are sort of bystander-survivors: those family and friends who did not experience the victim’s trauma personally and therefore may have trouble fully understanding what the victim suffered. There’s great value in the story for that reason alone.

But again, one thing Mary has here in abundance is Voice, and for me that’s really the defining line between great contemporary YA and cheap knock-offs who got into the market when it was hot. Not to name any names, but, you’d recognize them. There is not a lot of external, physical action in the story, although what action Mary does write is handled very well. It’s the internal action that gets the lion’s share of the pages, and that’s good. It works. I start and do not finish a ton of books these days, as my friends at my book club can attest, but I came back to Amy Chelsea Stacie Dee again and again to find out what would happen next. Mary does an outstanding job of capturing inner turmoil and symptoms of what is most likely PTSD, though a diagnosis is never actually given. As someone who still struggles with some of those symptoms, I felt that Mary did an excellent and considerate job of handling Amy’s trauma and recovery.

As it pertains to writers, I recommend this book for the same reason I recommended The Girl With All The Gifts by M.R. Carey — there is no predicting what is going to happen. Even after one of the biggest reveals in the book, the story’s not over, and there is just no guessing how things will turn out from page one until the very end. Like The Girl With All The Gifts, it is not fast paced, but it is deliberately paced, and our attachment to the characters is such that we have to find out how all this tragedy is going to resolve. So for you writers, I recommend studying how Mary constructs this novel in such a way that readers can only keep reading to find out the resolution. This is well worth looking into.

So, grab a copy of Amy Chelsea Stacie Dee, and then let me know what you thought of it. Did the author keep you guessing? Did you feel for the protagonist? Am I way off base on this one? Let me know on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Bookbub, Goodreads…wherever! And be sure to follow Mary G. Thompson for more of her work as well.

 

 

I Hate Me: a #HoldOnToTheLight post

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Because I trained as an actor, this is who I will show you at my events. It is who I wish I was all the time. But it’s not. I hate this guy. Here’s why:

For those of you short on time, here is the pull quote version of what I want to say and my vision for you and the world:

Don’t hurt yourself. Ever. If you do, stop. We need you. Choose today, even if it’s just today, to say, “I’m not going to hurt myself during this particular waking period.” Start there. Then do it again and again and again. Because whatever it is you are hurting yourself for, I know this to be true: it is not your fault.

#WaitOneMinute

I’m gonna tell you something right now that very, very few people have ever been told. But because I believe in the mission of #HoldOnToTheLight, I’m gonna tell you. Okay? I’m trusting you with this. My family—or, rather, the people I am related to by blood—probably aren’t going throw me any parties any time soon for sharing this. They are also unlikely to ever see it.

Okay? You with me? Here we go.

When I was about four or five, my mom rubbed my own shit in my face. A few times. It was supposed to teach me something. It was supposed to teach me how to use the goddamn toilet, in fact. I was having some trouble with that at the time.

Oddly, her approach didn’t work.

So on another occasion, my dad tossed my bare-naked ass into our outdoor chicken coop, where I literally jumped up and down in the air, screaming and terrified that I was either A) going to be left out there all day and all night, or B) the chickens were going to peck me to death, or C) both.

Oddly, that didn’t work, either.

These are two examples of what was considered Good Parenting Of A Preschooler.

Just two. Things that, if I saw someone doing them to my son, no court on Earth would convict me of what I’d do to them.

I didn’t know it was wrong of them to have done this until just a few years ago. Imagine if I’d thought that was normal when my son was born? Who might he become if I hadn’t known this was wrong?

Hold that thought, we’ll come back to it.

Flash forward to the year after high school graduation. Some friends and I got jumped in an apartment building parking lot. Two went to the ER. We didn’t even get a punch in. It wasn’t a big deal, really. Not at the time.

But then a few months later, I was alone in a community college parking lot after dark, and this car full of guys roars into the lot, starts doing donuts around me, and screamed, “WE’RE GONNA KICK YOUR ASS!”

They didn’t. I guess they were “kidding.”

