Guest Blog: John Wilcox

I'd love to tell you that the first time I met John Wilcox, I knew that we would be lifelong friends. But what's closer to the truth is that the first time I met John Wilcox, I vowed never to be in the same room with him again if I could help it. Fifteen years and many, many rooms later I'm happy that I broke that promise to myself and even happier to discredit both Emily Post and everyone's grandmother by telling you that first impressions don't mean a thing.

John is best described as wicked cool and wicked smart (if you are hearing me say that in a loud, way-off-the-mark fake Bostonian accent that sounds ever-so-slightly Jamaican, I thank you for knowing me so well). In fact, the only bad thing I can dig up to say about him after all of these years is that he lives entirely too far away from me and pulls off the "crazy old person on a college campus" routine off much better than I do. And that's saying a lot for someone who once drunkenly threw up all over my feet (I picked a terrible day to wear flip-flops but they didn't belong to me, which proves there is always a bright side to everything). Enjoy.

John Wilcox: Why Silver Linings Playbook Sucks Even Though Jennifer Lawrence (and I Guess Bradley Cooper) is Ridiculously Good Looking, and Other Stray Observations About Mental Illness

I recently watched Silver Linings Playbook, the movie about mentally ill people acting zany, rejecting medication, and finding love.  It was kind of like A Beautiful Mind 2: Stuck in Philly, or Garden State 2: This Time We Dance.

You can tell both characters are suffering from mental illness from the stubble and constipated expression

I  liked Silver Linings just fine. I, of course, fell a little bit in love with Jennifer Lawrence's character. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl type (defined by Nathan Rabin at The A.V. Club) really does it for me, like Natalie Portman's character in Garden State. I'm a sucker.

But this isn’t about my habit of falling in love with fictional characters, or even worse, fictional character types.  No, this is about…

…

(the ellipses build suspense)

Mental Illness.

More specifically, this is about mental illness in movies and the evil atrocity those movies commit (other than predictability that borders on criminal negligence.)

Of course, a blog about mental illness wouldn’t be a blog about mental illness without slightly uncomfortable self-revelation.  But that’s kind of the point of this whole thing.  Either by forming or reflecting cultural values on mental illness, Hollywood has painted such a consistent portrait of the mentally ill that it is difficult to talk about without first: 1.) defending mental illnesses as an actual disease and 2.) explaining away all of the weird stereotypes that almost every movie with a mentally ill character promotes. 

So, some slightly uncomfortable self-revelation!

Obviously, I wouldn't care about this as much if it didn't somehow affect me personally. About a year after I left the military, I started getting treatment for severe anxiety. The treatment was probably a lifetime overdue, but it became necessary when I spent that first post-military year sitting in my buddy Mark's house doing 

absolutely nothing, afraid to make any kind of movement in my life. I didn't go out, I barely reconnected with friends. And I sure as hell didn't make any moves towards my stated goals of going to college. 

This was pretty much my life for over a year.  Proud time

And here is the first part where, often in conversation, I feel like I have to defend myself, rightly or wrongly. I understand that change is scary for everyone. And if you saw my lifestyle for that year, you would probably accuse me of being nothing more than a lazy ass. (I'm always a lazy ass, so that argument is moot.) The fact is, though, that any time I would do something like start the registration process for college or seriously consider a job search, I would get physically ill. Sorry to be gross, but not just a little rumbly in the tumbly, but straight-up puking in the toilet physically ill. 

So I decided it was time to get treatment. I went to a psychiatrist who agreed with the diagnosis I had received earlier in the military of severe Generalized Anxiety Disorder with minor depression as a symptom of the anxiety, and started me on a regimen of medication that the hack, useless psychiatrist in the military hadn't bothered to try (and that's a whole other story worth telling sometime, psychiatrists whose primary client is the military rather than the patient. Another day,  perhaps.) 

