Eighty-eight Down
Vol. 3, Issue 32
I’m not too serious of a HOCKEY fan but let me tell you about this game I went to more than 20 years ago that recently came to mind. It was the Flyers Eastern Conference Finals against the Devils, Game 7 at the First Union Center, May 26, 2000. It was the loudest, rowdiest, most electrifying scene at a sporting event I’d ever been to – still to this day, even. And that counts all three Phillies World Series games in 2008.
But this hockey palace just rattled up until early in the first period when Eric Lindros got – as this video archivist proclaims – “completely destroyed” by the Devils’ hulking defenseman Scott Stevens.
Now Lindros was an underperforming superstar in that he came to the Flyers via an elaborate, confounding trade when he was still a teenager and was supposed to bring Philadelphia 12 Stanley Cups. He was an incredible hockey player – Hockey Hall of Fame class of 2016 – but he brought zero Stanley Cups so he stunk. He was also oft-injured, oft-concussed. I think this one was his sixth.
I sat in the first row in the second level behind the net so it was a perfect, perched vantage point for the hit. He was skating fast toward the centerline, head down (never good), and then Stevens’s giant shoulder freight-trained into Lindros’s exposed chin, and that was it. Lindros was skating clean and free then that shoulder unplugged his nerve center and down he went. He looked like a dead horse in the snow. What a sight. I will never forget it.
They finally got him up and he was gingerly escorted off the ice by two teammates as a trainer pressed a towel up against his crooked nose and wobbly jaw and that was the last time he ever wore a Flyers uniform again.
I thought about Lindros three weeks ago when I took Zyprexa for the first time. I took it because I was on the verge of a complete mental breakdown and I needed to be unplugged.
I’d just finished the newsletter and it was close to 3 a.m. and I just couldn’t deal with my brain anymore. I wanted it removed, like an abscess or a mole. Enough was enough.
I got out of bed, then I got back into bed. I tried to read, but my eyes didn’t work. All the letters on the Kindle looked like carpenter ants. I tried slow breathing, push-ups, gentle thoughts, but, gang, I was spun. There was a cartoon marching band in my head, giant animals and ice cream cones clomping around, smashing cymbals, honking horns. Complete madness. Then complete despair. Madness again. I was depressed, angry, anxious, humiliated, and afraid all at once.
“This is it,” I thought. “This is how it will always be.”
Yikes. I knelt at the edge of the bed, rocked back and forth. Then I nudged Julieanne awake.
“Hey, I think I need to go to the hospital,” I said.
She told me to wait it out a bit. Then she suggested I hit the Zyprexa. I hadn’t used it yet, but after my last troubling episode, my psychiatrist told me to use it in an emergency situation, as a last resort before we made the 9-1-1 call. I was reluctant, but I could see no other option.
I took the 2.5 mg dosage and chugged the water. I sat there in bed and said a prayer: “Please, God, knock me out like Eric Lindros. I wanna be asleep on the ice like Lindros.”
And 20 minutes later, my prayers were answered. A big shoulder to the chin. Lights out.
I couldn’t do shit the next day. I slept in. And when I got up, I wobbled. But I didn’t go to the hospital and I lived through it once again. On to the next one.
So for those scoring at home, here’s what I take to deal with my particular, annoying manic-depressive mood disorder:
* 200 mg of Lamictal per day * 300 mg of Gabapentin per day * 2.5 mg of Zyprexa for emergencies.
Meds work. Don’t waste time feeling bad.
****
Henry Giardina is the new editor of Into and has written for plenty of impressive publications. He’s also got lots to say about depression and how to survive it:
“I eventually found a therapist, but not before a few long months of really gritty shit. I called the national suicide hotline a lot, which is kind of hilarious because one of my best and oldest friends from high school was living in the same house as me at the time, literally one floor up. But I felt like I was a burden and that if I actually enlisted my friends to help, they'd resent me and think I was an asshole. Every time I called the suicide hotlines I'd get this absolutely exhausted person on the other line who kind of didn't know what to tell me, and at a certain point, it just became funny how unhelpful the hotline actually was. But it must have helped because I remember feeling some slight relief after hanging up. But then I'd call back the next day.”