When I got home, I collapsed in my room and couldn’t move. I thought I was going to puke, stroke out, and have a heart attack all at once.

I didn’t. I guess my body was “kidding.”

But I didn’t leave the house after dark for the next three years, either. And for the next several after that, if I did go out at night, it wasn’t without an escape plan. I lost friends. I missed opportunities. I pretended to sleep through my own birthday party so I wouldn’t have to leave the house. I cut lines into my arms to “relieve stress.” For as long as I can remember, I’ve flown into Exorcist-level rages over such slights as the garage door not opening correctly. I beat the almighty fuck out of my head, stomach, and legs. I’ve broken more shit than I can even remember. (Doors used to my favorite target; they were great for roundhouse kicks.)

My friends and readers, I have post-traumatic stress disorder. I never served on a front line and I was never a first responder, so I resisted this diagnosis for  a long time. How could I have PTSD? I’m an author, not a solider, not a cop. I have a friend who was literally blown up in Iraq. (I saw the footage!) He seems to be fine; ergo, I needed to shut up and quit being a fucking wuss.

That’s not how this works.

I developed a panic disorder that night after we got jumped. That was in January 1994. I’ve since gotten pretty much over that, though I still have an escape plan everywhere I go, and I can’t sit in the middle of a row at the movies or other events; always an aisle. So there are lingering effects from that.

The PTSD on the other hand . . . that shit’s still here. I actually have never-before-seen video footage of what the rages look like, and it would be funny, almost, if it wasn’t so fucking creepy. It’s inhuman. I am unrecognizable, even to me.

But it’s getting better, and you want to know why? Because a professional mental health practitioner told me what it was.

That’s the first step. If you cannot get out of bed from crushing sadness, if your only emotional release comes from a blade or a bottle of booze or a bottle of pills, if the slightest surprise noise makes you shrink inside your skin and then blow up with madness (like it does with me)…then something is wrong, and you need—

You deserve to have it checked out.

You don’t have to live like this. You don’t.

People always say “Get help!” What’s that mean? It means finding someone who can tell you what is wrong. Someone who can help you name it. Someone who, like my doctor did for me, can lean forward in her chair, look you in the eye, and say:

“What they did to you was not okay.”

Because eventually, you’ll start to believe it. You’ll start to accept it. And then things start to get better.

Whatever it was that was done to you was not okay.

Go ahead. Say it. Say it out loud to yourself right now. What they did to me was not okay. Because it wasn’t.

Now, I’d been to a whole slew of doctors from a very young age. None of them did much to make me feel better. I’ve done my time in a behavioral health facility over this mess, and that was . . . nice . . . but didn’t stop the rage, didn’t stop the self-hate, didn’t stop the fear.

What did one doctor do that all the others before her couldn’t? Here’s the secret:

I told her the whole story.

See, before that, I kept parts of the hell I’d been through to myself. They didn’t need to know! It was My Fault, obviously. I’d handle it. I’d Been Sick, obviously. My family history had nothing to do with slashing my arms or punching myself all the fuck over.

It sounds silly to write. It might sound silly to read. But that’s the secret. I told her everything, and that allowed her to give me the diagnosis I needed to start the process of feeling better.

My wife, doctor, and I developed a scale of rage from 1 to 10, 1 being “everything’s cool” to 10 being “I am out of control and breaking shit in the house, car, and my body.” It’s been…let’s see…maybe a few months since I had no-holds-barred Level 10 outburst. But I come close every week or two. I probably reach an 8 once every ten days.

But that’s down from a 10 every other week or so.

I hate me more than any ten, a hundred, or a thousand people on earth combined could ever hope to. (Even more than Kirkus and Goodreads reviewers, if such a thing be possible!) That’s my legacy. It’s not my only one, I know, but it’s up there. It is one that I chip away at as best I can. It’s one I will never let my son experience.

I don’t have to live like that. So I try to choose not to. (Try is the operative word. Sometimes it’s all we can do. That’s okay. It counts.)

