Save Yourself: A #HoldOnToTheLight Post

My life recently has been plagued by instances of mental illness—both my own and exposures to others.

Since my original post for #HoldOnToTheLight, “Life afterFighting, Fighting for Life”, the revelation of how utterly alone I’m not has been at points enlightening, stressful, a few times horrific, and often downright quirky. I don’t think everyone around me is mentally ill, but it’s given me pause to coping behaviors people use to get on, get through, and get past whatever is in front of them.

I’m happy to report that I find more people meeting negativity with positive habits that make far better arguments for working against your demons instead of for them, but there are also a lot of people that are angry—they are angry because of the economy, the president, or this issue, or that issue, or my issues, but every time we complain we all share one thing in common:

We’re all suffering and we don’t want to be, and the vast majority of us don’t want others to suffer either. Some are clearly suffering worse, but on the whole, many of the human beings around the world are not having a great time being a part of it.

During the summer I moved to Colorado after living almost ten years in Charlotte, North Carolina, and like the Queen City, the homeless situation here is AMAZINGLY BAD. Most people living on the streets are former veterans, the elderly, opioid addicts and alcoholics, and those who have fallen through the system.

The vast majority of them are mentally ill.

They harm themselves, scream in the street at 2:00 AM, and cluster together on sidewalks where they suffer openly and alone, trapped in private hells while shuffling through some of the most beautiful neighborhoods I’ve ever lived in. They aren’t bothering you, they don’t have cellphones, and they aren’t burnt-out hippies or college kids begging for change—these people are lost.

Thankfully Denver provides a wonderful network of homeless shelters and public services that make sure these people have places to sleep in the winter, food in their stomachs, and the local community comes together every weekend for fresh blankets and clothes, mobile showers, haircuts, and job drives. For all the bad things that happen in the world, there are real heroes out there doing their best to help—because they show up.

Seeing the struggle of mental illness every day when I go outside has been a fascinating mirror to examine my own coping mechanisms (or lack thereof) in a time when I’m dealing with my own challenges—but I keep in mind that people keeping showing up.

Some background: I was diagnosed with clinical depression as a teenager and that depression was compounded by a series of concussions and bad habits that led to a PTSD-diagnosis, which I’ve thankfully done pretty well getting past by getting better, but it took years of therapy for me to finally figure out the right habits needed for me to get past these things—and thankfully, those skills worked.

Meditation, exercise, a better diet, and having people and professionals to talk to allowed me a solid foundation to better deal with my conditions in a multitude of different ways, which sometimes feels like demolishing a house to rebuild the foundation, but sometimes that is needed. 

Yet the most important thing was that people showed up to save me first. From friends to family to my psychologist, even strangers offered help and advice in times of need.

And yet, even having experienced that, I had no clue I was going to have to deal with anxiety when it finally got around to be named for what it was. In some ways I’ve always been anxious, but it’s always been about process. One of the coping mechanisms I developed for depression—putting my nose to the grindstone and getting the work done so I can be satisfied that I at least put in effort—developed a downside: I would place all the little things that would cause me to be depressed or anxious to the side until they crowded in, and when they crowded in, I didn’t just trip over them as much as I let them drive me into closets and sit in empty hotel restaurants crying while my friends crowed in the bar a hundred feet from me.

So now I have to work more, which is exhausting but worthwhile. Along with my work and my work at Falstaff Books, being a husband, trying to be healthier and happier, there were already challenges along with these blessings. My boss wants me to learn that it is okay to ask for help, something that I struggle with. I deal with bouts of insomnia, but I now make time to sleep when I can instead of “soldiering on,” striving every day to handle both anxiety and depression. Some of it is doing the stuff I was doing before: meditation, healthier eating habits, exercise, and staying active in my own life by being mindful—but now I also have to teach myself to take a step back from anxiety like I step back from the depression and figure out how to work around both, and sometimes those internal processes conflict. It’s not easy, but it’s not impossible either.

But people are still showing up.

From my wife to my best friend/boss, or my coworkers at Falstaff Books, and even some digital therapy sessions, people have come out of the woodwork to help me learn how to better care for myself. Because of them this is a challenge I can beat.

