Also talking about Robin Williams here instead of Facebook

I like the fact that people are being more cognizant of clinical depression because of Robin Williams. I like the fact that the internet brings us together when we are most isolated. I like the fact that I am working at a job that sees me on my couch writing boring crap and I can still interact with human beings - even if only by joking on Facebook. What is bothering me is this weird positivity around helping people with depression or helping people with their issues. Sure, people do help other people all the time. We support each other. We let each other know that we're not alone. But when it comes to being in a bad mental state, we can't save anyone. We can't rescue them.

I don't think that I have clinical depression. I do know that I normalized a lot of behavior and attitudes that are depression including the ability to focus on one woman and act like she's the only woman who could ever make me happy (even now when I know that it's irrational and stupid - I can't just turn it off. I got to work through it with every obsessive step. Makes things easier if I am attracted to a woman with problems because she won't run away quite so fast) And when I wake up and it falls away, I am left wondering. But also I went through a bad July. It's a deeper issue, a certain fragility going on.

But with Robin Williams - I wish people would stop telling others how to deal with suicide and stop acting like they know better. I wish people would stop saying things like "if only he knew how beloved he was" - he knew.

And the irony lies in the fact that he was beloved because he was the whacky adult - the one jumping off the walls who was way more fun than our way too tired parents. And when we got older and found Robin Williams just as exhausting as our parents found us at that age, we could appreciate his more serious stuff. Or some of us still loved Patch Adams. There's no accounting for taste.

But that whacky jumping off the walls persona - that was a man fighting his depression in the best way he knew how. And he got the love and the adulation of the crowd every night.

One of the most disturbing things I ever saw with Williams was that HBO special from the early 80s. I don't remember most of the jokes (there was the Mr. Happy routine) so much as him in a flop sweat for the entire show. But someone decided to put a camera on him in the dressing room when it was over. He was drained and tired and just a mess. And of course, he would have been that drained because he was just running around stage in the highest energy possible. But for me - when I was 10 - it felt like a betrayal. The mask had slipped down and instead of the wild clown, the man before us was a tired and broken man who just wanted to get away from the camera. He was too tired to keep the act up.

I don't know. The man fought with depression for 63 yeas (ok it probably didn't come on until his teen years) and then recently, he decided that he didn't want to fight anymore. He probably made that decision many times in his life (overtly and covertly with the drugs) and this time he managed to make it without changing his mind. Could someone have changed his mind, thrown him a lifeline, etc.? Maybe. And perhaps people have been doing it for years.

I guess I feel like the decision to stop struggling with it and just go is just as valid as the decision to keep fighting and struggling. I don't want to say that on Facebook where the majority of people I know are reading it. I know that this could be interpreted as me being an insensitive fuck or engaging in suicidal ideation. I am doing neither. I don't even know where I'm going with this - beyond a kneejerk distaste for such saccharine "oh if only we could save him" statements. And I also don't like the suicide hotline people ordering everyone to refrain from talking about the suicide in details. Do they think that people contemplating suicide are only prevented from doing so because they don't know how?

I guess where my mind is going right now and it may need revising is that Robin Williams was an adult. He had problems. He made a decision that he probably had made many times before and we all saw him struggling with the depression. He wasn't a child that needed to be rescued from a burning building. Could he have been saved if he had been forced into a better therapy or treatment program or forced to live until he got out of the depression bubble? Sure. Maybe. But he was a grown adult and he killed himself. And that's sad for us. But we should not impose some polyanna belief system on his life and death in order to make ourselves feel better.

Oh fuck - more personal shit

The people at the place where Mom is staying and wants to move into as an assisted living situation have just informed her that they don't take Section 8, which means that she would be left with $95 after social security to live on for the rest of the month. She is upset. Mostly, she needs to get into assisted living and hopefully one that actually does take section 8, but instead of asking her social workers for help in this (and to be honest, the social workers are probably pretty inept and overworked), she is talking about trying to move back into her apartment that has been condemned.

And I can't tell her anything. It's another round of "I am going to get my stuff out and I will take care of it" delusion. This is the strategy that her hoarding addiction devises a couple times a year when confronted with the fact that "I'm not a hoarder, I'm just a collector" is untenable. She lies to herself and tells herself that she actually has the ability to get rid of her stuff without major emotional trauma. It's like she completely forgot putting herself into the hospital trying to get rid of her stuff and the amount of screaming that she did when I was throwing out her craft magazines. Actually, scratch that. She isn't forgetting it. She's rationalizing it. That's just past as if she suddenly became a different person in the month since she went into the hospital and now transitional care.

She honestly thinks that she can move back into her apartment, get rid of her stuff and not be bothered with the bi-annual fire inspection. She envisions this wonderful long term project where she slowly goes through every single item she has and puts some of it in the trash and some of it in a box to be sold to a willing store.

Hell, she even said that she was going to take books to Half Price Books but that day Mokie died (her old orange tabby - he was 20 so he was going) and so she couldn't. And the other 150 days since his death have equally compelling excuses for her inability to carry out a plan even as lame as bringing 20 books to Half Price and getting a couple of dollars for it (and then confirming her bias against selling anything).

And she hung up on me. The problem is that there doesn't seem to be any middle ground between her delusions (she doesn't have a problem, and even when she admits to having a problem she can totally handle it) and the reality - she needs to get into assisted living for her own mental and physical health and there is no way that she can move back into her apartment.

And to get all Freudian up in here - that woman that I was totally crushing on - she employed similar strategies when talking about how she wasn't an alcoholic. Sure, she drinks every day but she doesn't think that she has a problem because she's too honest with herself and her old drinking buddy is now in AA but that woman said she didn't have a problem. And she may just go a week without drinking, because she really can do that - and now that she is dating a guy who is bipolar and self-medicates with Scotch, she's really happy and she's totally capable of going a week without drinking.

My reaction to that was "oh why isn't she drinking with me?" as opposed to hearing every addict excuse in a slightly different form. I mean I heard it, but I was too busy with my emotional neediness.

this is getting fucking ridiculous

Someone finally broke into my mom's apartment and took the television. Sadly they didn't clear out the rest of the place leaving two very confused cats. This is the fourth phone call today. She calls and I can't work. I am already stuck on my fucking couch all day and I don't want to deal with this fucking shit.

Fucking hell. The sympathy ran out two phone calls ago and now it's just a time suck. And it's not like I'm working along and then I get a call. No. I go online and then I suck out my own time and I'm still on the fucking couch and I get another phone call.

I told the client I would have his thesis by tonight. I told the client I would have his thesis a month ago. And it would have been there if it hadn't been for this shit. And she keeps repeating that she doesn't want to go into assisted living. Like she has any fucking choice in the matter.

Fuck. There should be limits on this. There are other relatives.