Read the full interview with my pal Hendry in the feature pit down below. — AJD
All Images By Edith Zimmerman
Like Myself
by The Small Bow
What's your history with depression and mental illness?
I've been seriously depressed since I was about 7 or 8 years old. At first, it was a reaction to my grandfather's death. We were very close even though he died when I was 9 so I obviously didn't get to know him very well, but I felt that loss very deeply. One minute, my grandfather was in the hospital, the next he was talking and laughing and back home. Nobody had explained anything to me so I was like, "wait, I thought the fact that he's home means he's cured." He had colon cancer and I was in the room when he died, and I found it very confusing. From that point on I became obsessed with death. I had a lot of magical thinking around it. For a while, I was scared that falling asleep would make me die. Then I refused to eat for a while because I was convinced I would choke and die. Then, I started to worry that my mother was going to die. I did a lot of magical thinking/OCD shit around that: for instance, in order for her to make it home alive, I would have to detach a sheet of paper from a ringed notebook along the laceration without tearing the actual hole. If I deviated, I became convinced my mother would get into a car accident and die. My parents talked about sending me to a child psychologist, but it never happened. I sort of just adjusted, but I never figured out how to mourn.
The thing that happens now is that when somebody dies who was in my life, even if we weren't that close, I fall apart. I don't know how to accept death so every time it happens it feels like my brain breaks fresh and I'm back in that insane space where I can't trust anything and reality feels fake. I've had about 2 1/2 nervous breakdowns of this kind.
What's helped the most with it? Therapy? Meds?
Therapy always helps. I've been in therapy fairly consistently since I was about 14. The first therapist I saw, however, left a lot to be desired. She was very sweet and kind, but when I went in that first day and started to talk about my gender shit, she made this utterly disgusted face and shouted "you mean you want a PENIS!?" and I was like, ok I guess this isn't really space for me to explore that. The thing that's really helped is Lexapro. During my last serious mental breakdown, I'd just moved to a new city and was having a hard time finding a therapist. I was trying to rough it out, basically using a lot of Nyquil and diuretics to fuel my eating disorder. I slept as much as I could during the day so as not to have to be conscious for long periods of time, and the times I was awake, I was focused on losing weight. I was convinced that losing weight would make me like myself enough to want to stay alive, but of course, that was a lie.
I eventually found a therapist, but not before a few long months of really gritty shit. I called the national suicide hotline a lot, which is kind of hilarious because one of my best and oldest friends from high school was living in the same house as me at the time, literally one floor up. But I felt like I was a burden and that if I actually enlisted my friends to help, they'd resent me and think I was an asshole. Every time I called the suicide hotlines I'd get this absolutely exhausted person on the other line who kind of didn't know what to tell me, and at a certain point, it just became funny how unhelpful the hotline actually was. But it must have helped because I remember feeling some slight relief after hanging up. But then I'd call back the next day.
However, when things got so bad that, at the end of a very bad OkCupid date, I walked back to the red line stop and seriously considered throwing myself in front of a passing bus, I said to myself, "ok buddy, we need to get you some drugs." Almost the next day I called my brand-new therapist and basically demanded an anti-depressant that wouldn't make me gain weight (that was my top concern, of course!) She gave me a Lexapro script and it had an almost immediate effect (obvious placebo.) I woke up the next morning and, corny and fucking stupid as it sounds, I could hear the birds. I could notice nature in a way I hadn't been able to, and things felt a lot clearer and easier in general. It was like the giant muscle of my brain was finally unclenching and letting go of all the loops it kept getting stuck in. I noticed after being on Lexapro for a while exactly what it did for me, in a chemical sense. I noticed that there started to show up this tiny, almost imperceptible space for a choice between thinking something and feeling the resultant pain and chaos. It was like my brain was finally saying to me, "Hey, you know this thing that really upsets you? There's actually a choice here: you can follow the downward spiral into feeling obsessively bad about it, or you can simply choose not to engage with those feelings." That was a fucking miracle.
At some point, I also learned about negative thought spirals and how your brain kind of gets stuck in certain "tracks," like a car stuck in the mud. That visual really helped me, and also knowing that I'm not at the mercy of these downward spirals.
What triggered the last episode?