Now, the only reason that I'm going to reveal exactly what medication I'm on is because this relates directly to my problem with Silver Linings Playbook and the whole genre of movie it represents. My competent psychiatrist prescribed me Fluoxetine (Prozac) and Clonazepam (Klonopin). I started taking the medication after dealing with severe reservations about taking psychiatric medication. A week after I started taking the medication, I was registered for college, had all of the paperwork filled out correctly with the federal government and Veteran's Affairs (that's a LOT of paperwork), registered for classes, ordered my textbooks, and made contacts on campus. After more than a year of sitting on the couch and doing literally nothing, in a week I accomplised more than I had in the entire year preceding it.

I chose my college solely on aesthetic appeal.  Good ol’ St. Scholastica

And I stayed on the medication for a while, started college and kicked some ass. I was a horrible student in high school, but a straight-A student now in college with very real prospects of getting into a PhD program in the next year. But after being on the medication for more than a year and doing better than I ever have in my thirty years of life, for some reason, I decided to quit. I figured, now that I had a clear idea of what kinds of thoughts were the "mentally ill" thoughts and which ones were my own, I would be able to distinguish between them and only pay attention to the healthy ones. And as stupid as this sounds, and it will probably make you lose respect for me, the reason I thought I could do this was because MOVIES TOLD ME I COULD.

Now hear me out.  Every single movie that I can readily think of has the mentally ill protagonist learn to deal with his or her disease without the help of medication.  And not only that, the movies I’m thinking of actively demonize medication.

In A Beautiful Mind, mathematician John Nash (Russel Crowe’s character) deals with severe schizophrenia with nothing more than willpower and the help of his loving wife.  When he is forced into treatment, he loses is magical mathematical powers, so has to learn to deal with his hallucinations to be his truly genius self.  Of course, in real life, it was revealed soon after the movie that the real John Nash never stopped taking his medication, but that was just a minor blip in the news. 
 

Silver Linings Playbook takes it even a step further and makes the old claim that psychiatric medication turns the characters into “zombies” and in one scene lists several medications that countless people rely on to function, and laugh at their horrible effects, including both medications I took (although I had stopped taking them before I saw the movie, so it’s wasn’t the movie’s fault I stopped my medication or anything of the sort.)  The movie, along with almost every other movie that touches on the subject, implies that the medication somehow fundamentally changes the people for the worse, or robs them of their “true essence.”     

Garden State, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Girl Interrupted, hell even Good Will Hunting… this is just off the top of my head.  If I thought for another ten minutes I could probably name another ten movies that demonize psychiatric medication and treatment.  Think about all of the scenes of wily characters squirreling their medication in their cheeks only to dispose of it later.

So with this cultural context firmly embedded in my skull, I had stopped the medication that had so dramatically improved my life.  And guess what happened?  Life started sucking again.  I was missing assignments, and towards the end of the semester I started getting physically ill again when I tried to leave my apartment.  I started contemplating dropping out of college because I couldn’t handle what was happening.
Thankfully, some of the contacts I have made on campus are truly Good People, and one of them helped me get back to treatment before the end of the semester.  And again, just like the first time, a week after I re-started the medication I went into kick-ass overdrive, caught up with almost a full semester’s worth of work, and somehow scraped by the end of the semester maintaining above a 3.75 GPA.  And even though that was the worst I had done so far in college (totally bragging, unabashedly,) I had never been prouder. 

I guess this is the point, finally.  If you have never dealt with mental illness, or if you are dealing with it now and refusing medication because you are afraid it will make you a different person, don’t believe the movies. 
Now, getting on the right medication is often a long process for people suffering from mental illnesses.  And sometimes, the medications they try have negative effects like making that person feel sluggish and slow, or disassociated.  But that’s just because it’s the wrong medication.  Not every medication does that to every person.  Getting treatment for mental illness is not wrong somehow, it does not make you weak, taking medication isn’t a sign of defeat.  And not only that, but sometimes, medication is absolutely totally necessary to successful treatment of mental diseases. 

Because that’s exactly what we’re talking about.  Treating diseases.  Real diseases.  And that gets me to my last little minor point with this beast.

