anxiety – WIL WHEATON dot NET

When you really want to write something — anything at all — but your goddamn depression is sitting on your chest, making it really really hard to even reach the keyboard, so you end up with a folder of abandoned drafts.

And you feel like shit because you aren’t making anything, or creating anything, or actually doing anything. And you desperately want to make something, but whenever you start, depression wraps itself around you and whispers in your ear, “Why bother? You know how much you suck.”

And you know that depression lies, but you listen to it anyway, and you don’t even know why, but you do. It’s like you can’t tune it out and ignore it, even though it’s getting in between you and the thing you love to do more than anything else.

And that folder of abandoned drafts starts to feel like a monument to your own failure, and even though you could just delete it, you don’t because you know there’s something decent in there, and you just have to find it somehow.

Because you know that you have a good life, and you know that you do some cool things, and you know that you can make things, that you have made things, you decide to stand up, even with the weight of depression doing everything it can to hold you down.

And you struggle. And you push. And you struggle some more.

And finally you stand up. And you take a deep breath, and then you fall down again.

And then you try to stand up again, and you start to wonder if you’re just feeling sorry for yourself, but then depression reminds you that you’re not feeling sorry for yourself, you’re just acknowledging that you’re the least talented of all your friends and everyone knows it but you.

And then you remember that depression lies, so you keep trying to stand up and push it off, and believe in yourself.

And it’s really fucking hard.

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’.