you are not alone in this fight

Posted on By Wil

you_are_not_alone-NAMI

So last night, I had nothing but nightmares from the instant I fell asleep. I woke up five or six times that I remember, each time unable to remember the dream but clearly able to remember the terror and dread.

I have been so unsettled and upset since I woke up, and I can’t even remember the clear details of the dreams so I can at least try to process them and get on with my life. I’ve had a ton of generalized anxiety all day, so I went to NAMI to do some research and see if there’s something I can do to help myself. It looks like it’s just my brain being a dick (exhaustion from travel, jet lag, and missing my regular medication time because of all the timezones I’ve been in recently will contribute to that) and it’ll get steadily better as the day goes on.

And yet, I feel like this right now:

  • ?: KNOCK KNOCK.
  • Me: Who’s there?
  • ?: ANXIETY.
  • Me: Anxiety who?
  • Anxiety: BECAUSE FUCK YOU THAT’S WHO. LOL.

Gallows humor, y’all.

It’s especially frustrating to know that it’s just a thing I kind of need to wait out (everyone’s anxiety is different, but this is how my particular version of it works), but it’s also incredibly reassuring to know that I just have to wait it out while my brain gets back into normal balance … and now I have a (mostly) guilt-free excuse to watch The Avengers when I should be doing other things. The thing is, I wouldn’t know that it’s going to get better if I hadn’t spent lots of time talking with my doctor and other humans who suffer from depression and anxiety. I wouldn’t know how or why it happens to me without warning if I hadn’t gotten professional help, and I wouldn’t know how to handle it and make sure that I don’t let it completely take over my life.

So because I was visiting NAMI this morning, I wrote about it on my Tumblr. I’m reprinting what I wrote there because it’s important to me that as many people as possible see this: You are not alone in the fight against mental illness.

NAMI (the National Alliance on Mental Illness) is an organization that I am proud to support. NAMI helps people with mental illness get the treatment they need so they can get their lives back.

One of their major campaigns is to remind people YOU ARE NOT ALONE in the fight against mental illnesses like Depression. The link above goes to a webpage full of stories (likely trigger warnings, gang) from people who have battled Depression and are currently winning the fight.

Please know this: if you have Depression, you do not have to suffer. There is help available, including talking therapy and safe, effective medications to help balance the chemicals in your brain so you can feel normal again. To borrow a phrase from my friend Jenny Lawson: Since I got treatment for my particular flavour of mental illness, I may have Depression, but Depression doesn’t have me.

Here’s my blog on my personal battle with Depression, if you’d like to get a firsthand account of my experience with mental illness.

Please, if you’re suffering, know that YOU ARE NOT ALONE and you don’t have to suffer. You can get help. Please do.

we’ve got five years, that’s all we’ve got

Posted on By Wil

What Will River Be LIke In Ten Years?A magazine I don’t have much respect for contacted my manager, and said it was doing a retrospective on the 20th anniversary of the death of River Phoenix. Would I be willing to talk to their reporter?

I declined, because I don’t trust them to be respectful and accurate, but since the request came in a few days ago, I have been thinking about River a lot.

Yesterday, I was looking though my office bookshelves, and I came across some teen magazines I have from the 80s, when I was on their covers. I think they came out of Wilhouse 13 when I cleaned up the garage, or maybe my mom gave them to me when my parents moved out of their house a few months ago.

Anyway, on the cover of a magazine from 1988, there’s a picture of River Phoenix, and it says, “Find out what River will be like in 10 years!” I kept looking at it, past the pictures of me and Sean Astin and Kirk Cameron and Alyssa Milano and the other kids who were popular with teen girls in those days, and something about that was kicking me in the stomach, making me feel sad. I couldn’t figure out why, until I did some maths and realized that River died five years later, in 1993.

We’ll never find out what he would have been like in 1998, because he didn’t make it to 1998. Just thinking about that made me incredibly sad.

I said I Twitter that I don’t think of him often, but when I do, I miss him, and hope that we would be close if her were alive today, because he was good people. I don’t know what kind of 43 year-old he would be, if we’d have anything in common, or if we would be friends. Hell, we hadn’t been close for a few years when he died, mostly because our lifestyles were incompatible and I wasn’t especially interested in his recreational activities of choice.