Now I know I speak of mental illness as a challenge, and I realize that in that challenge I have a sense of privilege. I tackled and beat my depression before, so I know I can beat my anxiety. This is a challenge I relish, but I know so, so many who do not feel or see it that way. Some people after they read this are still going to feel alone, or worthless, or one of the many little lies our illnesses allow us to create for ourselves.

Those people will still be by themselves. Therein lies the root of the problem.

I’ve put in a lot of work to save myself from myself because people first showed up to save me, and for all the back patting I can’t forget that I was once that kid with a chain around his neck who thought no one cared about him. I beat that, but like I said the last time we were here, I know too many stories of those that didn’t get to win their struggle.

The need to save ourselves is paramount, and not so we can pat ourselves on the back, or “grow past” our problems—for many mental illness is a life and death battle to the end, and while the cost of defeat is exacting in its sorrow, the glory of victory is beyond anything a person can win outside of themselves. I need to get better so one day I can say “I beat anxiety and depression and saved myself. And so can you.”

I need to save myself so I can show up for others.

Every victory, yours and mine, saves actual lives.

If you are suffering, say something. There will be people there to love you, take you in, armor you up, and go fight with you until one day you too can say “I beat my mental illness. So can you.”

Donate to local shelters for the poor and underprivileged, help out with food drives, and volunteer. One of the things that I have discovered on my journey is that offering help first is often the key to getting things done. Sometimes s few hours at the library volunteering or simply asking someone “how are you?” makes all the difference in the world.

Speaking for myself, the worst part of about anxiety and depression for me is yjsy loneliness—and having someone simply come to be with me or acknowledge my existence breaks all that.

So go save yourself and show up for someone else. It will mean the world.

About the campaign:

#HoldOnToTheLight is a blog campaign encompassing blog posts by fantasy and science fiction authors around the world in an effort to raise awareness around treatment for depression, suicide prevention, domestic violence intervention, PTSD initiatives, bullying prevention and other mental health-related issues. We believe fandom should be supportive, welcoming and inclusive, in the long tradition of fandom taking care of its own. We encourage readers and fans to seek the help they or their loved ones need without shame or embarrassment.

Please consider donating to or volunteering for organizations dedicated to treatment and prevention such as: American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, Hope for the Warriors (PTSD), National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), Canadian Mental Health Association, MIND (UK), SANE (UK), BeyondBlue (Australia), To Write Love On Her Arms (TWLOHA) and the National Suicide Prevention Hotline.

To find out more about #HoldOnToTheLight, find a list of participating authors and blog posts, or reach a media contact, go to http://www.HoldOnToTheLight.com and join us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/WeHoldOnToTheLight

Follow me @JayRequard!

Life After Fighting, Fighting for Life: a #HoldOntoTheLight post

I will start with a declarative statement:

After 30 years of life on this planet I am still alive.

This statement contains a story within itself, but it is far harder for me not to remember the other stories I've grown up with.

My first cousin committed suicide when I was thirteen. Nobody knew he was depressed, save for a recent breakup, and nobody believed he had those thoughts until it happened.

In sixth grade I was awed by the news that an older boy, an eighth grader, had gone home and hung himself during the day. Another friend's brother shot himself in the head.

Then I got into high school and things got very real. From a significant someone who tried to snort her way to destiny to a very gentle girl that carved the inside of her legs with a needle because she felt awful about herself, unspoken problems involving mental illness ran amok. Her older sister, who had been a very talented writer from what I remember, scratched the inside of her arms with needles too. People were cutting but nobody wanted to talk about it--save for the few brave parents who tackled these things head on and, surprisingly, often caught flack for having the courage to actually do something instead of sweeping it under the rug. Some of those people were and remain as close to me as family.

Mental illness is an epidemic our society refused to even acknowledge for a long time, but for many of the communities I grew up in it was lingering specter above us all, an malefic spirit that always threatened to take another without warning.

