Depression, I know thy art

And I was just giving thought to depression and purpose, and how the two are so often attached to each other. As if when one finds a purpose, one will not be depressed. But we all know that this is not the case, because sometimes finding no purpose is the best way to get rid of the blues that beset so many of us. The pressure of meaning and purpose are often the culprit and catalyst of the darkness that is visible. And how tough is it when you are 13 and 18 and 14 and 16 and 17, and mostly certainly, 15 – how tough is it to realize the spinning meaninglessness of this life; you know, the thoughts that adults, who are my age, have as frequent as morning stretches. Those insidious thoughts that sound off at the most inopportune times, like on the toilet or in the shower or driving your car or seeing your children or not seeing your children and feeling guilty because it feels good or paying bills and taxes and child support or spending romantic time or dancing or being sexual or watching a good movie or traveling or just about any activity. And you ask yourself on more than just bleak occasions, ‘Is this it?’ And you convince yourself that life is all about this, realizing that it’s that very thought that got you to this point. Now, imagine being a teenager and having those thoughts every day in the prison of school, and then going home and feeling the same. And then imagine, you become an adult, and it really hasn’t changed.

I’m not saying that I don’t love my life – ok, I don’t always love my life, but I do like my life with all its gunk and mess and joys and creativity. I do like it with all the stuff I do, and how I help people feel better. And I’m a positive guy; I really am. I roll with the punches, and sometimes I roll into the punches. But I was thinking this morning how I never intended to make it this far, how I thought for certain that my life would come to a close – by my hands or others -- before 30, and how at times, I wished for this. I am glad that I made it to 40.

It was all weighing heavily on me this morning when I was thinking about Brian Winn. When I was 15 Brian and I were close, and he was a year older than me. And Brian was cool, definitely one of the cool and popular guys. And me? I was a distant cool. I got some merit from being Roy’s younger brother and playing football. I was an anomaly. I was the black kid who didn’t ‘act black’ who would do crazy stuff to prove that I had substance to offer as well. I was peculiar. I. didn’t. quite. fit. in. So, when Brian Winn wanted to hang with me I was over-the-top giddy. We made plans that we would party hard when he got his car the following year. And do you know what that meant to my mind? Girls. Hook-ups. Drinking. Having fun.

But I couldn’t even make it that far. A few months later, I wanted to end my life. And then Jesus, ruining all my plans I had with Brian, went on and saved me. And I became even stranger. And Brian didn’t want to hang out with me anymore, and I wasn’t going to any parties with him or hooking up with the pretty, popular girls. I was a Jesus freak, walking through the hallways of my school preaching AT people, telling them how much I ‘loved’ them, but how they were all going to hell, if they didn’t accept God into their lives. And I did find peace, through God, through faith and religion, but I wasn’t really ‘happy’ either. I convinced myself that I was better off having the guarantee of eternal life than enjoying sin for a season. Or something like that.

Now, here’s the hard part to admit, finding God did not permanently remove my depression. In fact, I would go as far as saying that it perhaps made it more acute. When you see the world for the way it is, whereas, before you had been living with blinders and lies and masks, reality is not glorious. It is bleak. There is an adjustment period to this brightness; light stuns and shocks when all you know is how to move through the darkness.

I became aware of my failure. No more lying to myself. I knew well of my imperfection, because I was told incessantly by pulpits and altar calls that I just wasn’t quite good enough, but Jesus still loved me. How depressing is that thought? How does one ever feel powerful, beautiful, or confident, if you are taught that your beauty is only because of some other being outside of yourself who lives within you; that you, on your own, are ugly and damaged and imperfect?

I don’t regret my radical conversion, for it was this awakening that brought me closer to the balance I now feel. I am thankful for the people who were placed by God to intercept me from ending my own life. I appreciate Mary Lou Blake, Pastor Snyder, Janice Tulp, Charlie Thiel, Linda Wigginton, and anyone else who whispered, ‘It will get better.’ However, now, I see things differently. I am not a failed being; I am a perfect being who fails because I choose not to see my perfection.

Depression hurts, but I’ve also discovered that it helps. It helps me see through the muck and fear. It teaches me how to remove the mask. Depression makes me question my existence, while simultaneously bringing my existence into better focus. I have found a creativity within myself that is hard to harness when I am not riding the tides of sadness. I celebrate these epiphanies. I celebrate with all of us who have found true spirituality. A student once told me that religion is for those who are afraid of hell, and spirituality is for those of us who have been through hell and have come back. I would like to welcome you back, my friends. Welcome back from the darkness. Welcome back to the darkness of a new moon.

What I Do

What I do

I was asked to write a narrative about what I do to earn the living that I earn, but how does one define what they do by what they do? I suppose the most inaccurate, but direct reply is: I speak. I speak to audiences and individuals; youth and elderly; rural communities and urban communities; the despondent and the desperate. I speak with vigor.

