Hugh Hollowell

Trying to build a a better world.

The storm is still there

This essay published

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I made the decision to go on medication for my depression – depression that was crippling me and threatening my ability to keep it together. This past weekend I was at a wedding, and several of the people there are readers of my blog. So, a natural question they asked was, “How is the medication working out?”

That is the question, isn’t it? Generally, it’s good. I am some five weeks in, and should now be fully dosed. And I have some very good days, some OK days, and some bad days – I imagine just like you do.

Drugs don’t stop depression, as much as I wish they did. I am still the sort of person who gets depressed, and always will be. Hell, I always have been.

What the drugs do, however, is give me some space away from the depression. Instead of being immersed in it, I am able to sit back and observe it. Here is the way I described it to a friend the other day:

Imagine you are on a patio, and it has come a thunderstorm. You are getting drenched, and are unable to move to shelter. That is what depression feels like for me. Now imagine you are inside the house, looking at that same storm, and at that same patio through the sliding glass doors. The storm is still there, the patio is still there, and you are still there. That is what depression on meds feels like for me.

The storm is still there. But now I can observe it, instead of drowning in it.

80/20 Relationships

This essay published

I had a person the other day, hand to God, who got upset at me because I don’t “like” enough of their Facebook posts, even though they “like” all of mine.

There is a theory that in any given situation, 80% of the outcomes come from 20% of the inputs. It has been called the 80/20 rule, or the Pareto Principle, after the Italian economist who first noticed it. While it isn’t exact, the ratios work nearly everywhere.

If you own a store, 20% of your inventory make up 80% of your sales. In a church, 20% of the congregants give 80% of the money. Of the things you own, 20% of them give you 80% of your enjoyment. On Facebook, 80% of your enjoyment comes from 20% of your contacts. (When I dropped over 2000 Facebook friends a while back, I barely noticed a change at all.)

And of your relationships, 20% of them give you 80% of the value.

We tend to know this instinctively. We talk about how this person is your best friend, or we are close friends, or so-and-so is a new friend, or how we want to be better friends. We recognize there are degrees of friendship and relationship.

And we tend to act accordingly. If we get asked to do something for our closest friends – those who are in our 20% – we usually don’t hesitate. I have three or four people in my life that could ask literally anything in the world of me, and I would try to figure out how to do it. Once you get outside that circle, however, I start doing equations, asking myself things like do I really want to do the thing? Is it convenient to do the thing? How much will it cost to do the thing? And so on.

And by and large, I think we tend to be OK with this. In theory, anyway. We understand we can’t all be as close to each other as we are to some people. We don’t have the time or the emotional energy to maintain those levels of relationships. I don’t think people really get upset that we treat them differently than we treat other people. I think what gets people upset – what got this person upset – is when you are in their 20%, but they are not in yours.

This is when they think they have a right to more of you than you are willing to give. This is when they can’t hear that “No” is a complete sentence. This is where you begin to offend folks.

And I don’t really know what to do about that.

Sleeping through the night

This essay published

I have trouble sleeping. I always have.

I don’t usually have trouble going to sleep. I get sleepy about the same time every night, I turn out the light and drift off to sleep within 10 minutes or so.

It’s the staying asleep that is a problem.

Usually about three or four hours later – around three o’clock – I wake up, wide ass awake. And I stare at the ceiling and think deep thoughts like, “I am a failure. I can’t win. I should quit. Nobody cares about you.”

Here’s the thing: I know none of that is true. I am good at what I do. I have kicked literally every problem I have ever faced in the ass, and came through it. I am good enough, smart enough. I am enough. I know this.

I only hear those thoughts at three AM.

So anyway, I wake up in the middle of the night, and can’t go back to sleep. But the rare occasions I don’t wake up, I am sleeping the sleep of the dead, and wake up seven hours later refreshed and energized. The key is not waking up.

I have been on a mission of sorts this year. I have started paying attention to my diet. I am running. I am taking care of my mental health. I am really proud of my progress in these areas.

But I can’t manage to sleep through the damn night.

A while back, I read this book, by Arianna Huffington. One of the things she mentions are wind-down rituals – things you do before you go to bed, to tell your body it’s time to go to bed. I read it, and liked it, but also sort of ignored it. Because I wasn’t having a hard time falling asleep, but staying asleep.

But it still appealed to me – I like rituals and practices – so over the last few weeks, I have developed the following ritual.

It starts around 9:45PM. I make some chamomile tea and get out my laptop and my paper calendar (I’m old-school like that) and sit at the kitchen table. I might nibble on some dark chocolate.

I plan what tomorrow is going to look like. I look ahead to see if anything is coming up I need to factor in, or plan for. I might return an email if it can’t wait, but it can probably wait. I don’t want to be surprised.

I drink my chamomile tea and I log my day in that same paper calendar. I take a 5mg melatonin tablet, go into Renee’s studio where she is probably editing photos and kiss her goodnight. Then I go to bed and read nonfiction until I get sleepy – usually about 20 minutes or so – and then I turn out the light.

When I do this, I sleep through the night, and when I do wake up in the night – to go to the bathroom, say – I fall right back asleep. So it works – right?

I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s the tea, the melatonin, the peace of mind from planning my day, the satisfaction of logging my day, or if it’s the ritual of doing the same thing every day to tell my brain it’s time for bed.

But I don’t care. Not really. I only care that I am sleeping through the night.

Survival

This essay published

I was a sickly child. When I was 18 months old, I had spinal meningitis. It damn near killed me.

