Author: Wil

I’m having a moderately better day than I was yesterday. I’m not entirely back to my normal self, but the crushing, suffocating, relentless pressure around my chest seems to have relaxed quite a bit, which is nice.

I have a few things to share today, so here we go:

1. Congratulations to my dear friend and co-conspirator in so many things, Felicia Day, on the announcement of her upcoming book!
2. I sat down with Chris Hardwick and Matt Mira for a Nerdist Podcast that was just released. #TorsoShorts
3. By coincidence, I got to fill in for Larry King recently, and I chose Chris as my interview subject because I love him. I think you’ll enjoy it.
4. I narrated Cory Doctorow’s book, Information Doesn’t Want To Be Free. I’m very proud of it.
5. I really like Non-Judgmental Ninja. I especially like that people are making their own comics.
6. I was having a hell of a time getting a “watch my dogs be cute in the backyard” camera set up, but a mystical mixture of cursing, and turning it off and back on again seems to have somehow solved it, so that’s good. No, you can’t watch.

I think there were other things, but I’m drawing a blank at the moment.

Today is, by every objective measure, a good day. I was privileged to speak via the Internet with a group of college students across the country about leadership qualities, and even though I was mostly terrified (talking to young people makes me feel old faster than anything else), I thought I mostly did not suck.

After I finished that, I did some work around the house, enjoyed the company of my family, wrote a brief blog, drew a dumb cartoon, and then went to Geek & Sundry to give notes on some Tabletop edits.

Soon, I’m going to attend a special screening of Tabletop for a few very special people who helped fund this season of the show, and our upcoming RPG spinoff.

I have a great life, and this has been a great day … but without warning or reason, the gloom and sadness and despair of Depression wrapped its claws around my chest this afternoon, and has been squeezing me and attempting to pull me to the ground ever since.

Objectively and rationally, I know that this is due to a chemical condition in my brain, and I know that this feeling will pass. I also know that depression lies, and I have enough experience doing cognitive behavioral therapy to sort of ninja the worst of it away (something I’d never be able to do without my meds and doctors; it’s not possible to wish Depression away), but I still feel anxious and irritable and impatient and annoyed and frustrated and tired and sad and even a little hopeless.

I know why this is happening. I know how this is happening. I know that it will leave as suddenly and unexpectedly as it arrived.

Knowing all of these things doesn’t make the way it makes me feel any less real or intense.

Knowing that I have Depression, but Depression doesn’t have me helps me get through it, though.

This one’s for me:

This isn’t one of those posts about not posting, except that it kind of is.

A couple of nights ago, Anne and I were sitting on the couch, Seamus between us, watching Modern Family. A fire in our fireplace warmed our living room, and both of our cats, who were stretched out in front of it.

Modern Family is one of my favorite shows on television, because it brilliantly fills a hole left by the Simpsons, when it stopped being about characters and started being about guest stars and whacky shenanigans: it’s a terrifically funny look at a family trying to be a family while their life happens around them. More often than not, it cleverly weaves together seemingly unrelated stories into a satisfying ending, and the writing is consistently clever and unexpected.

During a commercial, I thought about my kids, and my family. Ryan’s 25 and Nolan’s 23. We see them at least once a week for family dinner, but usually more than that. We’re a close family, we love each other very much, and every moment we spend together makes me so proud of all of us, because we struggled and suffered a lot for years at the petty and vindictive hands of their biological father. That we have anything at all is pretty remarkable, considering how relentlessly he tried to destroy our ability to be a family, and that we have something so special and rare makes all the suffering and struggling worth enduring, because here we are today, Team Wheaton.

I said this wasn’t one of those posts about not posting, except that it kind of is. During that commercial, as I thought about Ryan and Nolan and our lives together, I noticed that I don’t write about us as much as I used to, which means that I don’t write in my blog as much as I used to. More often than not, when one or both of them is over, I can take a picture and post it to Twitter, and it tells an entire story that would have once been saved for a blog post. Yes, I could still do that, and add the picture to the post, but that’s not the way we do things these days, and it feels like most people don’t read or comment on blogs, anyway.

So this isn’t a post about not posting, except that it is. It’s a post that reiterates, for me as much as anyone, that I need to write, because it’s doing the right thing, even when I feel like I don’t have anything to write about.

Runners run, even if they’re not in a race, and they run every day, so they’re ready for the race when they find themselves at the starting line.

Sometimes a nice jog, for the sake of jogging, can be a worthwhile thing. In fact, it’s worthwhile more often than not.