I speak words of rage and inspiration. I encourage people to take hold of their days in a manner that is befitting of the very air they breathe. I speak out against the injustices that take place on the grand scales, as well as those diminutive slights that fester in the very hearts of us all. Make no mistake, my friends, my voice is used as a melodious cello, vibrating with universal sounds, often left unspoken. I speak words of alarm and words of comfort. I speak what I know to be true.

I also create. I create shows and programs and visions and implementations and passion and healing. I use movies, books, religious scriptures, music, video, knowledge, performance, and poetry. I create monologues and essays; characters and challenges; epiphanies and reminders. I fit my program to the needs of the organization that brings me in to speak to their students, employees, or participants.

I create dialogue. I want people to speak more. See more. Know more. Care more. Be more. I create a safe space for individuals to open their minds, speak about their pain, while acknowledging the hurts of others. I create a legacy that will long be remembered when I am fertilizing daffodils.

What I do is integrated with who I am. I am performer, psychologist, poet, actor, orator, writer, photographer, healer, philosopher. I am a reflection of light. I am how I was made.

What do I do? I get on stage and I bleed out. I challenge the masses to turn their pain into pearls; I tell every soul about their beauty. I hug and listen as the tears run freely. In short, I aspire to inspire others.

Excerpt from Walt Whitman

"The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.

That you are here—that life exists, and identity;

That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse." -- Walt Whitman

Superman saves

My daughter, Saskia, is a superhero. I am not sure what her other-worldly name or abilities are, but I am confident that she will embrace them in due time. For now, she is content to teach me lessons she learned from lifetimes ago and previous worlds.

We have a tradition when Saskia sleeps at my house. I will tell her a true story from my life, a story that I make up, or a joke. She loves jokes. I must admit, some of the jokes I share with my daughter, though not offensive or mean, are probably not jokes found in a six year old joke book. But give me a break, how many knock-knock jokes can one tell?

Saskia has a delightfully smart sense of humor. With parents who are both performers, what else could one expect? Currently, she has a favorite joke that I share with her. Personally, I love the joke, but more importantly, I find Saskia’s consistent response, regardless of the amount of times I tell her the joke, to be refreshingly enlightening. Here’s the joke.

Guy number one is sitting alone at a bar when guy number two sits next to him. Guy number one looks over at guy number two and says, “Is this your first time here?”

Guy number two replies, “Yeah, how did you know?”

Guy number one says, “I can always tell the newcomers. Did you know that this is a magic bar?”

Guy number two responds, “What do you mean?”

“Well,” says guy number one, “if you go on the roof of this building and jump off, because of the way the buildings are set, the wind currents will catch you before you hit the ground and carry you back to the top of the building.”

Guy number two laughs, “Listen, buddy, I don’t know what you’ve been drinking, but I want you to know that I was born, but it wasn’t yesterday. I would suggest that you slow down on them drinks.”

Without missing a beat, guy number one invites guy number two to follow him to the rooftop. Guy number two cautiously obliges. When they get to the top guy number one says, “Watch this!” And he takes off running and jumps off the roof. About 30 feet from the ground, the air currents catch him and carry him back to the top of the roof.

Guy number two is utterly amazed. “Wow! I’ve got to try that!” he shouts. So, guy number two takes off running and he jumps off the roof. He gets 30 feet from the ground, and keeps descending until finally he smashes on the ground and dies.

At this point, guy number one calmly walks back down to the bar and continues sipping on his drink. The bartender looks at guy number one and says, “Superman, you sho’ is crazy!”

At the end of the joke, Saskia is laughing, and she says to me, “Daddy, that’s really funny, but it’s kind of dumb, because Superman is not supposed to kill you, he’s supposed to save you.” And by this brilliant response, my daughter illuminated me to recognize a simple truth. At six years of age, children actively rely on their brains to process their world. They attempt to ascertain what makes a joke funny or not so funny, good or not good, appropriate or inappropriate. And then, the deterioration occurs; we get older. We rely on our brains less and less. Automation is king.

As you are reading this essay, I want you to stop and look at your nails. Now, there is a favorable chance that, if you are a male, you turned your palms up, and bent your fingers towards your wrist to examine your nails. If, on the other hand, you are a female, odds are in my favor, that you laid your hands flat, with your fingers moving away from the body to gather a clear view of your nails. I haven’t even seen you, but I know that more than 90% of the associated gender will follow that script. Now, the question: from where did you learn that behavior?

I can assure you, no health class taught you how to look at your nails. Nor was there any specific parental lecturing that bid you to conform to this gender identification. You picked it up along the way, and have not given it a further thought in your time on this earth. And I can be confident in also assuming that until I mentioned the difference in action between the genders of nail-watchers, most of my readers were unaware that a variance existed at all. We do what we do. No questions asked. No additional thoughts volunteered. It is what it is, an automatic behavior.

