You Can't Spell USA without U-S, eh?
And more thoughts on teamwork and tv shows and screaming brains
Here’s what depression feels like:
Everything is weird down to the very core in the world you live in. Like broken and rotten and doomed.
Everyone else is acting like everything is completely normal and going about their day.
This broken, haunted status quo is simply too much to bear and yet you have no choice so you do your best to pretend it’s normal. Sometimes it works.
You are utterly, completely, alone. The people and institutions that are set up to help you, that exist ostensibly for that purpose, can’t or won’t help.
Nothing will or can get better.
Here’s what dealing with medical insurance people on the phone or living through a Trump presidency feels like:
Same.
The most remarkable part of the Biden inauguration, to me, was the introduction of the first person plural. We. Us. The common good. Not just the language around all of us coming together but the existence of an entire US to begin with. That there was an us. An us that encompasses all Americans, regardless of what they believe, who they voted for, or whether they were nice to the president.
Honestly, it just hasn’t come up in the last four years. Because that’s what you get when there is narcissistic personality disorder at the very heart of government. For the last four years, the government has been mostly built around the feelings of the president. Public policy has largely stemmed from that one person feeling sufficiently flattered or insulted. If his thinking extended beyond his fragile ego, it could only reach as far as verbal support for his most ardent followers. But there has been a complete absence of a true national us.
When Biden first ran, I was pretty dubious about his “let’s all get together and have unity” campaign angle. Too late, I thought, too idealistic. But he stuck with it through the campaign and onto the lectern yesterday. And it felt pretty good in light of the last four years of selfishness.
It felt good in the same way that people tell me some of my work makes them feel. Yes, we’re in the shit (covid, economy, environment, depression, whatever it is) but being there with people helps a whole lot. Having people to support you when you struggle the worst and being able to help people when you’re not at your worst but they are.
And things will be frustrating during a Biden presidency and we will have complaints and there will be jerks with plenty of power. But it started with a declaration of us and hey, I’ll take it.
Here’s a very cool article about graphic medicine and cartoonists like Ellen Forney.
The genre focuses on and discusses topics within the medical field from cancer to Alzheimer's and anorexia in an engaging and entertaining way.
Although developed for patients and medical professionals as a way to explore different conditions, it is now often found in general stores and libraries.
Forney who was comfortable telling stories through this medium, started to create comics for herself about her experience of living with mental illness.
"I wrote a lot in my journals," she says. "I didn't know that those were going to be pieces of a comic, a memoir later, but it's kind of how it comes out of me, in words and pictures."
It’s Not Just You. No one’s getting anything done. Because of the terrifying world.
A survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation in July 2020 found that 53 percent of adults said the pandemic had a negative toll on their mental health. Data collected from the CDC found that 41 percent of adults experienced symptoms of an anxiety or depressive disorder in December 2020, compared to 11 percent in January-July of 2019.
All of which is to say, it’s not just you. Mental health troubles are a natural reaction to an ongoing traumatic event like a pandemic.
If there’s a hurricane outside, don’t ask yourself why you’re causing all this wind.
Just started watching the comedy series Work In Progress. Gets PRETTY GRIM but Abby McEnany is magnificent and it is very funny.
I am enjoying getting the new show ready! Have done interviews! Stay tuned!