The Undercover Introvert

Depression: Let’s Call the Beast by its Name

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I’m not a happy person.

Don’t get me wrong, I can be happy, but the feeling tends to wane more than it waxes. As long as I’m not actively unhappy, I count the day as a win. But there are days that definitely aren’t winners. There are days when it’s hard to find a reason to get out of bed.

As an introvert, I have a rich inner life that doesn’t often mirror the outer one. Before the craziness that was the late fall of 2016, my outer life was whisper quiet. In contrast, my inner life is akin to ordered chaos. And while chaos lends itself to fantastic bursts of creativity, it is also exhausting emotionally and physically.

But here’s the kicker: you would never guess it.

From the outside, I appear to be mild mannered Clark Kent. But, on the inside, I am leaping tall buildings in a single bound and screaming at the top of my lungs.

For me, adulthood has been a mostly bleak landscape interspersed with the occasional soaring peak of exquisite joy. And while I cherish those joyful times immensely, I also wonder why they are so few and far between. I came to the conclusion many years ago that adults aren’t meant to be happy. That we expect otherwise is a childish misconception born of the fairy tales we were force fed as children, complete with smarmy soulmates and happily ever afters. Real life is different, longer, and packed full of humdrum, yawn inducing moments that can still, oddly, be fraught with anxiety.

So, I set a low bar, and settle on the goal of contentment, which I label the absence of active unhappiness. This mostly tolerable state isn’t created out of thin air. I set the conditions in which I can stand to sit comfortably inside of my own head, that loud, tumultuous place where dread so often seeps in through the cracks and crevasses. Contentment is less a state of being and more a destination, reached through hard work and constant diligence.

Exercise helps a great deal. The longer I run, the better I feel, because that anxiety washes away on a river of sweat. But I can easily overdo it if I’m not careful.

Spending time with a handful of the right people can also bolster my weather beaten spirits. But if you add too many people, my spirits tatter at the edges even more rapidly, and I unravel.

Food helps too, momentarily. And why wouldn’t it? Food is delicious.

There are times when I stop short and think:

I am happy, right now, in this moment.

And the feeling disappears like smoke in the wind.

But the residue remains, and I cleave to it on mornings when I can’t find another reason to peel myself from the mattress and face another day. Because there will be more such moments, if only I soldier on. Right?

Why am I even bothering to say all this? Because we should name the beast whenever we see it. Whenever we feel it. Whenever it starts to creep over us, spreading sticky black anxiety…

Depression.

The more we speak its name, the more we know it. This might not loosen its hold, but there’s relief in the telling, isn’t there? And, sometimes, that’s all there is.

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Losing My Job was the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me

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A year ago today, I got up early, went running, reported to work, and was fired.

I packed my things and left, feeling set adrift, lost, unsure of what I would do to pay my bills. A local group I helped to run was hosting its first big Town Hall event that evening, which we’d started planning many weeks earlier. I threw myself into that, letting the nervous excitement wash away the dread I felt at being untethered from a source of income.

Our event was an overwhelming success, and it far surpassed our wildest expectations. As I was walking around that evening, gobsmacked by how well things had come together, I knew that this was what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to be a change-maker, a community organizer, a person to whom others looked for ideas. But how would I make a living doing that?

I like to plan eight steps ahead, and at that moment I couldn’t even plan the following day.

A day later, at the advice of a friend, I signed up for a freelancing website in an attempt to scrape together a few hundred dollars to tide me over while I tweaked my resume and blasted it out all over town. I booked my first freelancing job the following day, then another, and another. The rest is history.

Over the last twelve months, I’ve worked with several clients, written hundreds of thousands of words, started my own blog, and found a way to get paid to do what I was already doing for free in my community. If someone had stopped me on the way to the parking lot with my bag full of personal belongings and told me that in 12 short months I would be living my dream, I’d have scoffed derisively and walked on. But it’s true. I’m exactly where I want to be right now, and I can only see good things on the horizon.

Twelve months. 365 days. 8,760 hours.

So little time, and yet it was enough to realign the ground beneath my feet. My world trembled after I was let go from a job I didn’t love, and then it expanded. I walked through an unlocked door without knowing what lay on the other side, and I’m grateful to have been in a position to take that chance. I’m also grateful to all the folks along the way who have encouraged me without even knowing it, and stood by me, and pushed me to be better.