I was in a coma for weeks, and my heart stopped beating for a while and when it was all said and done, I was alive but had seizures and some brain damage and a neurologist that would be a part of my life for the next 15 years.

I had to learn to walk and talk again (some people say I have been making up for lost time on the talking ever since) and had periodic EEG’s to check brain function and medicine – oh yeah, the medicines.

There were medicines to prevent the seizures and medicines to calm my brain and medicines to help me with the headaches caused by the other medicines. I grew up like that, so it didn’t seem weird to me. It was just a thing I did. Other kids had sisters or played basketball – I took medicine.

I was a really small kid for my age, but dad was short and mom was short and so that all seemed natural, but I hated it. I wanted to be tall, and strong. When I was 13 and had my first normal EEG ever and I came off the meds, I shot up six inches in 18 months. You could almost hear me growing. I heard Mom talking about it to a neighbor at church, and her theory that the medicines had held back my growth.

“Just imagine how big he would have been if he never took them,” the neighbor said.

It’s funny how you can hear a thing and it hardwires your brain. The meds did this to me – the meds were why I had been scrawny. I hated the meds. Meds are bad. The meds broke me.

I was still on meds for my ADHD, and I didn’t like how they made me feel. I don’t know how to describe to you what it feels like, taking meds that slow your brain down so you can sit still in a class room, so you can pay attention when your girlfriend wants to talk to you, so you can sit in a cubicle and make money for the man.

The closest I can come to describing it is to say it feels like molasses. Like you live in molasses.

So I talked to mom and told her all of this. She was already pissed at the neurologist because of the growth thing, so I came off the ADHD meds.

And I was free.

My grades dropped, but not precariously. I developed coping mechanisms, and read books and figured out how to live around my different brain. Mostly it worked. It helped I was smarter than some folks, and it helped that I had good communication skills and could argue my case, and it no doubt helped that I was white and male and likeable, and so the white teachers wanted to help me.

So I survived.

* * *

“Hugh is a moody child.”

That is what my teacher told mom in the parent-teacher meeting, while I sat in the chair next to mom and ostensibly read a book I had brought with me.

She was right. I was a moody child. I had serious mood swings that would last for days. One of the reasons I came to love reading was it was a socially acceptable way to not talk to people when I was in a dark place.

I confused my parents. My family does stuff – dad would spend his spare time building things or working on cars or so on, and mom would work in the garden, and me? I would be right there with them, unless I was in one of my moods, and then I would lay on the couch and not move. Mom said it was like I was either on or I was off.

I was neither – I was a depressed kid who had ADHD.

The diagnosis wouldn’t happen for another 12 years or so, when I was trying to figure out how to survive after my marriage ended, but in retrospect I see it everywhere.

I remember reading Conan-Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, and reading Doctor Watson’s description of Holmes, and his black moods where he would lay on the couch for days, and thinking, “That’s me. That is exactly me. “

When I was sixteen, the black mood caught me and damn near killed me, but it didn’t. I began to develop coping mechanisms. I would learn when the moods were coming on and develop strategies to deal with them. I would shift into what I came to call “maintenance mode”, where I did the least amount humanly possible to survive, knowing I would slide back into “normal mode” eventually and pick up the pieces. I took jobs that let me create my own schedule, so when the black days would come I wouldn’t get fired.

So I survived.

* * *

The black periods were usually short-lived. Sometimes as short as an afternoon, and sometimes as long as a week or two. When I went through my divorce, it lasted a couple of months, which is what drove me to therapy for the first time, and a diagnosis and medications and all of that.

But the stories we hear as children are always part of us, and all I could think about is how medicines broke me as a child, made me less than I was capable of being, stunted my growth and limited my potential. And they still made me feel like I was in molasses. So when I got past the crisis, I convinced my doctor to ween me off the meds, and once again, I was free.

In April of this year, the shit hit the fan. I got very publicly betrayed by some people I trusted, and people had to choose sides. People I was convinced were my friends didn’t choose mine. I no longer knew who my friends were, who I could trust. Not only did I lose friends, it looked like I might lose the work I had spent ten years building.

It was dark as hell. People were worried about me. Renee had a list of people to call if I looked like I might hurt myself. I sat on the couch for long periods, unable to move. I would start sobbing while driving down the street, for no apparent reason.

I slipped into maintenance mode. And I haven’t come out for five months.

Depression doesn’t look like you think it would. Depressed people laugh, sometimes, and depressed people go to work, sometimes, and depressed people still write and build things, sometimes. But mostly, you just watch the things you love go away.

I was convinced it was temporary. It’s situational, I would tell myself and others. It’s like when you break up with someone – I will bounce back. I always do. And I kept waiting.

A few weeks ago, I suddenly became afraid that this time, I wouldn’t. I was afraid my inability to act would cost me my job, and cost Renee and I our dreams and cost my community their place to be and my employees their jobs. You can only be in maintenance mode for so long.

So I called my doctor, who reminded me that I hadn’t had a physical since 2011, and who told me to get my ass in there. Yesterday, I went to the doctor and he poked and prodded and I suffered various bodily indignities and when it was all said and done, he prescribed me a white pill I take twice a day now, as of this morning.

I wish I didn’t have to take meds. The little kid in me is convinced they will stunt my growth, or slow me down or somehow break me.  I am really afraid of feeling like I am in molasses. I am afraid of being dependent on this little white pill to function. I am afraid of losing my independence. If I am honest, I am afraid of losing my creativity.

But goddammit, I also want to survive.