If your life, or the life of someone you love, has become unmanageable . . . if simple daily tasks feel impossible because of that crushing intangible weight in your heart and mind . . . then today is the day to set up an appointment with someone who can help you name it.

You don’t have to live like this. You don’t.

But you do have to live. I’m here because I know there are people who would miss me if I left. You have those people, too. Don’t let what someone did to you determine the course of your life. They are not worth it. You are better. You are stronger. And hey, there are too many great books yet to read, right?

Stay here. If you can absolutely nothing else today, do that. Stay here. We’ll work on it again tomorrow.

Take care.

+ + +

About the campaign:

#HoldOnToTheLight is a blog campaign encompassing blog posts by fantasy and science fiction authors around the world in an effort to raise awareness around treatment for depression, suicide prevention, domestic violence intervention, PTSD initiatives, bullying prevention and other mental health-related issues. We believe fandom should be supportive, welcoming and inclusive, in the long tradition of fandom taking care of its own. We encourage readers and fans to seek the help they or their loved ones need without shame or embarrassment.

Please consider donating to or volunteering for organizations dedicated to treatment and prevention such as: American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, Hope for the Warriors (PTSD), National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), Canadian Mental Health Association, MIND (UK), SANE (UK), BeyondBlue (Australia), To Write Love On Her Arms and the National Suicide Prevention Hotline.

To find out more about #HoldOnToTheLight, find a list of participating authors and blog posts, or reach a media contact, go to

https://www.facebook.com/groups/276745236033627/

 

 

Maybe this’ll help.

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Note: I wrote this at least a year ago and just didn’t post it. I’m posting it now because I need to read it, and maybe you or someone you know does, too.

I just wrapped up teaching at a conference over the weekend, and it was great. I got to meet rock star authors, and make new friends, and learn a lot, and teach a lot, and it was great. It really was.

And within 24 hours of it ending, I just wanted the whole world to go away.

You know that feeling?

Now, I’m not going to hurt myself again—I’m trying hard not to, anyway, although it is hard sometimes. But yeah, there was definitely a moment or two there where the anger and the sadness and the unfairness and injustice and just the futility of fighting anything anymore got to me.

Some of you know what I’m talking about. That sadness and depression and rage that sits like a ten ton overcoat. And you feel like no one else seems to get it.

Well, I do. But you know what? You’re still kind of right. A lot of people don’t get it. They don’t. A lot of people haven’t gone through what you have. A lot of people have families and friends of the family who didn’t do terrible things to them. Right? Because that’s who it almost always is, isn’t it. They don’t understand that.

That’s okay.

I was reading an article on The Guardian recently about sadness, and making peace with it, and the author made a great point: In Western civilization, sadness and grief have been criminalized, in a sense. Look at our places of business. Someone in your life dies–could be a parent, spouse, or child–and you get ,like, five days to get over it, then it’s back to work, chin up, stiff uppper lip. That’s absurd. Grief can take years.

And no one gives you time off to grieve over other losses. Losing a dream. A love. A pet.

I don’t mean to suggest you shouldn’t work until all grief and sadness is gone. For one thing, that’s just never going to happen in life. What I do mean is that this morning, I got out of bed and I took my kid to school and I went to my coffee shop and wrote. I’d rather have stayed on the couch and watched Walking Dead all day, because, you know, irony. But I got up.

I got up because maybe today will be better. Or tomorrow, or next year.

So if you’re sad, that’s okay. If you’re grieving, that’s okay. Don’t let anyone try to steal it from you. I’m not going to sit up here and tell you to get better, but I will tell you to at least not give up. And don’t hurt yourself. Ask for help, because someone needs you.

Straight up honest: Yesterday, I really missed my hospital, and it wasn’t the first time. I write about that feeling in my novel Shackled, how being in a mental hospital–sorry, behavioral health facility–can become kind of . . . addicting. It’s safe in there. There are fewer rules. There’s lots of nice meds. Everyone smokes, because smoking Camels is always better than shooting heroin or burning yourself with a soldering iron.

If someone hurt you, I am sorry, and it is not okay. Period.