But he was, in his heart, a kind and loving and caring person. He loved his family more than anyone I can think of, and he did everything for them, maybe — I think — to his own detriment at times.

But he was good. River was good, and he had so much talent within him to share with the world, so many characters to play, songs to sing, and stories to tell … and we’ll never get to experience any of them. That makes me sad.

Like I said, I don’t know if we’d be close, or if we’d have anything at all in common, but when I think of him, I remember the 16 year-old who I looked up to, who taught me chords on his guitar and played video games with me while we listened to music on a tiny mid-80s boom box in Oregon.

I miss him, or at least the memory I have of him. He was good people, and he left us far too soon.

going behind the scenes at tabletop, and embracing your inner nerd

Posted on By Wil

My friend Amy came to Tabletop to shoot a behind the scenes vlog for Geek and Sundry. You can see a little bit more of our set, and meet some of our crew. I can’t embed it, so go watch it and then come back to read something awesome.

Okay, here’s something awesome: I got this lovely note on tumblr, and wanted to share it with as many people as possible. I asked reader RM if I could have permission to reprint this note that she sent me, and she said yes. I hope it makes you feel as happy as it made me feel.

So the last thing I thought I’d do was send fan mail to Wil Wheaton. Yet, here I am doing this happily against the wishes of my past self who constantly told my dad I would never like the ‘stupid nerdy things’ he enjoys.

He always told me one day I would. I didn’t believe him. Then I discovered everything you’ve ever done and made and I realised a lot. I do enjoy ‘stupid nerdy stuff’ but I learnt that what I thought of as stupid nerdy stuff isn’t stupid or in fact how I viewed something being nerdy.

Because looking back I noticed that I always really loved science and super Heros or vampire slayers but I thought in order to like that I had to be a certain way. I was wrong. And I’ve learnt to leave the part of me that stereotyped behind. So thanks to you and my dad I’m not ashamed to share my love for astronomy, Mythbusters, and discoveries.

I will never say to myself ‘I’m not supposed to like that’ anymore because no one is in charge of what I’m supposed to like. And if I like it then that’s what I am supposed to like because I do. I’ve never been supposed to like anything either so why should I not be allowed to like something. Plus, what fifteen year old doesn’t like super Heroes anyway. We all secretly want to be one anyway. No shame in that.

Thank you,

RM

RM’s note to me delights me, because she’s learning to feel comfortable with who she is, and what she loves. One of the many things I just adore about Amy and her vlogs for G&S is how unabashedly enthusiastic she is about the things she loves, and how infectious her love for those things is. I don’t know if RM will grow up to become as enthusiastic as Amy, but hope that RM’s note inspires other young people — especially young women — who are struggling to embrace their inner nerd so they can share her with the world.

just another day

Posted on By Wil

I dug through my T-shirt drawer, and realized that I basically have a few dozen variations on a theme: I love Doctor Who, I love gaming, I love Star Trek, I love Game of Thrones, I like black T-shirts.

At the bottom of my drawer was one I haven’t worn in a long time: a green Stone Brewing Company T that I picked up earlier this year. I pulled it out and shook out the wrinkles. As I closed the closet door, I caught a glimpse of Anne, drying her hair in our bathroom.

I don’t know where the thought came from, but it sprung into my brain: I’m 40 years-old, and I met her when I was 23. I’ve known my wife for almost half of my life.

When she shut off the hairdryer, I voiced this thought to her.

“Wow. We’ve known each other for a long time,” she said.

“I’ve been thinking a lot recently about all the shit we endured when we were starting our life together, and how our kids are almost the same age we were when [shitbag ex-husband] put us all through that. I just can’t imagine being their age and having the strength to deal with that.”

She set the hairdryer down on the sink and looked at me. “Maybe if we had to deal with it alone, but we didn’t. We dealt with it together.”

“I love us so much,” I said.

“Me too.”

We finished getting ready, and headed out to our respective days. Hours later, we met up back at our house.