Now, looking at your nails or getting a joke is not very significant in the grand scheme of things. (In fact, I dare say, if you have to explain every joke to your friends, you will wind up without friends.) There is nothing wrong with limiting the amount of brain power we exert for activities and behaviors that are routine. Automation is the way the world works. This is why we practice over and over. We want to create routines; we are desirous of order.

However, my daughter got me thinking about the automatic behaviors that do not benefit our place on this planet. They do not add perfection to our lives or nobility to our legacies. I think about the hallways of our schools where students travel through daily, navigating away from “this” group or “that” group, so as not to be beaten down anymore. Like what happens in the cafeteria of countries, where the nation of Hip-Hop despises the province of Abercrombie, but they will unite to demolish the small island of Ciphers who eat alone daily.

Or in gym class, where it’s all about fitness, but some children just fit less than others, so they witness the witless making decisions about who should come first, but these children know that they will always be picked last.

Or in a college dorm room, where one boy discovered his roommate was gay, so he turned on a webcam to broadcast the sexual explorations of his roommate and another man, unbeknownst to either his roommate or the other man. And it’s funny because we live in a world of YouTube, so we can broadcast this worldwide and receive our 15 minutes of fame, for hours. It’s automatic. It’s fun. It’s guaranteed to make people laugh, feeding their vacuous voyeurism. The formula has worked over and over: the wonderful world of automation. Can we really blame the parties involved? How was Dharun Ravi or Molly Wei ever to know that playing such a reckless game would inspire Tyler Clementi to scream “olly olly oxen free” because he was tired of hiding who he was, and he had already lost the game? How were they supposed to know that Tyler Clementi was not a fan of automation? He fooled everyone. He practiced his violin incessantly. The notes were like breathing, until his final note of whimpering, of feeling unfit, a dirge of a swan jumping off a bridge and making ripples from New York to San Francisco. How could they have known their actions were a part of Tyler’s opus?

There must be some other way; some other way to avoid the norm of derision and imprisonment. We need to burn those stagnant stocks passed down as heirlooms by prior generations. Burn those mutual funds of fear and ignorance; these investments always crash. Burn! Burn! Burn! Let the ashes rise to heaven so that they may be spat down into the dirt and transformed into something nobler, more useful. Our human race has survived because of the tools of bravery, boldly going where others fear to tread. We are not the strongest creatures, but we have more than just instinct and hardwiring. We are not condemned to do what those of the past have done. We can choose. We can choose comfort over castigation, faith over despair, and brain power over automation.

We were told that our greatness will be revealed as we get older. We were told that we know more now than we did before. We were told that adults have the answers because they have lived longer. We were told that the world is far more complex than it was when we were younger. But these days, I’m not too sure if these axioms I learned hold pure for me anymore. I think the world is a lot simpler than we presume. It is brilliant because of its simplicity. And I’ve met the smartest people of them all – the six year olds – like Saskia, who very simply, but clearly, said to me, “Daddy, Superman is not supposed to kill you, he’s supposed to save you.”

Just Think

My daughter, Saskia, is a superhero. I am not sure what her other-worldly name or abilities are, but I am confident that she will embrace them in due time. For now, she is content to teach me lessons she learned from lifetimes ago and previous worlds.

We have a tradition when Saskia sleeps at my house. I will tell her a true story from my life, a story that I make up, or a joke. She loves jokes. I must admit, some of the jokes I share with my daughter, though not offensive or mean, are probably not jokes found in a six year old joke book. But give me a break, how many knock-knock jokes can one tell?

Saskia has a delightfully smart sense of humor. With parents who are both performers, what else could one expect? Currently, she has a favorite joke that I share with her. Personally, I love the joke, but more importantly, I find Saskia’s consistent response, regardless of the amount of times I tell her the joke, to be refreshingly enlightening. Here’s the joke.

Guy number one is sitting alone at a bar when guy number two sits next to him. Guy number one looks over at guy number two and says, “Is this your first time here?”

Guy number two replies, “Yeah, how did you know?”

Guy number one says, “I can always tell the newcomers. Did you know that this is a magic bar?”

Guy number two responds, “What do you mean?”

“Well,” says guy number one, “if you go on the roof of this building and jump off, because of the way the buildings are set, the wind currents will catch you before you hit the ground and carry you back to the top of the building.”

Guy number two laughs, “Listen, buddy, I don’t know what you’ve been drinking, but I want you to know that I was born, but it wasn’t yesterday. I would suggest that you slow down on them drinks.”

Without missing a beat, guy number one invites guy number two to follow him to the rooftop. Guy number two cautiously obliges. When they get to the top guy number one says, “Watch this!” And he takes off running and jumps off the roof. About 30 feet from the ground, the air currents catch him and carry him back to the top of the roof.

