i got better

Thanks for all your kind thoughts and empathy about my damn panic attacks. It really means a lot to me, and it makes me feel like less of a weird alien who is doing his best human impression.

Since I shared my shitty night terror experiences, things have gotten significantly better. A lot of you recommended looking into CBD, and because California is a state that ended cannabis prohibition (get with the program, rest of America), I was able to talk with my doctor about using it for my anxiety and insomnia. He recommended that I give it a try, and it’s made all the difference for me. I put a dropperful of this tincture under my tongue every morning, and … it just works. I don’t feel intoxicated or weird or anything. I just feel calm and not anxious. In just four days, I went from having nightmares every night, waking up every couple of hours with a panic attack, and living every waking moment surrounded by a swarm of anxiety bees, to sleeping soundly and all the way through the night, and feeling like a regular person who isn’t terrified and worried and afraid all the time. It really is a miracle, and it’s going to be a significant challenge for me to not become one of those obnoxious evangelists about it. Blaze it bro you can make rope out of it man!

Because I was able to get the constant fear and anxiety under control, I was able to look back on things as objectively as possible, and see what the triggers for the latest round of Mental Health Funtimes were. I’m not ready to share those publicly, but I am fairly certain that the CBD got my shit under control enough to allow me the insights I needed, and I was able to confront what was causing the fear and anxiety that was controlling me. I’m not sure that I’m like 100% back to normal (for my personal values of normal) but I feel like a person again. In fact, I told Anne that I felt so good day before yesterday, I wasn’t sure if it was genuinely feeling great, or if it was just the absence of that terrible anxiety and worry that had been engulfing me. I guess the end result is what really matters, and the end result has been really good.

Part of that end result? Oh, let me show you the most recent entry in my daily writing word count blog thing:

840 words (70782 total) on the rewrite of All We Ever Wanted Was Everything.

And that is a completed first rewrite. I thought for sure I would have to do massive rewriting in the last 10K words, because I wrote them all in a single day, but they really (surprisingly) hold up!

I’m going to send my manuscript to a few close, trusted friends for feedback, so I can get fresh eyes and perspectives on the story. Once I have that information, I’ll be able to do a second rewrite, and then I think it’ll be time to give it to my editor and start making plans to publish it.

You guys. I totally finished the rewrite! It felt so good and so rewarding. And the coolest thing, ever, is that I don’t worry that it’s terrible. I worry that it isn’t long enough. THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID HEYOOO.

I’m sharing it with some early readers, and when they get their feedback to me, I’ll do another pass based on what they tell me. Then it goes to my editor for the Red Pen of Doom.

I haven’t decided if I’m going to shop it, yet. I think that it’s a solid story that readers will relate to, so I think it’ll be a reasonably easy pitch, but after the less than awesome experience I had with Just A Geek, I am very concerned that I won’t find the right publisher for it.

panic attacks suck

This is a reprint and expansion of today’s word count entry on my tumblr thing.

I had panic attacks all night long, last night. Each time I fell asleep, I woke up what felt like minutes later, in absolute terror. Like, imagine that you’re on an airplane and everything seems fine, and then it suddenly drops like 1000 feet. You know how you think you’d feel? The rush of adrenaline, the certainty that you were about to die, the helplessness to do anything about it … that’s how I felt all night long (all night, yeah).

I recall four specific times this happened, because each one had some different physical sensation when I woke up. There was the hot tingling in my arms and legs, there was the sense that I was not quite awake, but awake enough to know that the terror was about to hit, and then struggling in vain to prevent it, this cold wave that started in my chest and spread out all over my whole body like ripples in a pond, and the time my heart was beating so hard, I thought I was having a heart attack. Oh, and each time I woke up, I didn’t know where I was. Once, I didn’t know who I was. So I guess that’s five times I can recall, but I know it happened more than that because I didn’t get any meaningful rest. Also, a lot of the neurochemicals that I need to function are only created in my brain when I’m sleeping, so my dumb brain, which is already sort of challenged to give me the juice I need to exist, didn’t get to do its thing. That’s been really great.