“I have no idea what do to for dinner,” I said. “Want to walk to the store and figure it out?”

“Sure!”

We held hands and walked to the store, catching each other up on the stuff we did during the day. When we got to the store, we decided on steaks with grilled asparagus and Caesar salad, bought the things we needed to make that happen, and took them home. I prepared the steaks and walked out to the patio to start the charcoal and mesquite wood in our barbecue. Marlowe followed me and sniffed around while I put newspaper into the charcoal chimney.

“This is not for dogs,” I said. She looked back at me as if to say, “everything is for dogs, dummy.”

I pet her head and she wagged her tail. Then she saw a squirrel on the wire and bounded across the yard to go bark at it. The squirrel scolded her, shaking its tail and generally being an asshole.

“One of these days she’s going to get you, squirrel,” I said, “and you’ll regret all the time you wasted teasing her from the safety of your telephone wire.”

I lit the charcoal and went back into the house.

“Do you want to watch a movie?” Anne asked me.

“Sure,” I said. “What do you want to watch?”

She got an impish look on her face and said, “Chupacabra vs. The Alamo.”

I’ve been in the mood for gritty 70s movies like French Connection or Marathon Man, so I hesitated a moment.

“Come on,” she said, “movies like this are my guilty pleasure!”

I laughed. “There is absolutely nothing guilty about your enjoyment of the SyFy originals, and I love how much you embrace their particular brand of cheese.”

Strangely, we’ve never watched either of my entries in this genre: Python or Deep Core, mostly because I don’t know if I could bear to watch myself in them.

I put the DVD into the player and pressed play. We sat next to each other on the couch and had a hell of a good time watching a pretty bad movie that was shot in Vancouver pretend it was in San Antonio. Spoiler alert: the Alamo doesn’t exactly fight the Chupacabras as much as Erik Estrada blows it up for some reason.

We ate our dinner, laughed like crazy and talked about it on Twitter (which was apparently as amusing to lots of other people as it was to us, because we were the only people on Twitter not talking about the basketball game).

While we got ready for bed, I looked at her in the bathroom mirror.

“That was really fun,” I said, around my toothbrush.

“Yeah, that was great,” she said.

“I love us.”

“Me too.”

 

My review of Star Trek Into Darkness

Posted on By Wil

I don’t go to the movies very often. I think the last time I went to a theatre on purpose was to see the first of the current Star Trek movies, and then I only went because it was a private screening and I could reasonably expect the audience to shut the fuck up, turn off their damn phones, and pay attention to the film.

I planned to write a paragraph here detailing why I hate going to the movies, but I think I just covered it, so let me write a different paragraph instead, about how I finally found a movie theatre that I will go to as long as it exists: the iPic theatre in Pasadena (also called Gold Class, I understand) is the only way I will ever watch a movie again for the rest of my life if I can help it. It costs much more than a typical multiplex, but it is entirely worth it, and this theatre has replaced the Arclight (which makes me sad, but sometime in the last couple of years, Arclight stopped enforcing the shut the fuck up and turn you goddamn phone off policy that had made it such an attractive destination for me for so long).

I’ve really wanted to see Star Trek Into Darkness, but I had resigned myself to not seeing it until it was available to watch in the comfort of my own home … until Stepto, e, and my friend Jen all told me about the existence of a theatre that was actually enjoyable, instead of wall-to-wall bullshit advertising and people who have such little respect for the movies and the rest of the people in the audience, they belong at the gathering of the Juggalos instead of in a movie house. When I saw that one of these theatres was not only nearby but was also showing Star Trek Into Darkness, I looked at my schedule, gave myself an afternoon off, and took my entire family to see it.

We just got home, and the rest of this post will be about my first impressions of the movie. If you haven’t seen it, do not read past the jump, or scroll past the giant picture of Bender B. Rodriguez I’ve placed for those of you who came here directly. I will discuss specific plot points and spoilers. You have been warned.

The short version is: I loved it. I think it’s my favorite Star Trek movie ever, and I can’t wait to see what this crew does next.

-SPOILERS BEYOND BENDER-

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