A Return to a Gentler Insanity

Storytelling is essential in combating the mental health care crisis.

The thought has been reverberating inside my head as I begin sniffing out trails to follow to get my book out there. I hate being a salesman, but it is necessary. I guess this especially annoys me because a PDF of the book is free on my website.

I sort of feel like in the kid in the class with arm and body outstretched that the teacher refuses to call on.

I have always said that to be a writer, you have to be arrogantly humble.

Publishing is an act of arrogance. Thousands of new books hit the market each day, especially now with self-publishing. You are essentially saying, “my work is more worth your time and money than the others.”

That’s arrogant.

You also have to be humble. The evolution of a book, column or article is a carefully walked path through a wilderness. You have to learn to pay the hell attention to the park rangers. The editors, the graphic designers, the friends. You have to learn and progress.

Sorry, but you can ignore Mom–unless she is an editor. She’ll think every word is dripping genius.

And then you have to approach everything with soft eyes. As much as I preach that, I always seem to forget it. Publishing a book, an article, or even something like this, a simple column, is not a dragon to slay. It is not a contest. You have to look upon it with soft eyes, see the entire field, and approach it gently.

I’ve taken steps back in my passions because I needed to focus on my career. My writing became a dragon again.

I really need to stop doing that.

So, with soft eyes, I look upon the entire field and be arrogantly humble. The title for this column just popped into my head. I went with it. It immediately crashed into the quote about storytelling. I learned a long time ago to just go with it, that my subconscious understands things far better than my conscious does.

My website has never garnered the attention and subscribers I wished it had. Things would be so much easier if…

But that is the dragon rearing up.

Storytelling to combat the mental health care crisis is the purpose. It is the entire field. If I can touch one other person with a column, then my purpose has been fulfilled. For the day.

But I still need to snuff along those trails. I need to find the right mixture. The short, funny videos I posted have not exactly gone viral, but they have gotten over 1,000 hits. The Depression Project, which I highly recommend and follow myself, has millions of subscribers around the world–I do not begrudge them a single one as they are doing an incredible job, and providing and awesome service.

But what is my path, bypassing the hissing and snarling dragon on the hilltop?

It’s this.

It’s the combination of the title and the quote. It is the difference between the front cover of my book and the back cover, the pictures chosen very carefully.

The front cover is a picture of me converted into an oil painting by a friend of mine, Maria Sakharova. I think she did an incredible job capturing a moment. She took the picture that I staged and created a statement. –Maria can be found on Fiverr among other places.

In the book, I refer to the picture as being part of the 5%. As I write and recording my podcasts, people reached out to me, asking me if I was okay. Hell, even YouTube reached out to me as my podcast triggered their self-harm alerts.

I explain in the book that though depression has been a part of my entire life, dating back to the first onset probably in high school, the deep depression, what I call clinical depression, as depicted in the picture above, only makes up about 5% of my life.

The other 95% is the picture on the back of my book. Yes, I struggled, I was doing things because of the illness, but I was okay for the most part.

The illness, the disease, warps perception. When I am sitting as in the first picture, with my head in my hands, not staged, the 5% becomes 100%.

When I am in the 95%? I can’t remember the 5%. It is unclear, fogged. I remember things, and they seem ludicrous. It’s insanity. How the hell could the guy in the second picture get to the first? How could perception and perspective change so drastically? How do I stop from returning there?

Storytelling is not only essential to combat the mental health care crisis, but it is also essential for me to remain conscious of the field.

Returning to gentler insanities is essential for me. Not snuffing out those trails, and listening to the park rangers, is what helps me get lost in the abyss that is the 5%. It puts me on the path that leads directly to a dragon.

I’m going to get back to it. You are welcome to join me.

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Aloha.