So I want you to get better, yes. I want you to be happy, yes. But you can be happy on a deep, heart level and still be sad or depressed or angry. That’s okay, too. Don’t let it run your life is all. There are good things out there. A peppermint mocha and a laptop with a fresh new Word doc that starts to fill with the words of an urban fantasy novel for example. That’s good shit. (I do still miss smoking, not gonna lie, but anyway…)

Be sad. Anyone who loves you less for it doesn’t deserve your time.

Be sad, but work to feel better. Work to get the things you want in life. Which by default means sticking around so you can do that. However sad you might be, there’s still something you want to do. What is it? Go get it. Show it to us. Share it.

Okay?

 

The Sun Experiment

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I’ve been doing this experiment. I didn’t mean to do it, it just sort of happened, and I can’t make a positive correlation exactly, but it’s been interesting.

I’ve been watching sunrise and sunset.

If you’ve been on social media with friends or family in the Phoenix area recently, or if you live here yourself, you may have noticed a surge in photos of our breathtaking sunrises and sunsets lately. I don’t know what’s been causing them, but man, they’ve really been amazing this past week.

Taking just one minute or two minutes in the middle of the morning rush and the evening rush to stop and look at these ‘rises and ‘sets may have changed how my day goes.

This past weekend, my wife said, “This has been a really good week. What’s different?”

She didn’t intend the question to be a referendum on weeks past, necessarily . . . except it kind of was. Rightfully so. I have not been having a good couple months. Actually, the whole of 2015 has been more shitty than not shitty for our little family, barring a couple of Abrams-lens-flare bright spots like our trip to Germany. Mostly, though? Yeah. Not very good, and the vast majority of that not-goodness has been on me.

But she was right; this week had been different. Why?

Two things. Maybe they will help you, too.

  • I began asking myself in the morning how I wanted to feel when I went to bed. What sorts of things did I want to accomplish, what kind of mood did I want to be in, how did I want my mind and body to feel? Then as the hours of each day went past and night came, before going to bed, I’d run a quick recap and do a systems check: Is everyone safe and healthy? Yep. Did we have a roof, food, and clothes? Yep. So far so good. Did I have a good time with my wife and son, did I get to write, did I get to check some things off on my list? Yep. Did I absolutely lose my shit when the garage door wouldn’t open? No. Okay, then. That’s a good day.

Just running through these little checklists seem to have helped put things into priority for me. Planning ahead to feel good at night seems to have made a world of difference.

Then:

  • I started noticing sunrise and sunset. Just opening the front blinds to look at the incredible cloud formations we’ve had lately, and the prismatic glow of reds and oranges and purples reflected in them. Call it “mindfulness” or “prayer” or “Zen” or whatever, but I just stood and breathed and looked and thought, “That is very, very pretty, and I am fortunate to see it.” That’s all. I’d do the same in the evening. Again, I can’t prove this exercise has changed how my days go, I just know that my days have been better since starting to take that time. One or two minutes, that’s it.

In his last filmed interview, Brandon Lee said:

“Because we do not know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. And yet everything happens only a certain number of times. And a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood? An afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more? Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”

He’s right, of course. I now enjoy taking that minute to see the sun rise because the reality is, I might not see that day’s sunset.

Does that sound grim? SaIMG_1286d? Depressing? Morbid? I used to think so. It’s one of our great failings of American culture that while we fetishize death in all of our entertainment (including the entertainment I provide in my novels), we don’t really talk about it, we don’t really think about it, and we certainly don’t really think it’s going to happen to us.

I had to embrace it. If I didn’t, I’d be a lot more angry today than I am. I have never been a proponent of “living each day like it’s your last,” because then the world would shut down. No, it’s more a matter of this nightly routine I have now: Am I happy with how I feel at the end of this day? If not, what can I do differently tomorrow, if I’m lucky enough to have one?

I don’t know if any of this will help you, but I hope it does.

Enjoy your sunrise.