Actually, the last episode happened about two weeks ago, and the thing that triggered it was vacation. Because my job is really busy around Pride (we're a gay company) my bosses give us some days off at the end of June. I was thinking, "wow that's going to be awesome, I can have a 5 day weekend on the week of July 4!" I just started the job in April and it's been pretty hectic so I was pumped. Then, of course, vacation gets here, and what do I do? Fall into a massive depression. My body has no fucking idea what to do with itself on days off, and I kind of feel like one of those dudes who gets shot out of a cannon. The day starts with a burst of energy and then very quickly I land right back in the mud and manage to make myself very depressed. It was about four days of just like, "fuck, I should probably kill myself."
It didn't come out of nowhere, of course. Before this, I'd been enjoying my job, but in between enjoying it I kept feeding my worst habits like overspending on takeout and skincare. At one point I said to myself, "just wait and don't check out your cart yet, see if the need to buy goes away." Instead what happened was that the voice in my head chimed in with "You should probably just kill yourself, right?"
That's what's always behind my bad impulses, it seems. I also figured that new job euphoria only lasts so long, and I was bound to feel the reverse at some point.
Are you afraid that meds will stunt your creativity?
I used to be, now I'm like "bring on the drugs." I still have a really hard time just being conscious and sober. The minute the workday ends, I smoke a gigantic bowl, followed by lots of edibles. Anything that can black me out or get me to sleep quickly is a blessing, and every so often I'm like "wow, this is kind of a depressing way to live" but then I remember that my brain is my brain, and I have to deal with it in whatever ways I can. That's what pisses me off about people who are like "suicide is a shitty thing to do to your loved ones," it's like duh, it's the last resort. And like, you try having my stupid brain, and then we'll talk.
I'm thinking of getting on Vyvanse because I have a lot of ADHD/Autism things happening as well that can make focusing very difficult. We'll see.
The hope part is interesting. When I was younger, I held on because I figured at some point maybe I’d get famous and that would make it ok. Now I hang on for much simpler reasons: I want to see how the story ends.
Curiosity has always been a big part of my driving life force if you can call it that. It’s curiosity that’s saved me a million times by showing me that there’s always something new around, even if it’s old. We live in a world where you can start the day not knowing that there was a trans male lieutenant nun in the 1600s and end your day knowing everything about Catalina de Erauso. That in itself is a fucking miracle, I think. I hate to make a Woody Allen reference but in this case, it’s apt. When he lays down in ‘Manhattan’ and starts recording all the reasons he’s stayed alive and he’s like ‘de Maupassant, the Marx Brothers, Tex Avery.’ For me, it’s exactly that. I stay alive because of A Little Night Music. Because of Zero Mostel. Danny Kaye. Spalding Gray. Peep Show. Tropic of Cancer. Elliott Smith. Frank Loesser. And at my worst moments, the one thought that always helps is to remember that we will never run out of music: the notes we have are infinitely variable. I never cease to be amazed by that.
Do you think people oftentimes mistake your depressive feelings are tied to your transness? What role (if any) does that play? I love how you instinctively want to help those suffering the way you've suffered.
There have definitely been people who assume I must be this depressed and mentally ill because of my transness, and it’s true that that’s definitely a part of it. But the thing that people have to understand is that it isn’t transness itself that makes our lives hard. It’s the fact that we get so much resistance in everything we do. We’re disbelieved and kept from treatment because of peoples’ own ideas about us. For centuries we were criminalized and institutionalized, and we still are. But there’s nothing inherently depressing or mentally ill about transness. I think, hopefully, a few generations from now the obstacles will have fallen, and trans kids can just have a normal childhood without thinking of themselves as broken or feeling like they have to carry around this shameful secret. It’s already changing a lot.
I don’t consider myself an activist, but one thing I can offer is my attention. I’ve been through it, I’ve had the shitty therapists and the bad doctors and I’ve heard it all, so I feel like when a friend or whoever comes to me needing to talk, the least I can do is listen and try to help since I know just how bad the suicide hotlines really are in this country. I feel like it’s literally the least I can do. So if you’re trans and depressed and you’re reading this, don’t be afraid to reach out. I’m here.
****
Amazing job everybody. Check out more newsletters in our archive.