I’m lucky that I didn’t have anywhere to be today, so when I finally fell to sleep for more than a few minutes at a time, around 6am after my dog asked to go outside, I slept until almost 11. I can function on five hours of sleep, but I can’t function on five hours of sleep after eight hours of intense, adrenaline-draining night terrors.

So this is a long way of saying that I really wanted to work on my rewrite today, but I am mentally exhausted the way I would be physically exhausted if I’d been forced to walk on a treadmill for hours at a time.

I honestly don’t know what to do about this. I’ve had a sleep study done, and I don’t have sleep apnea. I’ve changed my meds more than once, hoping to find one that works for my depression and anxiety when I’m awake, and also when I’m asleep, but there doesn’t seem to be a correlation between these panic attacks and one med or another. I’ve tracked my food (and I don’t drink any more, but it was nights like last night that, until I quit two years ago, drove me to drink so much that I wasn’t capable of waking up), I’ve tried meditation. I’ve tried tons of exercise. I’ve tried no exercise. I’ve tried every bullshit herbal tea pseudo science hokum whatever (and of course none of those things work because they are bullshit, but … desperate people and such). Nothing works, and these panic attacks are the most terrifying and frustrating and upsetting things that just show up without warning, and then just as suddenly go away. I really wish there was something I could do to make them stop, or at least to understand what causes them, so I could get to work on getting my sleeping life back from them.

And because it wasn’t bad enough overnight, all day today, I’ve been anxious and afraid, with a generous helping of existential dread thrown in, because fuck me, right. Go back to imagining that you’re on a plane. Now imagine that the plane is in terrible turbulence, bouncing around, shaking side to side, with a violence that makes you worry that the plane will be torn apart in midair. That’s how I’ve felt all day, like I’m in a swarm of bees. It’s totally irrational, and I know that it’s all in my head and isn’t real, but when the part of my body that is responsible for how I perceive the world and how I exist in it is fucked up, it’s challenging to separate what’s real from what’s just in my head. I’m super grateful that I’ve done so much work with so many licensed professionals over the years, so I can do my best to manage this … because I can assure you that while this is a challenge for me now, it would be close to impossible to deal with if I didn’t have that professional help (ask for and use professional help if you deal with any of the mental health issues I deal with, gang. Please. Trust me on this.)

All of these things go together to ruin my ability to be creative, which is a giant bummer, because I really love being creative. I’m having the time of my life rewriting this manuscript, and I’m so excited to finish this pass so I can give it to some early readers for their feedback. I hope that tonight goes better than last night, so that I can work on it tomorrow. And I just love it that I am having such a good time with this draft, and it’s so satisfying to work on, that I want to stay at my desk and work on the weekend.

this is a post about sweaters (no, not those sweaters)

It’s been a strange couple of weeks, here in Castle Wheaton. Anne was gone for six days, came home for literally twenty-two minutes and left again for another day. When she got home, we saw each other for about an hour, and then I had to go to sleep early to wake up early to fly across the country for two days. When I got back, she had to leave again for Piggy and Pug promotion, and it wasn’t until last night that we finally had an opportunity to make dinner together and catch up on all the stuff we did while we were gone.

“I have been feeling this strong compulsion to clean stuff up,” I told her while we were finishing dinner. “I wonder if it’s some kind of Spring Cleaning impulse that I’ve never noticed before.”

“More like never had before,” she reminded me.

“Okay, that’s fair,” I said.

We ate the empanadas we’d made. They were better than I expected.

“Hey, speaking of that,” she said, “will you come into our bedroom with me for a minute?”

Heckyeahsexytimesdottumblrdotcom I thought. “Sure,” I said.

I have this big pile of sweaters and hoodies at the foot of our bed. I keep meaning to put them away, but my closet is a shitshow and the shelves are a disaster. I have a box on the top shelf where most of my sweaters and scarves live when we aren’t having our three to five weeks of winter in Los Angeles. It is currently … not optimal.

“What’s going on with …” she indicated with her hand, sort of twirling it around like Vanna White, but with a little more distaste, “… this … stuff. Here.”

“Oh, those are all my dumb sweaters. I already put a bunch of them away, and I just need to find some room in the closet to put the rest of them away.”

“Isn’t that what your box is for?”