 

 

 

That Guy

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I knew this guy. When he found out his best friend’s father had a sweet video camera, he immediately got permission to borrow it. Then, with the help of two friends, he made his first horror movie, using this borrowed camera, borrowed editing system, and zero budget. They had no script, and improvised the entire thing based on what this guy had in his head. In fairness, the film was not exactly well-made; I mean, how could it be? But to be fair even further, during its premiere — at his school — one girl did legitimately scream during a jump-scare, so in that sense it was kind of a success.

Also: he was thirteen at the time.

Then I knew this guy who wanted to get into a summer acting program that would have put him on the fast-track to a B.A. in theatre and likely some good acting opportunities around town. Maybe even . . . get paid. But when he and one of his best friends auditioned and the best friend didn’t get in but he did, he didn’t bother signing up for the program. He wasn’t about to waste a summer with a bunch of profs who couldn’t see the talent his friend had, nevermind spending the summer away from his buddies. He was eighteen at the time. Three years later, he and that best friend, along with two other best friends, wrote and staged a one-man show. They got a standing ovation opening night.

(Of course, that was only after he and a totally different best friend grabbed a camera and started shooting a television show in their spare time. He was nineteen at the time. He had a lot of best friends, that guy.)

It’s the same guy who, after seven years of being pretty universally disliked by his classmates, turned to face the kid who’d just insulted his clothes and calmly replied, “Fuck you.” And how the teasing stopped after that. He was thirteen at that time, too.

At fourteen, the seniors in his high school speech and theater department were going nuts because he’d qualified for the State speech tournament his first year, and went on to break to the semifinals that year. One of the “top twelve in the state!” he’d say. But it’s not the breaking to State that I admire; it was his entire attitude, which was — without a single shred of guile — “Does this mean I get to perform again? Oh, okay, cool.”

These are the highlights, of course. The lowlights are far too low for public consumption. But when this guy died (which I think was sometime around early 1994, though spots of his spirit resurfaced from time to time), I couldn’t help but miss that entire Fuck It attitude of his. He wasn’t cruel about it, to the best of my knowledge. He just set his sights on something, and when he did, he generally got it. Whatever he went after, he tended to get. And when he didn’t get it, he’d shrug it off and move on to the next thing. When he and one of his teams got an outrageously positive review of a play they did, they had a party. When they got outrageously negative reviews about another, he shrugged and dismissed the critic as a prick, and moved on.

I really miss that about him. His ability to not give a shit, in the best possible way.

Now, having said all that, the thing that always nags me is that on the one hand, he rarely took no for an answer. He’d get some weird, usually performance-related idea in his head (“Hey, let’s produce a play! Hey, let’s make a movie! Hey, let’s make a movie about a play!”) and then he’d go gather up a crew, most of whom would follow him wherever he led, even if that was to total financial ruin or artistic obliteration. I have no idea how he talked so many otherwise intelligent, rational people into following his craziness, but they did.

I miss that about him as well. I miss that about all of them.

But then on the other hand . . . was what he did really any good? I mean, demonstrably, quantifiably good? By any measure? And what measures can we even use, really? Plenty of mediocre people with mediocre personalities or talents have tasted far greater success, and surely a hundredfold better people with better talent have gone unnoticed. So what does it say about him if he was just sort of middle-of-the-road, relying on the good graces and patience of people in some way beholden to him . . . family, say, or other students who have no choice but to sit through that absurd horror movie.

The thing is, they didn’t make a movie; he did. But if it wasn’t all that good by any measure, then what was the point? And if that trend continued into his professional life . . .

I know this: He took his arts very seriously, but not necessarily himself. The times he got all brow-furrowed and tried to REALLY CREATE SOMETHING, it never worked. The stuff he just threw together on a whim always seemed to be received better. I’ll never understand that. Or maybe I’ll never want to.

In some ways, I’m kind of glad he’s not here to see what I’ve become. Parts of my life would make him scream with pride and envy. Other parts would make him wince and say, “Dude, what the fuck are you doing? You don’t got to take that shit.” Yet I keep on taking it.

