When I started this post yesterday, I wasn’t intending to write a two-parter. I was talking about the reasons the mental health conversation is so hard to have, even in an ideal world where everyone is kind and supportive and wants to understand. While talking about how the symptoms of depression make depression hard to…
If we’re going to have the big mental health conversation, there’s something that we need to get out of the way first. It’s a hard conversation. I mean really hard. And I’m not talking about all the baggage that comes with it like the embarrassment, stigma, shame, resentment, and all that. Those are real and…
Last year, I wrote a piece for a friend’s website called “The Conversation Around Mental Health Is Long Overdue – and We’re Screwing It Up“. I said we were making two mistakes. The first was that we are focusing too much on celebrity in this conversation. I talked about Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles in…
Every holiday season, at least since the advent of social media, I see people asking other people to be aware of people who struggle during the holidays. They want us to be sensitive; to watch what we say and do. As far as I can tell, the requests for sensitivity rarely come from people who…
The song Levon, by Elton John (@eltonofficial) and Bernie Taupin (#bernietaupin), opens with the line: Levon wears his war wound like a crown He calls his child Jesus ‘Cause he likes the name And he sends him to the finest school in town Then, there’s a line in Elton John’s and Bernie Taupin’s song Tiny…
I had a dream last night. In and of itself, that’s not a big deal. According to people who study such things, we all dream every time we sleep. I almost never remember my dreams, though. It’s rare enough that I sometimes wonder if the scientists are wrong and I don’t actually dream every night….
I don’t use air conditioning in my house. The only time in my life I air conditioned my home was while I was married. It wasn’t really my choice. I didn’t have air conditioning as a kid, in college, or when I moved out on my own. And since my divorce, I have not used…
I hate thinking about myself and talking about myself. That may sound strange coming from someone who has spent the last six months chronicling his divorce and depression, but it’s true*. It makes for a weird dynamic in therapy. Therapy is all about me, but I’m always trying to change the subject. When I fail…
