I’m on a boat (2016 version)

I’m about to spend the next seven days and twenty-two romantic nights on a boat with about a thousand nerds, and another thousand muggles who won’t know what the hell is going on all around them.

While I’m gone, I don’t plan to get online at all, because boat internet is expensive and slow, and taking a week off from being online is probably good for my mental health. If I’m lucky, I’ll come home with a finished draft of at least one story.

But while I’m away, I’ve lined up some really fantastic guest bloggers to write stuff and share creative things here. It’s probably the best team of interesting people I’ve ever been able to convince to come write here, and I’m really excited to get back from my trip and read what they’ve written.

So please welcome them when they introduce themselves, and don’t forget to be awesome while I’m gone (and all the time, really).

You’re not broken, and you’re not weak. Depression lies because Depression is a dick.

A question from my Tumblr ask thingy:

I was just wondering, how did you feel when your doctor suggested going on anti-depressants? My therapist of several months suggested it to me today and while logically I know it’s probably a good idea, I can’t help but feel like I’m broken, you know? Like, I’m worse than I thought I was. Did you feel like this or know anyone who felt something similar?

My answer:

First of all, Depression Lies. It tells you that you’re weak and unworthy and terrible and that you’re never going to be able to get out from under it.

Depression lies like that because it wants to protect itself and keep on controlling your life.

Depression is a dick, and I want to encourage you to listen to your therapist and let him or her help you.

Now I want you to imagine that you have a fever, and your whole body hurts, and you’ve been coughing up all sorts of awful gunk for days. You’re miserable, so you go to the doctor.

The doctor says, “oh, you have this terrible infection in your body, so I’m going to give you some medicine to help your body get better, and some other medicine to help you not suffer while your body works on that.”

Imagine that you then say, “I don’t want to do that, because I feel sort of broken if I take those medications. I feel like I’m weak or something, and if I take those medications that you know will help me feel better, I’m admitting that my body needs some help so I can stop suffering. I think I’ll keep on suffering and hope it gets better.”

Or you go to your doctor because you’ve been feeling crummy and she runs some tests and she says, “Well, it turns out that you have diabetes, but you’re in luck! You can take some medicine, and it’ll treat it. You’ll probably have to take it for a long time, maybe even your whole life, but you’ll get well and feel better!”

Do you say, “No, I think I’ll just deal with it,” and continue suffering?

Of course not! You would treat any illness with medication if you could, and you’d put a cast on a broken leg and walk with crutches if you needed to, because walking on a broken leg really really really hurts, and you don’t need to suffer through that pain!

Mental illness is exactly the same as a physical illness. Your body has something that’s out of whack – in our case, it’s how our brains handle neurochemicals and stuff – and there’s medication that can help us help ourselves feel better.

You’re not broken, and you’re not weak, and if you’re now thinking that you’re worse than you thought you were? Well, that’s really awesome, because it means that you recognize that your brain needs some help to get healthy, and your doctor is there to help you do that.

It takes courage to take the chance on medication, and the first one you try may not work, because brains are all different and incredibly complicated, but something will work, and you will feel better, and you will be so glad that you took the step to take care of yourself.

Please check in with me in a month or so, and let me know how you’re doing.

I answer a lot of questions about living with mental illness on my Tumblr thing, if you want to go take a look.

And please, remember, if you live with mental illness like I do: you are ok.

Post script: It’s been about 24 hours since I published this, and there are a lot of comments here, a lot of people sharing their own experiences and stories. That’s wonderful. Something that has come up a lot, which I know but failed to write here originally, is that medication for mental illness isn’t a magic wand. We live in a society that too frequently says, “here, take this pill” instead of “let’s look at what’s going on, and see how you can be helped, including but not limited to taking medication.” For me, personally, a combination of ongoing talk therapy plus medication gave me my life back. That may be different for you or someone you know. Brains are complicated, as I said, and what works for one person may not work for another. What works for you now may not be as effective at some point in the future. My goal in writing this post yesterday was to dispel the myth that says mental illness = weakness, because I believe that myth is demonstrably harmful to countless people. There are lots of ways to get help for Depression and Anxiety, and I hope to encourage anyone who is suffering to please seek help, because you don’t have to suffer. The comparison I made between physical illness and mental illness is one way I try to do that.

The audio version of my Criminal Minds Production Diary is back.

Back in 2009, I was having a lot of fun with this thing I called Project Crazy Idea. This project was how I gave myself permission to try something silly or unconventional, without feeling like I was doing something stupid.

One of the things I did was an audio performance of my Criminal Minds Production Diary, which I wrote while I worked on an episode of the show called Paradise in 2008. I put it online in my Lulu store, where it happily lived for a few years until Lulu stopped doing multimedia files.

I just realized, today, that I can make it live on my Bandcamp page, so I remastered the recording and uploaded it. It’s basically pay-what-you-want, starting at $2, or you can stream it for the low, low price of free!

So here’s an SEO-friendly link to Wil Wheaton’s Criminal Minds Production Diary at Bandcamp.

my good idea was so good someone already did it!

I’ve been writing this science fiction short story for a little while, now, and I think I’m about 3/4 finished with the puke draft*. I’ve been reading a lot of science fiction for fun, because that’s where my head is right now (Lightspeed Magazine and the Expanse series have been delightful companions, as was the most recent Twelve Tomorrows) but also for inspiration, because that’s where my head needs to be right now.

So when I’m not actively writing this story, or thinking about what I’m going to write next in it, my brain is kicking around lots of other ideas that I are interesting to me, like What if future humans built a ring around Earth, sort of like Ringworld but smaller, and the story was told from the point of view of the last generation to live on the planet? It turns out that this has already been done, which is both reassuring — Hey! My good idea was so good someone already did it! — and frustrating — Shit! My good idea was so good someone already did it!.

I have learned not to talk about things that are ideas, or share details of works in progress, because it’s a great way to bring the work to a screeching halt for me, but I have this idea for a short story (like, very short, just a couple thousand words) that I like so much, I have just decided right now in this very instant that I will not reveal what the idea is, and will instead write it out and make it a story.

So now this is a much shorter and less interesting post than I thought it was going to be when I started.

*The puke draft, as defined by my friend and mentor Amy Berg (who created both my role on Leverage and Eureka), is the draft you write first, where you just puke up everything onto the page, without stopping to fix stuff or redo stuff. I add to this the following: you go all the way through until the story is done, and then you can go back and start washing away the puke to leave behind the yummy undigested morsels of delicious story.