Maybe he was mediocre. Maybe he was middle-of-the-road. Mid-list. But he didn’t care, and he had no regrets. He didn’t compare himself other people, mainly because he tended to be too busy on his Next Big Thing.

I think I miss that about him more than anything.

 

That Thing You Do

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Just in case you didn’t hear me the first time, let me reiterate and post it for all the world to see:

That thing you do? That thing that actually gets you excited to wake up on certain mornings? That thing that makes you lose track of time in the best possible way?

You get to do it. You deserve to do it. Provided it’s not a three-state killing spree or some similar hobby that breaks the laws of man and gods…you get to do it.

Particularly if you live in the U.S., or any other industrialized nation. Obviously there are people struggling — trust me, I know — but the vast majority of us have roofs, food, and clothing. If basic survival is not a daily issue for you (and if you really take stock, it really probably isn’t), then you have time to do that Thing You Do.

Do not listen to anyone who tells you it’s stupid. Or you can’t. Or you suck. Do it anyway.

The trick is to work with the people in your life to whom you are “beholden.” A spouse and/or kids, for example. Your Thing may not get to come first on the week’s agenda. That’s okay. But work with those people and carve out that time. That Thing You Do makes you who you are, and you’re no good to those other people if you’re not the best You that you can be. (Someone told me that once. It helped a lot.)

Writing poetry, writing fiction, playing guitar, kicking the ball around, gardening, walking the dog, meditation, martial arts, knitting, cooking…anything that makes you the best person you can be, you deserve to do it. All people do…we just happen to live in a nation where it’s largely possible, and the only things really keeping us back are our own fears or resistance to talking to our loved one about it.

It might be an hour a week, it might be an hour a month. But you deserve it. (So do those other people!) Talk to them, keep talking to them, work something out.

You’re only going around once. Do Your Thing. When you do, it makes the world a better place.

I for one could use the world to be a better place. How about you?

 

a thin scream

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I’ll be honest with ya’ll, it was a rough end to ’09 and ’10 is defining itself as a time in which I’m trying desperately to refill my emotional gas tank, the needle of which hovers over E right now.  But I know one thing.  I know one thing.  I have a reminder of it on every Bauer bag/murse/backpack I’ve carried since about ’93 or ’94.  It’s a crappy yarn-woven bookmark that is useless for that function, so now is merely decoration and a reminder.  It was knitted for me by an older lady I remember only as “Babs” who I met while in intensive day treatment therapy and one lovely evening as an in-patient for a number of psychological problems.

I know one thing that this crappy yarn bookmark reminds me of every time I see it:  I will not ever let myself get so out of control that I need to go back to that hospital.

I’m tired, worn out, stressed, on the virtual brink of being broke; I’ve been a shoulder, a confidante; and I’m out of gas.  But I will never hurt myself again.  Ever.  If I ever thought I was about to, believe me, I wouldn’t hesitate to get the help I needed. But I don’t think that will ever be necessary, because I won’t let it be necessary.  I’ll work it out.  I’ll hit the heavy bag in my garage or scream or cry or play really f’ing loud Social D on my crappy Mexican Fender, but I will not hurt myself.

Nor should you.

Self-injury is not cool, not hip, not wicked-awesome, not anything but a thin bloody scream for help.  Don’t let it get to that point.  This is your only body.  Use it wisely.  Treat it well.  This is your only mind; ditto.  Your only heart; ditto again. I’m not saying ignore any hurt, any stress, any drama.  I’m saying find a good way to deal with it.  Hurting yourself is not going to help, not going to make it go away, and is not something you can take back.  It’s as addictive as any drug.

So please — don’t.  Get help.  A friend, a parent, a teacher, I don’t care, but get it.  You matter to me, and I guarantee you matter to others.

I’m not a licensed anything – not a doctor, psychologist, psychiatrist, therapist, or anything else. I’m just a guy who took a mental tumble many years ago and made it back.  So can you.  It does get better.

Hang in there.  Instead of carving Liar, Hopeless, Failure, or anything else into your body, “write love on your arms,” a thousand times if you must.  But don’t give in and don’t give up.

Take care.

~ Tom