Into my junior year of high school I had a friend who was addicted to heroin. His best friend, the dude that started shoving way too many heavy metal CD's into my hands, literally watched out for my-friend-the-junkie day and night. My peer group spent weekends drinking pretty hard and living very fast. It is not out of the way to remember how many people I knew that felt left out of things, how people floated in and out of their self-destructive packs, and how many who were simply lost.

Sure, these are often the stories about growing up, but it was always startling to see how many of those stories were haunted by mental illness.

Some of us (see: Jay) had real anger issues, others tough family situations, and there were a lot of kids and adults I knew that were strung out or pilled up on something. The last of the Gen-Xers, who I looked up to, struggled with their place in the world after college and a few were left behind when it broke them. Drugs were a constant reality. I probably smoked and drank too much myself to mute out the world, but so did a lot of athletes I ran with. From those on the high school wrestling team to the guys I rolled jiu-jitsu with in the strip malls, there were always problems with depression. Start adding concussions into the mix and guys would act very strange. One of my closer friends at the time lost his brother to suicide--a brother who was one of my little sister's closest friends.

College was worse.

Many of my friends were poor and struggling with un-diagnosed bipolar disorders, self-medicating to get through working and going to school full-time--and some of them were raising kids, which while wonderful was a colossal burden within itself. I met a mom who served bar and she was the nearest thing to Wonder Woman I've ever met. And she popped a lot of pills. A lot of people were on some form of a SSRI.

And say what you want: The Bush Years were soul crushing. A lot of people went off to war and died. A lot of families were left with loved ones too damaged to make themselves a "normal" life when they came home. I knew a few soldiers that were taken by PTSD while I was in college. They aren't here to tell their stories now.

Here is the point where I insert myself back into it and admit my own demons: Since the time I was 14 years old I had wanted something all through high school and the beginning of college--a career in mixed martial arts--and through injury and purely bad choices on my part I screwed myself out of that. It took a lot of therapy before that period of my life and lot of therapy and love after that period to come to terms with the reality that I couldn't have what I wanted anymore.

That same reality almost took me twice and, if I'm purely honest, the same depression followed me into my destined career too. I know a good many writers in my community that really struggle with depression and suicide. I was, again, one of them not too long ago.

Yet for my part in this, I still remember the stories of others:

One roommate was so terribly broken by his experiences in the Bosnian-Serbian Conflict that he refused to act outside of a self-proscribed set of behaviors that inevitably led to self-mutilation and becoming one of the first people I know to be addicted to bath salts. The uncle who lost his son to suicide when I was thirteen went through rehab not too long ago. The fight to stay sober, happy, and healthy is a hard one for him that he faces every day.

And there's the point: for people that struggle with mental illness, life is a fight, no matter if you are using your fists or not.

I make the statement "I am still alive" to write stories because I know of how many stories were ended because of cruel circumstance, or addiction, or depression, or something even deeper. The only reason I'm here is because I did something we are sometimes shamed in society for doing: I went and found help. I went to therapist, tried medication, took up meditation, and still work every day to fight the specter of mental illness. My best friends do too.

The best thing we can do to talk about mental illness is to tell these stories and let others know that somehow, somewhere, someone out there cares enough to help them. The more we talk about it the more we help others win their fight to hold on, endure, and find their own victories. It is a far better option than waiting until it is too late and having another tale lost.

About the campaign:

#HoldOnToTheLight is a blog campaign encompassing blog posts by fantasy and science fiction authors around the world in an effort to raise awareness around treatment for depression, suicide prevention, domestic violence intervention, PTSD initiatives, bullying prevention and other mental health-related issues. We believe fandom should be supportive, welcoming and inclusive, in the long tradition of fandom taking care of its own. We encourage readers and fans to seek the help they or their loved ones need without shame or embarrassment.

Please consider donating to or volunteering for organizations dedicated to treatment and prevention such as: American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, Hope for the Warriors (PTSD), National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), Canadian Mental Health Association, MIND (UK), SANE (UK), BeyondBlue (Australia), To Write Love On Her Arms (TWLOHA) and the National Suicide Prevention Hotline.

To find out more about #HoldOnToTheLight, find a list of participating authors and blog posts, or reach a media contact, go to http://www.HoldOnToTheLight.com and join us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/WeHoldOnToTheLight