Starting over at this stage in the game is terrifying, but I wouldn’t change a thing about the last year. There are so many unlocked doors on the path ahead of me, and I can’t wait to see what the future holds.

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23andMe: the Terrifying Prospect of Knowing Absolutely Everything

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I am a mystery.

Not being coy here, just stating a fact. As an adopted kid, I have no idea where I came from. If I look into my history past the point where I ended up on my parents’ doorstep, I find a locked door that I’ve never felt the need to jimmy open. Whatever’s on the other side can stay there, for all I care. I might as well have been born from sea foam, like Aphrodite. There is absolutely no evidence to the contrary…

All that being said, let’s cut to Valentine’s Day, when I received an odd gift from my ex-husband: a 23andMe health and ancestry kit.

Had I asked for this? No.

Was I even considering DNA testing before receiving this kit in the mail? Nope.

Is it weird to get a gift from your ex on V-Day? Maybe, but that’s a topic for another post. And, honestly, this is more of an anti-gift, which seems fitting…

Some adopted folks want to mine as deeply as they can into their pasts, even if it means getting dirty in the process, because they feel an overwhelming need to understand their origins.

I’m not one of those people.

Watching the commercials for 23andMe elicits a string of smartass comments aimed at the smiling dopes happily discovering that instead of coming from one primarily white country, they actually come from another primarily white country. And they sure seem excited about it, don’t they? So excited that they go from attending the German heritage functions of their youth to wearing kilts and shit. Because these results would be definitely enough to make you change longstanding family traditions. As long as you’re still 100% white, amirite?!

It’s ridiculous and anyone who has ever sat through one of the commercials with me has probably heard my profanity laden rants on the subject and are beyond tired of them. I often wonder just how enthusiastically said smiling dopes would react to the discovery that some of their ancestors were actually from Africa instead of Germany, Scotland, or France like they always thought. I wonder how many folks who believed themselves to be white have been shaken to their core by the pretty, color coded, seemingly innocuous results of their DNA tests…

So, I have this kit, and it cost close to $200 bucks (yes, I looked it up). I didn’t buy it, but the thought of wasting that kind of money is abhorrent to my innate thriftiness. Just letting it sit unused is out of the question. But do I really want to know what lies behind the closed door of my history? Do I want some faceless entity to have samples of my DNA readily available in their database? Adopted kids are finding their biological relations through services like these, which is the last thing I’m interested in. I’m fine not knowing where I come from. That has never troubled me. It, instead, sparked my imagination and led to hours of daydreaming from the time I was a child until today.

But, if I’m being absolutely real, I just don’t want to find out information that I’m better off not knowing. That’s truly the long and short of it. Nothing I find out about my ancestry will change my day to day life (if you see me suddenly wearing some form of traditional African dress, feel free to call me out as a boldfaced liar). I won’t be shocked to hear part of my disconnected biological relations came over unwillingly from Africa. That really goes without saying. But the health stuff is troubling. Do I want that kind of stress in my life? I really can’t decide what’s more anxiety inducing: knowing your family medical history or not knowing anything at all.

You might be asking if I’ve sent in the test yet.

Nope.

It’s still sitting here on my desk in plain view, taunting me and serving as a great reminder of why my ex and I are divorced (kidding/not kidding). Who gets this for someone for Valentine’s Day? Chocolate, gents. Or books. Damn, I’m not hard to please.

I like the mystery in my lack of history. Just because we can know everything, does that mean we should? Is knowledge power, or just more fodder for worry?

That being said, I’m going to take the fucking test. Maybe I’ll report back on the findings, maybe I’ll read them once and never look at them again, or maybe I’ll be consumed with crushing dread at the sheer emotional weight of what I discover. Who’s to know? I just hope I don’t end up moon-eyed and ridiculous like the overly excited saps on the commercials…

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From Delusion to Compliance: a Writer’s Five Steps

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Writing for a living is interesting. And by interesting I mean a maddening roller coaster of self doubt and overconfidence. It’s incredibly difficult to keep on task when you work for yourself, because there is no framework. You’re literally making things up for a living, including your own schedule. In an attempt to describe just how much of a struggle it is to squeeze anything meaningful out of a workday that starts when we say it does and ends the same way, I’ve identified five distinct steps that writers pass through during their hours spent tied to their computers.