One thing I realized as an adult dealing with a mental illness is that I have to be open and honest about the whole thing.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t usually advertise it (other than, you know, this blog or whatever,) and it is not a common topic of conversation in my everyday life.  But it sometimes is necessary to bring up.  In my academic life, I have found it much easier to be honest with my professors about what is happening than trying to hide it, because even on medication there are some bad days (very very few, but some.)  And predictably, the reactions differ.  Almost all of the professors accept what I tell them, perhaps ask some questions, and we move on.  However, there are the few people that, although they nod, I can tell think that I am just another person making an excuse.  That “mental illness” is just another word for “lazy” or “disorganized” or whatever it may be.  

And I guess that is any individual’s right to believe what he or she chooses to believe, but I’m pretty sure that medical science has gone pretty far to prove that mental illnesses are real and identifiable.  Diseases to be treated.  I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure the experts agree that mental illnesses are real.  But some people think that billions of people emitting noxious gases doesn’t affect the atmosphere, so you can’t expect everyone to accept mental illness either.  So even though it is very uncomfortable to talk about sometimes, if someone suffers from some random physical disease, let’s just say Lupus for the hell of it, she may not like talking about it, but if it interferes with her life, she is probably not too hesitant to explain what is happening.  (And the feminine pronoun isn’t just culturally progressive, but accurate to Lupus because that’s how I roll.)  And that’s how I have to look at my own illness.  If it gets in the way of a successful life, I need to explain what’s happening.

And to wrap a bow on it, I can’t think of any movie that demonizes treatment for physical diseases.  So stop it, Hollywood.  You’re fucking people up by promoting this idea that treatment is bad.  It’s a goddamn disease.  Get treatment.  Don’t be afraid to talk about it.  Even though those movies pretend to be “sympathetic” to mental illness, they are a bunch of crap.

I suppose that's it. I've been thinking a lot about mental illness advocacy. I don't know. Just something on my mind. My recent struggle with medication (and lack thereof) and then watching Silver Linings Playbook made me realize that there is a lot of work to be done with de-stimatization. I guess this is my opening salvo. We'll see where I go from here. 

Yes I did.

The Road Not Taken

Another semester has come and gone and I finished with my fifth consecutive 4.0 semester and the promise of a paper getting published in the near future. But my pride in my achievement isn't the point of this blog. The point is how I finally learned how to stop being down on myself and start being my own number one fan, and that's a lesson far more valuable than any grade ever will be.

Let me back up a bit.

For a long time now, I have been obsessed with the idea of what I "should have" done with my life. I "should have" plugged straight through college right after high school. Okay, so I hated college ten years ago, but so what? In my mind, it didn't matter that I hated it, I "should have" done it because in the lineage of life, it was the thing that was supposed to come next, therefore I "should have" sucked it up and kept going. I have spent the last three years absolutely hating that I have to worry about homework and tests when I had a family to take care of. I "should have" been putting every last ounce of focus and energy on them, and none of it (or at least a minimal amount of it) on myself. There was a way that I "should have" been living my life and I wasn't. As far as I was concerned, you only get one life and I was messing mine up. Royally.

Here's the thing. Deep down, I know that there is no right or wrong way to live your life. But knowing that on an intellectual level and actually believing it are two very different things. I've spent a lot of time beating myself up, looking regretfully back to the past, and generally feeling less than good enough  because I was absolutely convinced that I was living my life the wrong way. I hated telling people that I was still in school and that I was only just getting around to earning my bachelor's degree instead of a masters or a PHD. I dreaded the "what do you do?" question because I hated saying I was a student, like I was a carefree nineteen-year-old instead of someone who ought to have it together by now. I wasn't supposed to be a student, I was supposed to be the next Tina Fey by now! And because I was so down on myself, I assumed (absolutely wrongfully) that everyone else was down on me too and that people thought I was stupid or unmotivated for being where I was in life. Worse, I felt that by putting so much of my time towards school and by extension towards myself, I was doing my children a grave injustice and not giving them enough of my time, attention, or even love. I would lie awake at night, imagining the awful day somewhere in the future that my kids would come to me and tell me that they wished I had been a better mom, that I hadn't been so selfish and self-absorbed and had managed to get my act together sooner in life.