“Yes, but it’s already full. I must have added sweaters to my life this winter, and now I’m past the critical mass for sweaters.” I shrugged. “But don’t worry, I’m going to put them away tomorrow. I just need to clean up that shelf and get it more organized.”

“You’re going to put them in the bin that’s already full?”

“No, I’m going to put them in the spot next to the box, which is currently a jumble of kilts and horsemasks.”

She looked at me with a mixture of amusement and disbelief.

“…a jumble … of …” she was unable to finish the thought.

“This is who you married,” I said. “You did this on purpose.”

an incomplete collection of #wordmetrics from my recent rewrites

Before I get into this post, I want to thank everyone who has sent me feedback about my speech to NAMI.

I never know how these things are going to go over, and I never know if what I had in my head and my heart when I wrote a thing will translate into something similar in the audience. I am always anxious about being misunderstood, even when I’m speaking on a topic I know a lot about. Yay for anxiety! It’s super effective!

It means so much to me to know that I’m helping people. I’ve heard from a ton of parents who didn’t know their kids were living with anxiety, but after reading (or hearing) my stories about my experiences, they can see that their kids need the help that I didn’t get. All I want to do with my time on this Earth is make things that matter, and use the privilege and success I have to help make other people’s lives better. It’s so wonderful to know that this speech I gave (and the essay it is when it’s written) is making a positive difference in the world.

Okay, on to what this post is about: Writing!

Well, rewriting, specifically.

I’ve been working on the rewrite of my novel, which is currently titled All We Ever Wanted Was Everything. It’s a semi-autobiographical work of fiction, about a twelve year-old, coming of age in 1983. The protagonist is a kid who wants to be a writer, and I have no idea where that inspiration came from.

So every time I finish work, I make a post on my Tumblr thingy with the word count and some thoughts about what I did that session. It’s kind of how I cycle the airlock when I come back inside from the deep space solitude of writing all day. It feels good to write it, and I look forward to it every day. It’s like my reward for doing the work, in a way, and it’s nice to have this little diary of the process that I can look back on, to see my progress in more detail that just a word count. I know that some of you who read my blog want to know what’s going on in my creative life, and what I’m working on, so I thought I’d share some of the recent entries.

Each bolded part, and the words that follow it until the nifty little horizontal line, represents one day’s work.

Continue reading… →

My name is Wil Wheaton. I live with chronic Depression, and I am not ashamed.

I’m about to go speak to NAMI Ohio’s statewide conference, Fulfilling the Promise. These are the remarks I prepared for my speech.

Before I begin, I want to warn you that this talk touches on many triggering subjects, including self-harm and suicide. I also want you to know that I’m speaking from my personal experience, and that if you or someone you know may be living with mental illness, please talk to a licensed and qualified medical professional, because I am not a doctor.

Okay, let’s do this.

Hi, I’m Wil Wheaton. I’m 45 years-old, I have a wonderful wife, two adult children who make me proud every day, and a daughter in-law who I love like she’s my own child. I work on the most popular comedy series in the world, I’ve been a New York Times Number One Bestselling Audiobook narrator, I have run out of space in my office for the awards I’ve received for my work, and as a white, heterosexual, cisgender man in America, I live life on the lowest difficulty setting – with the Celebrity cheat enabled.

My life is, by every objective measurement, very very good.

And in spite of all of that, I struggle every day with my self esteem, my self worth, and my value not only as an actor and writer, but as a human being.

That’s because I live with Depression and Anxiety, the tag team champions of the World Wrestling With Mental Illness Federation.

And I’m not ashamed to stand here, in front of six hundred people in this room, and millions more online, and proudly say that I live with mental illness, and that’s okay. I say “with” because even though my mental illness tries its best, it doesn’t control me, it doesn’t define me, and I refuse to be stigmatized by it.

So. My name is Wil Wheaton, and I have Chronic Depression.

It took me over thirty years to be able to say those ten words, and I suffered for most of them as a result. I suffered because though we in America have done a lot to help people who live with mental illness, we have not done nearly enough to make it okay for our fellow travelers on the wonky brain express to reach out and accept that help.

I’m here today to talk with you about working to end the stigma and prejudice that surrounds mental illness in America, and as part of that, I want to share my story with you.

Continue reading… →