Step One: Delusion

This stage is probably the most creative, as well as the most ambitious. While here, your goals for the day are lofty as fuck. You are going to write 15,000 words, outline a new novel idea, finish a short story, edit a few chapters of a first draft, and write a blog post or two. This furious planning starts around the time the alarm goes off at 4:30 or 5:00 in the morning. Your mind is a fertile treasure trove teaming with possibility that is yours for the taking if only you will get your lazy ass out of bed and get started. But, you don’t.

Step Two: Apathy

Creativity is a sword that cuts both ways, and this is the point in the day in which you use that sword to inflict the most damage to yourself, because if a way exists to derail your forward progress, you will either find or create it. Despite planting your ass in front of your computer by seven a.m., you’re unable to get to work. Well, you don’t have your coffee yet, and by the sounds of things, it’s just about finished brewing. Go get yourself a cup. While you’re out there, take a peek in the fridge. It’s too early to eat, isn’t it? Yeah, probably. You notice the time on the microwave. Oh, shit. Have you really been standing in the kitchen for nearly ten minutes? You book it back to your desk. By now, someone else is awake and messaging you. You message back. Check Twitter. Check Facebook again. It’s been quite some time since you posted to Instagram. Better get on that. Another friend messaging. And another. You haven’t even looked at the dozens of emails that have crash landed into your inbox. You start through those, looking for correspondence from clients first (I mean, you are working, supposedly), and then branching out to other messages. You fall into a rabbit hole. You resurface for more coffee. Then a snack. Bathroom break. Your dogs bark and you spend several minutes petting them. Before you know it, the afternoon is creeping closer and you’ve written fuck all. Shit. You have something to do that evening. You need to get it together. Stat. No more fucking around.

Step Three: Haggling

At this phase in the day, you’re beginning to acutely feel the passage of every solitary second. You do quick calculations in your head, comparing the time you still have left to write versus the time you’ve already wasted. Cursing yourself, you fire off a number of firm directives. 1,000 words before you can even think about taking a bathroom break, despite the fact that you’re 5 minutes away from an embarrassing accident (you are home alone, however, and your dogs don’t judge). 2,000 words before you get another snack or check social media. 8,000 words before you can leave your desk. You are painfully aware that you are to blame for this mess, but still see a way to meet a few of those lofty goals from early that morning. Definitely not all of them–that ship has long since sailed while you stood watching it instead of writing–but enough. You knuckle down in the limited hours you have left. You consider canceling whatever you have going on that evening, but it’s impossible. The only option is to complete your work. It’s fine. You can do this.

Step Four: Wretchedness

You can’t do this. No one can write 8,000 words in four hours. What were you thinking? Why didn’t you get up at 4:30 when the alarm went off? Why did you go to the kitchen ten times? Was that 20 minute long back and forth on Twitter really necessary? You are always doing this, and if you keep on the same way, you’ll never make your deadline and you won’t get paid. In case you haven’t realized, you need money to live. Thus begins your decline into the depths of despair at your own inability to muscle through your lifelong penchant for procrastination. You know how you are and you haven’t done anything to change it. Maybe you can’t. Maybe this freelancing thing just isn’t for you. But the thought of returning to a regular eight to five makes your skin crawl and your stomach drop. Still, instead of doing this, your time might be better served sprucing up your resume…

Step Five: Compliance

You are a world class procrastinator whose mind runs a hundred miles an hour. Okay. That’s nothing new. And since you know how you are, let’s just get this work done, shall we? We’ve had our pity party, and now it’s nose to the grindstone. You have bills to pay, after all. Somehow, this tough talk works. You crank up the music, you put your hands on the home row keys, and you get cooking. Before you know it, you reach the goal, and then you pass it. You don’t get close to the herculean itinerary your sleep starved brain cobbled together that morning as you lay in your bed maniacally planning a future that was never to be, but you rally and end the day somewhat successfully. You also kick off the delusion stage of the next working day a bit early, promising that tomorrow things will be even better because you won’t let yourself get off track in the first place. You will avoid this entire mess and break the five step cycle!