I never once thought for a minute that my kids (or anyone else in my life, including myself) would ever be proud of the fact that I was working really, really hard and trying to accomplish something more. When I first went back to school, I killed myself for my grades, not because I cared and wanted to feel accomplished, but almost as a penance for my prior scholastic offenses. It took a long time for me to realize that I was punishing myself for a crime that I never committed. I was so blinded by my perceptions and negativity that I couldn't see how much love and support I actually had around me. If anyone would express happiness or pride at my hard work or grades, I would assume they were just being nice and didn't mean it. I have no idea why I thought this or why I continuously came down so hard on myself when I was surrounded by nothing but positivity. No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't feel good enough.

The point of all of this is that I know I'm not alone. I think a lot of people beat themselves up for not living their life the "right" way or the way they had planned, but maybe great things can come from being thrown into situations and having to fight your way out. Only recently, I have realized that this whole concept of  "should have" is bullshit. It doesn't exist. We trick ourselves into thinking that there is a right or wrong way to life your life and that there is an order that you are supposed to follow. I've realized over the last year that "should have" is nothing more than a lie we tell ourselves for no other purpose than to make ourselves feel really, really bad for absolutely no reason at all. It took a long time, but I got tired of working hard and still feeling terrible. The only person who was being hard on me was me and eventually I decided to stop living my life that way. The past belongs in the past and the "what if" game is pointless and harmful to any kind of life that you are tying to live. That much I know is true.

I've finally (FINALLY) realized that going back to school doesn't make me selfish or a bad mom and that thinking that those things are in any way connected is nothing short of outrageous. I realize now just how proud of me my husband and kids are, but how proud of myself I am. I'm proud of my hard work, dedication, ambition, and let's face it, kick ass time management skills. I may not be taking the easy road in life, but "easy" and "right" are not necessarily mutually exclusive. I'm not lazy or stupid, I'm just a late bloomer and there's nothing wrong with that. Earning a degree while juggling two kids, a husband, and a job certainly isn't the easy way, but that doesn't make it wrong. I know now that I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be. And that's an amazing feeling. 

 I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference. 
~Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken 

Real Life Lara Croft

I never really write about celebrities, but I wanted to say that I take back every snarky thing that I have ever said about Angelina Jolie. She's amazing and let's face it, I was probably just jealous when I said those things anyway.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. 

This morning I got on to Twitter to find my feed clogged with slightly varying versions of the same screaming headline: Angelina Jolie Gets Double Mastectomy. I'm not hugely into celebrity news, but this shocking headline was coming at me from every direction of my social media life, in all-caps with excessive exclamation points. So, like the good little internet sheep that I am, I picked a link and clicked on it, which led me to Jolie's post in the New York Times. In a nutshell, Jolie carries a gene called  BRCA1 (which she refers to as a "faulty" gene) that puts her at a ridiculously high risk of getting breast and/or ovarian cancer. Rather than sit around for cancer to strike, she chose to be proactive and had a preventative double-mastectomy. She briefly described the surgical process and why bothering with any of this at all was important to her. I sat dumbfounded at my computer, as all of the work I had planned on doing this morning came to a screeching halt. I read the article, cried and then reread it and cried harder.

I thought the best part of the piece was when Jolie wrote about how she watched her mom suffer through cancer and knew firsthand what a horrific thing it would be for her kids to endure. Her mom was only 56 when she passed away and if that was the case for me, that fact would always be hanging over my head every single day. Jolie wrote that she would do anything to get more time with her children, which I relate to for obvious reasons. I would undergo surgery to become the next Wolverine if it meant I got to spend 30 extra seconds on this planet with my kids, so yeah, I get it. Overall, I felt like this whole piece made her seem so human, less like the perfect, leggy movie star and more like the mom who loves her kids and would do anything for them. And there's nothing not to love about that.

