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.

Last night, I was texting with a friend, and my phone’s autocorrect tried to change “non-judgmental” into “ninja”. I told Twitter that I felt pretty bad about not letting it make the change.

Then I got a stupid idea to create a character called the non-judgmental ninja, and this happened:

Yes, I spelled “non-judgmental” wrong on this comic that I drew in about five minutes (it’s one of those words that always gives me trouble, even though I should know by now), and I ran out of space on the panel and changed the lettering, but as you can see, non-judgmental ninja is there to tell me that it’s ok.

r/ObscureMedia is one of my very favorite subreddits, and while I was looking at it today (as a tiny puppy we’re fostering slept on my lap), I saw this Star Wars figure commercial that Redditor RidleyScottTowels posted. I commented that I’d done a Star Wars figure commercial when I was a kid, and holy shit Redditor VonAether found it (I’m at 6:10 of this video):

But wait, there’s more! I thought I’d done a single commercial with different toys in it, but it turns out that I’d done two different commercials; the one VonAether found, and this other one that TheBoredGuy found:

If you couldn’t tell who I was, I was Boushh in the first one, and C3P0 in the second one.

I don’t have a lot of clear memories of the commercials I did when I was a kid, and I’d forgotten that I’d done two Star Wars figure commercials (something that was incredibly cool for a kid like me who lived and breathed Star Wars figures, even though we were forbidden from playing with them on the set), but I clearly recall that, on one of these two shoots, one of the ad agency people was a woman from New York, who wanted me to read one of my lines in a very specific way. She wasn’t a director, and wasn’t very good at communicating to 9 or 10 year-old me what she wanted, so she just started giving me line readings, and telling me to mimic her. I was very good at following directions, so I did as she asked … perfectly recreating her very thick, very nasal, very New York accent. I remember feeling nervous, and  thinking she thought I was making fun of her, but  wasn’t, I was genuinely confused about whether I should do her voice exactly the way she sounded, or if I was supposed to do my voice with the inflections she was using.

It’s amazing to me that I can clearly remember sitting in the backyard of this house in the valley where we were filming, this woman standing above me, holding the script, reading these lines for me. I can hear her telling me, “That’s better, but don’t sound so nasal,” and  realizing that not only did I know what nasal meant, but that she meant I was not supposed to mimic her voice, but just the line reading she gave me.

That was a lot of stuff for little kid me to process, but somehow I got the job done, and thanks to the weirdness of this world we’ve made for ourselves, I can see the resulting commercial over 30 years later.