Joel Kim Booster and Climbing Out of a Pit
Also, it's Day One of the Max Fun Drive and I need to hear from you.
If you listen to my show this week, I think you will smile. You may cry.
In the summer of 2021, I conducted one of the toughest and bleakest interviews of my career, especially of my career since 2016 when I started interviewing people about mental health. It was with the actor, comedian, and writer Joel Kim Booster, who was going through a depressive period so deep and intense that he was convinced that he would never get out of it. The episode was talked about all over and won an award for its raw and honest depiction of depression. I also wrote about it here.
I put that episode together over two and a half years ago and a little over a week ago, I finally listened again to prepare for a long-anticipated follow-up interview that I was about to do with Joel. That new interview is our Depresh Mode podcast episode this week. It’s a very different side of Joel, who takes a long assessment of what was happening in his life at that time and some decisions he had made that put him in such a dark place. I don’t want to give too much away except to say that he’s doing better, is still a person with bipolar disorder, and is someone who hopes he can make healthy choices in the future.
As I say in the intro to this episode, “Where you are now with your mental health is not necessarily where you will always be. If things are bad, they could get better. I can’t make any promises as to when that will be or what that will look like but I just want you to know that this is possible. There is reason to hope, there is reason to keep trying. When you’re in a bad place, it can feel permanent. That’s not always so.”
We talk about Wellbutrin, falling in love, being incredibly productive through hypomania, becoming something of a monster in the crash following hypomania, and the overall challenge of managing a complex set of mental health conditions while trying to positively travel forward in the world. Joel says he hasn’t listened to that first episode, too painful, but he’s had more of a response to it than he’s had from any podcast he’s ever done.
Hello dear reader.
Help.
Many public radio stations have member drives three times a year and spend all day every day soliciting donations to keep their service running. Shows at Maximum Fun, like Depresh Mode and Sleeping with Celebrities, get one drive a year to talk to you in whatever medium we can about what is basically the same funding model: make good shows and rely on listener support. That means that during that drive - the Max Fun Drive, happening now through 3/29 - we have to fucking HUSTLE.
And that’s where you come in.
Depresh Mode is a show that is trying to help people. We engender open conversations about a topic that frankly our society historically prefers to stay silent about. If people felt more comfortable talking about the issue of mental health, we’d have more of the people we love still in the world and they’d be living happier lives. That’s why we make the show.
But making the show costs money. It means paying people who do the hard work to get the show conceived, booked, recorded, produced, edited, and out into the digisphere (might not be a word) where it can get into your ears and brains and hearts. There is equipment, there is a business staff, there are costs all over the place, actually. And honestly, we make the show such that you don’t need to think about those costs, you can just take in the message of the show. But once a year, we come to you and tell you that yeah it does cost money. (Well, okay, I often point this out in the credits but you might have stopped listening by then.)
So I need your help, even at just $5 a month. This effort might not be necessary if we choked the show with ads or if I made a show where I was really cruel and incendiary. Don’t want to do that. So I need you to go to maximumfun.org/join and become a member. You find a level that works for you, you select Depresh Mode and/or Sleeping with Celebrities from the list of programs, and then you can shop from our delightful list of thank you gifts. If you’re already a member, you can upgrade or boost your membership and I sure hope you do.
At $5 a month, you get access to Max Fun’s vault of over 600 hours of Bonus Content, available only to members. It includes a new episode of Depresh Mode this year where listeners interview me and a Sleeping with Celebrities where former guests all over the world (including Neil Gaiman, Felicia Day, and Michael Ian Black) tell you how the weather is where they are in order to put you to sleep.
For $10 a month (either new membership or a $10 boost to your existing membership), you can get our Depresh Mode enamel pin that says I’M GLAD YOU’RE HERE, which is a thing I say on every episode. Pin doesn’t even say the name of the show, just says I’M GLAD YOU’RE HERE for all the world to see and be helped by.
The Sleeping with Celebrities pin says SHHH… I’M SLEEPING WITH CELEBRITIES and features a cute li’l glow in the dark moon. All the MaxFun shows have pins. Can you spot ours?
There are more cool thank you gifts available and new ones that are different from previous years. At $35 a month, you get this huge big-ass tote bag called the Maximum Bag. It’s so big. Just go check them out at maximumfun.org/join.
So give in order to support a better society or give to get fun presents. Just give.
You’ve scrolled enough. And thank you. Here are some short links to other things I’ve found interesting lately:
Campaign despair is crushing our mental health
We need to take our post-pandemic mental health crisis seriously
A palindromic duet:
Thank you for reading.
That link again:
I was already planning to increase my membership but getting a big-ass tote bag for doing so is just the icing on the cake I needed. Thank you!
I'm already a monthly member, but I'm committing to work my damnedest hustle to help by:
1.) Adding more to what I throw in for THIS month (I'm really quite poor so this is awesome)
2.) Doggedly pursuing my shortlist of friends and family and doing everything I possibly can to get one of them to commit to Max through Depresh Mode monthly!
I NEED you to keep doing what you do, John Moe. Oli believe there are a whole lot of us who would agree.
All my love & support 🩷
-Rebecca Potylycki
(Oh! Sorry, I forgot to mention... Do you think you might ever possibly get John Darnielle back on the show?)