And, like the sucker you are, you believe it.

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An Ode to Those Working Jobs They Hate

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I’ve been where you are.

Getting up every morning to go somewhere you can’t wait to leave again at the end of the day. Counting down the hours until quitting time and the days until the weekend, when you are free. But even those precious hours are tainted by thoughts of eventually returning to work, when the cycle repeats itself and you are again marking the time until you can stay home instead of showing up to trade your labor for however many dollars an hour.

Like a child, you’ve cleaved to your dreams with a stubborn, illogical grip. Maybe your parents instilled in you the uniquely American belief that you could do anything, if only you put your mind to it. And what a mind you had, full of plans and ideas about the kind of world you would inhabit once you became an adult. Maybe you went to college, and maybe you didn’t. But you jumped across the stepping stones of your childhood, careful not to fall, always keeping your eye on the horizon and what you wholeheartedly believed waited there.

Now you have kids and living expenses, ends you make meet like clockwork as your dreams smolder on the back burner. When you complain, someone appears to remind you how fortunate you are to even have a job when so many people don’t. Hell, you tell yourself this sometimes, berating yourself for the directionless longing that keeps bubbling to the surface no matter what you do. Why are you so unhappy? You love your kids, your significant other, your pets, but deep inside, where that child you once were continues to live, you know that you were built for better things, that the American dream is a promise that will come to fruition if only you give it time…and you will, as soon as the kids are off to college and you’ve put enough away in your rainy day fund to justify taking a leap into the unknown. In the meantime, you keep your head down and work.

In the quiet times after dinner when the kids are in bed and you are alone with your thoughts, you remember the dreams you’ve guarded like shining embers in a high wind, waiting for them to grow into a blinding inferno. You consider your life up until now, the nonstop hustle to bring home a paycheck that never seems to cover all of the bills, the time spent away from your children that you can never get back, the parade of days spent at a soul destroying job that offers the stability you just can’t walk away from. The responsibilities you have don’t allow much room to breathe, let alone alter your life in any way, so your dreams diminish a little more as the years pass, those embers cooling as you watch, sad and helpless.

Will there ever be time, you wonder, to do the things you’ve dreamed of since childhood? Or is this really all there is?

You don’t ask this ungratefully (or aloud), because there are parts of your life that you cherish deeply. But beyond the claustrophobic limits of your small existence, you can just glimpse an entire universe of opportunity that might be yours if only you were willing to venture out in it. That would mean taking chances, and you aren’t sure how prepared you are to do that. You have a sure thing now, and exchanging it for an unsure thing seems crazy. And yet…

I am you.

I’ve known that I was made to write from the time I was in middle school. But I had a child young and married. So I dove into adulthood headfirst, and the responsibilities piled on. I struggled for years, working jobs I hated and jobs I didn’t hate but also didn’t love, all the while dreaming of words building sentences building paragraphs building books. In all those years, I did find room to write, but it didn’t pay the bills and money trumps all things when you have a household to keep and a child to raise.

And then, as if by magic, my child became an adult and the world shifted beneath my feet. I was still a young(ish) woman who could have that long sought after freedom if I wanted it. But not taking chances when you had a sure thing was so deeply ingrained in me that it took getting let go from a job to actually venture into that unknown universe of opportunity. I’m still exploring, but I’m also paying my bills with the seemingly limitless power of my imagination. Don’t get me wrong, I’m scared shitless every day that the bottom will drop right out from under me, leaving me no choice but to hurriedly spruce up my resume in order to secure another job that feels like it’s taking much more than it’s giving. But I’ve also never been more content with my work than I am right now. That’s more than something. That’s everything.

I won’t tell you to take a leap that I couldn’t muster until my child was safely out of the nest and I found myself at a crossroads–go right to find another unsatisfying job that would pay my bills or go left to find who the hell knows what. But I will encourage you to watch for the opportunity to do what you’ve always dreamed of doing, because the things that have doggedly beckoned you since childhood will lose their power one day and that silence must be awful.

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