Guy number two is utterly amazed. “Wow! I’ve got to try that!” he shouts. So, guy number two takes off running and he jumps off the roof. He gets 30 feet from the ground, and keeps descending until finally he smashes on the ground and dies.

At this point, guy number one calmly walks back down to the bar and continues sipping on his drink. The bartender looks at guy number one and says, “Superman, you sho’ is crazy!”

At the end of the joke, Saskia is laughing, and she says to me, “Daddy, that’s really funny, but it’s kind of dumb, because Superman is not supposed to kill you, he’s supposed to save you.” And by this brilliant response, my daughter illuminated me to recognize a simple truth. At six years of age, children actively rely on their brains to process their world. They attempt to ascertain what makes a joke funny or not so funny, good or not good, appropriate or inappropriate. And then, the deterioration occurs; we get older. We rely on our brains less and less. Automation is king.

As you are reading this essay, I want you to stop and look at your nails. Now, there is a favorable chance that, if you are a male, you turned your palms up, and bent your fingers towards your wrist to examine your nails. If, on the other hand, you are a female, odds are in my favor, that you laid your hands flat, with your fingers moving away from the body to gather a clear view of your nails. I haven’t even seen you, but I know that more than 90% of the associated gender will follow that script. Now, the question: from where did you learn that behavior?

I can assure you, no health class taught you how to look at your nails. Nor was there any specific parental lecturing that bid you to conform to this gender identification. You picked it up along the way, and have not given it a further thought in your time on this earth. And I can be confident in also assuming that until I mentioned the difference in action between the genders of nail-watchers, most of my readers were unaware that a variance existed at all. We do what we do. No questions asked. No additional thoughts volunteered. It is what it is, an automatic behavior.

Now, looking at your nails or getting a joke is not very significant in the grand scheme of things. (In fact, I dare say, if you have to explain every joke to your friends, you will wind up without friends.) There is nothing wrong with limiting the amount of brain power we exert for activities and behaviors that are routine. Automation is the way the world works. This is why we practice over and over. We want to create routines; we are desirous of order.

However, my daughter got me thinking about the automatic behaviors that do not benefit our place on this planet. They do not add perfection to our lives or nobility to our legacies. I think about the hallways of our schools where students travel through daily, navigating away from “this” group or “that” group, so as not to be beaten down anymore. Like what happens in the cafeteria of countries, where the nation of Hip-Hop despises the province of Abercrombie, but they will unite to demolish the small island of Ciphers who eat alone daily.

Or in gym class, where it’s all about fitness, but some children just fit less than others, so they witness the witless making decisions about who should come first, but these children know that they will always be picked last.

Or in a college dorm room, where one boy discovered his roommate was gay, so he turned on a webcam to broadcast the sexual explorations of his roommate and another man, unbeknownst to either his roommate or the other man. And it’s funny because we live in a world of YouTube, so we can broadcast this worldwide and receive our 15 minutes of fame, for hours. It’s automatic. It’s fun. It’s guaranteed to make people laugh, feeding their vacuous voyeurism. The formula has worked over and over: the wonderful world of automation. Can we really blame the parties involved? How was Dharun Ravi or Molly Wei ever to know that playing such a reckless game would inspire Tyler Clementi to scream “olly olly oxen free” because he was tired of hiding who he was, and he had already lost the game? How were they supposed to know that Tyler Clementi was not a fan of automation? He fooled everyone. He practiced his violin incessantly. The notes were like breathing, until his final note of whimpering, of feeling unfit, a dirge of a swan jumping off a bridge and making ripples from New York to San Francisco. How could they have known their actions were a part of Tyler’s opus?

There must be some other way; some other way to avoid the norm of derision and imprisonment. We need to burn those stagnant stocks passed down as heirlooms by prior generations. Burn those mutual funds of fear and ignorance; these investments always crash. Burn! Burn! Burn! Let the ashes rise to heaven so that they may be spat down into the dirt and transformed into something nobler, more useful. Our human race has survived because of the tools of bravery, boldly going where others fear to tread. We are not the strongest creatures, but we have more than just instinct and hardwiring. We are not condemned to do what those of the past have done. We can choose. We can choose comfort over castigation, faith over despair, and brain power over automation.

We were told that our greatness will be revealed as we get older. We were told that we know more now than we did before. We were told that adults have the answers because they have lived longer. We were told that the world is far more complex than it was when we were younger. But these days, I’m not too sure if these axioms I learned hold pure for me anymore. I think the world is a lot simpler than we presume. It is brilliant because of its simplicity. And I’ve met the smartest people of them all – the six year olds – like Saskia, who very simply said to me, “Daddy, Superman is not supposed to kill you, he’s supposed to save you.”