ADHD, Anxiety, Depression, and Conventions

Reader R writes:

Dear Wil,

I wonder if you could give me some advice. My daughter Ella is 10 years old and is really getting into Star Trek, particularly Voyager and DS9. She’s even started drawing her own fan fic comic about Odo and Quark. So we thought we’d take her to a con.

The problem is, she has ADHD and mood disorder, and me and my husband both have depression/anxiety. So places that are crowded and have lots of long lines are hard for us, collectively.

I’m wondering if you can recommend a con that’s particularly well-run so that we can help our daughter enjoy the experience. We understand that we’ll have to manage waits ourselves, we won’t get help like we do at Disney World, but I can imagine that some cons are completely packed with people and it would be hard to find a quiet space to give Ella a break from the crowds or a food vendor that can serve us in a reasonable amount of time.

Any advice you have would be appreciated. I imagine you’ve developed mad skills for surviving a con while anxious.

Oh, and we live on the east coast (came to your NY show with Paul and Storm–awesome!) so a show on this side of the country would be great. And if there are games there, so much the better.

I have both  anxiety and depression, and a combination of medication and therapy helps me deal with the lovely* things they do to me. When I’m at a convention, if I start to feel that overwhelming feeling of being trapped in the trash compactor, I can duck out into a quiet place until I’m able to get C-3P0 to shut down the power on that level, but if someone has spent time and money to get to a con, that’s probably not something they want to do.

I don’t really have a good answer for R, but I thought that maybe some of you who read my blog may have personal experience that you could share about dealing with mental health issues when you’re at a con.

 

*and by ‘lovely’, I mean ‘not lovely at all’.

From the Vault: respect yourself

This was originally written a little over a year ago, but it just came across my radar from a person on Twitter. Because I think maybe it’ll land on someone who needs to hear it (or could otherwise benefit from hearing it), I’m reposting it now, From The Vault.

Laws of Modern Man 233

I posted this on Twitter earlier this week, because I believe it’s good advice, but about 1 in 20 or so replies accused me of being selfish or narcissistic, or — worst of all — an Objectivist.

I’m not a big fan of getting into “Someone is wrong on the Interent,” but I wanted to clarify a little bit in a way that Twitter does not allow.

What I get out of this quote is this: if there is a toxic person in your life who does nothing but bring you down and hurt you, then you should respect yourself enough to remove that person from your life. Life is too short to maintain toxic and negative relationships.

This doesn’t mean that you don’t make an effort to work on building and maintaining positive, healthy, fulfilling relationships. It doesn’t mean that you don’t make an effort to be kind and generous and just take take take. It means that if you’re constantly “making up” or something like that with a person, you’re not in a healthy, fulfilling relationship. You’re in a toxic relationship, and time you spend maintaining toxic relationships is time wasted that could be spent — invested — into relationships that bring you joy and make you a better person.

Know and recognize the difference between healthy and toxic relationships, positive and negative people, and respect — and love — yourself enough to choose the ones that make you happy and inspire you to grow as much as you possibly can. People who drag you down because it makes them feel better about themselves are not worth your time.

Where I think people may have interpreted this as selfish or narcissistic is in the clumsy wording of people or activities “serving” you. I’d take people out of that portion of the advice and apply it directly to the forehead.

Or, you know, just apply it to the “activities” part and think about where you’re investing your time and energy — your most precious and limited resource — and what yo’ure getting back from it.

Mostly, though, this quote encapsulates advice I’ve given my children and applied to my own life: respect yourself enough to leave a romantic or platonic or business relationship that is causing you more harm than good. To borrow a quote from Green Day: “You can’t go forcing something if it’s just not right.”

I Made A Sparkly Gargoyle

I downloaded this model from Thingiverse, and instructed my Makerbot to create it while I slept.

Sparkly Gargoyle Closeup Sparkly Gargoyle

It’s beautiful and sparkly, it looks great on the shelf next to my Maltese Falcon, and so far, it hasn’t even come to life and tried to murder our faces!

For the 3D nerds: I sliced it using Makerware, set infill to 5%, used 2 shells, and .1mm layers. It took 6h43m to build. The filament is the sparkly black stuff from Maker.

EDIT: A few of you have pointed out that this is not actually a Gargoyle, but is actually a Grotesque*. I had no idea there was a difference, or that a Grotesque was even a thing. TIL!

 *Grotesques are often confused with gargoyles, but the distinction is that gargoyles are figures that contain a water spout through the mouth, while grotesques do not.

I’m ready for dream time, Mister Bubbles

I continue to have way more fun with my Makerbot than I ever thought possible.

A few days ago, I printed out a Big Daddy figure, from one of my favourite video games of all time, Bioshock. I used a glow-in-the-dark filament, and the result looks like this:

3d-printed big daddy

3d-printed big daddy glows in the dark

I got the model from Thingiverse. It took 16 hours to print, and I used supports, 5% infill, .1mm layer thickness, and 2 shells. I sliced it in Makerware.

You may notice that some of the pipes around his head are messed up. That’s not the fault of the model, that’s my fault. When I was cutting off the supports, some of them snapped off (probably because it needed more infill to be stronger) and I had to put them back together with epoxy. I don’t really mind that those pieces are a little weird, though, because it gives the impression to me that this particular Big Daddy has been stomping around Rapture for a really long time.

Eventually, I’ll start making practical things, but until then, I’ll be busy making beautiful toys and models, because I can.