I'm sure that a preventative double mastectomy is a ridiculously expensive procedure, which most of us probably wouldn't be able to afford (though I'll spare you my liberal, tree-hugging opinion on the state of health care in America...for now). But if having a preventative double-mastectomy could significantly decrease your risk of breast cancer, would you do it? Is this taking advantage of the awesomeness of modern medicine, science, and preventative care or are you just playing God? Just some food for thought.

Either way, I feel that I have a whole new respect for someone that I (wrongfully) blew off as just another Hollywood actress gazillionaire. It might sound cynical, but people don't surprise me very much sometimes, and it's nice to be proven wrong (in a good way) and also to remember that what you see on your TV isn't the full story. My mom always said that you "never know what goes on behind closed doors" and that lesson applies here perfectly.

Above all, I think that both having the surgery and writing about it was brave, honest, and downright bad ass. Like a real life Lara Croft.

Where'd All The Good People Go?

A few weeks ago, I read a disturbing article. Nearly two-thirds of Americans are on some form of anti-depressant. Anxiety is at an all-time high. Nearly 30,000 Americans committed suicide in 2012 alone. I think the point of the article was to demonstrate America's dependency on pharmaceutical companies, but what I took away from it is that we are all walking around like open wounds, hurt, confused, terrified, and desperate for some form of escape from an increasingly violent reality.

I don't know about anyone else, but ever since 9/11, I find it nearly impossible to relax on an airplane. Ever since the 2007 London Bus bombings, I'm weary of city buses. Ever since Aurora, I've kept one eye on the exit every time I'm in a movie theater. And ever since Newtown, I have hated dropping my kids off at school every morning, wondering if that day will be their last.

And now Boston.

I would like to make it clear that I realize that violence, terrorism, and senseless tragedy is an every day occurance in other countries. Many people's first reaction to events like yesterday is "This happens all the time, all around the world and no one cares, so what's the big deal?" and honestly, this is a horrible reaction. Fighting apathy with apathy is pointless. The fact that violence occurs other places doesn't take away from what happened in Boston. If anything, it's a reminder that we all live on this crazy, messed up planet together and we should empathize with everyone who is a victim of violence, whether it occurs in your hometown or thousands of miles away. Have a heart. Show some compassion.

Speaking of compassion, in situations like this I have noticed two kinds of people: The good and the parasitical. The bad people are not just the obvious characters like the bomber(s) but the people who try to take advantage of an already horrible situation by creating fake Twitter accounts to "accept donations" for victims or to spread false reports or conspiracy theories.Why create chaos out of chaos? It's beyond me. People like this are not only showing a complete and utter lack of respect for victims and families, but for the human race in general. But I don't want to focus too much on the bad people. They don't deserve the attention.

The good are the best kind of people out there, the amazing first responders who ran towards the smoke and flames, into the chaos, intent on staying calm and saving lives while everyone else froze. The good are the marathon runners who kept running past the finish line, straight to hospitals to donate blood. The good are the spectators who, though injured themselves, helped others to safety. One of the best things in life is being pleasantly surprised by the kindness and humanity people are capable of expressing. Maybe it doesn't make everyone feel safer on an airplane or worry less about sending their kids to school every day, but in some small way, it's reassuring to think that there are people who are willing to put their lives on the line for the sake of someone else. That in the worst of situations, you can find the best in people and it doesn't get much better than that.

I'm only one person, a couple of thousand miles away from Boston, but I wish it was physically possible to hug the whole city right now and to let them know that people across the country are standing with them.We care about you, Boston, all the way from Albuquerque, and everywhere in between. 

If anyone is interested in helping, please check out the American Red Cross or my personal favorite good-doers Humans Helping Humans . Don't hang your head in fear, be proactive and help the world carry on. Hug your families, be grateful for what you have. Talk to your friends who are going through a hard time and don't be afraid to talk to someone about your own hard time. And turn off the TV every once in awhile. The bad news will still be there when you come back.

Most importantly, remember the helpers. See the good in life, humanity, and each other, no matter how desperate it feels. The good people haven't gone anywhere. You just have to look a little harder to find them.