Maybe, he surmises, people laugh with relief that they’re not alone.
Enjoy this excerpt from Moe’s wonderful memoir.
“I’ll probably make jokes, I said to begin our first appointment.
It’s part of the way I talk.
I like to make jokes about grim and grisly stuff as a way of facing it.
The jokes, the laughs, that’s oxygen for me.
Maybe it’s deflection.
I’m not sure.
I don’t think so.
You tell me.”
“Okay, Julie said.
“I’ve been depressed my whole life, but I only found out about twelve years ago.
I’ve been kind of faking my way through since childhood.
I’ve managed to stop getting worse.
I want to be better.”
“Well, let’s see if we can do something about that, said Julie.
Finding a therapist is a bit like dating.
I was fortunate that this felt good right away.
For various reasons, I had mostly had short-term relationships with therapists in the past.
Even a few one-session stands.
I had never been able to make much of a commitment.
My mind was a wild stallion that demanded to run free.
It’s never gotten better before, really, so how could it?
But yes, I’m ready to try.
I hope it works.
I doubt it will.”
“What’s really, I guess, dumb?
Is that I’ve got this show I host.
I travel places to give speeches about this stuff.
Right now, I’m working on a book about this stuff, too.
But it all came out of this podcast.”
“I know the podcast well, she said.
You emailed me about it, but I already knew it.”
This didn’t make me sad; it’s the way I understood the world to be.
I kept talking, like I do.
But the thing about that show is that it’s mostly about other people’s depression.
I feel like I understand other people’s depression pretty well, actually.
I can quickly figure out what their issues are and draw information and stories out of them.
Make connections they hadn’t thought of.
The thing is, I don’t know what is going on with me.
It’s hard to see a skyscraper from inside the skyscraper.”
My first appointment with Julie took place after two full seasons of The Hilarious World of Depression.
Friends, that’s just bad property management.
I had ended up believing that it was just too late for me.
I wasn’t thrilled about that, but I accepted it.
What you really need to do then is stop the bleeding and launch a podcast about shark bite wounds.
I can’t even define depression.
I’ve never found anyone who could.
That’s part of the problem.
So, reader, it’ll be analogy-a-go-go from here on; strap in.
Frankly, the sands of my mortal life were falling into the bottom part of the hourglass.
I was on deadline before my dead line.
Also, lately, I kept wanting to .
not so much die as simply not be alive anymore.
I’d be driving in to work or cleaning the kitchen or trying to sleep and boom!
This feeling was morbid and, yes, depressing, but it was also just pesky.
My unique brand of depression responds to stress; specifically, it blows up under stress.
When the going gets tough, I don’t get amped up, I get despondent.
I turn into a human version of a song by the Smiths.
It was a brutally efficient machine.
“What do you have to be stressed about?
the normies might have said, if I ever talked about these things with normal people.
You have a family, a house, a car, a good job.
Just deal with it!”
As if I could simply do that.
As if I chose this.
Normies and saddies are different, you see.
Then they go back to listening to, I don’t know, Foo Fighters.
The saddies are piled into a Model T with a sail on top of it for some reason.
Try being more positive!
That’s helpful, sure, but it’s not really progress.
Like knowing the brand of refrigerator you’re locked in.
It was my fault, or Clinny D’s fault.
I never wanted to go all that deep in therapy because that’s where the monsters were.
There would be car bombings, but a homeland is a homeland.
Let it go, the simple-minded say, again, as if no one had ever tried that before.
Making matters worse, depression causes the saddie to lose hope.
So to figure things out?
Over and over in interviews I conducted for the show, I heard about CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy.
So when I went to find a new therapist, I limited my search.
In that first session, I only got about halfway through my biography.
I recall Julie’s mouth actually dropping open during one description of family behaving in a not-at-all-nurturing manner.
When you’ve shocked a professional therapist, you’ve accomplished something.
Seeking that out, making that appointment, and keeping that appointment can be a Herculean task.
And yes, that sounds, well, crazy.
If you could get better, why wouldn’t you want to do that as soon as possible?
It’s like being super hungry but reluctant to go to the Free Pizza Store located ten feet away.
(I don’t know how the Free Pizza Store stays in business, honestly.)
While I had the monster pretty well contained, I wanted to start throwing some punches.
I wanted to feel better.
So we got to work unpacking it all.
From The Hilarious World of Depression, by John Moe.
Copyright 2020 by the author, reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.
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