Douglas Cootey's Blog, page 11

Fighting Depression: The Beast We Have in Common

Chapter One

Learned Optimism Thought #1:

I am grateful for beautiful daughters who made my 50th birthday a memorable one.

If you can’t take medication to combat depression or suicidal depression, how do you cope? Do you resign yourself to desolation, or do you fight back? Can you fight back? How‽ This was the dilemma I faced years ago when anti-depressants had failed me and my life was worse off because of side-effects. What I learned in my battle against depression not only changed my life for the better, but helped me change other lives, too. Fighting off depression seems like hard work, but when you break down the coping strategies into smaller steps, depression becomes easier to conquer. That concept can seem daunting at first. I know it was for me. I spent years learning how to overcome depression. I could continue living a miserable half-life, or I could make incremental changes and begin my recovery. I chose recovery and spent many years experimenting and analyzing my patterns of behavior to work out the best path forward. Now depression doesn’t define my world, but instead is a hinderance that I work around. The scale of its magnitude has diminished, and I spend less time managing it. Whether you treat your major depressive disorder with anti-depressants or not, the coping strategies I discovered should prove very beneficial, especially after you adapt them to your own needs.

Pills don’t teach skills. At some point, we have to make choices, and, as is often the case, we must make those same choices over and over again until we start to see true changes in our behavior. As happy and well-balanced as I am today, there was a time when clinical depression defined my entire world. My first marriage was developing issues, my career was stalled, school was a chore, and I began motor ticking due to a side-effect to ADHD medicine that I was prescribed. Although there were many joys in my life, such as my newborn daughter, family that loved me, and friends that visited me weekly, I was deeply unhappy. I felt justified in embracing my sadness to the point of suicidal ideation.

Depression settled over my life as a thick, murky mist, making the world around me almost impossible to experience without a negative bias. I was angry, bitter, jaded, but worst of all, I was pessimistic. I lost interest in drawing for a year, which until that time was a lifelong passion. I lost interest in people and withdrew from social activities. I wouldn’t even attend a club I had founded that met in my own living room! Video games, escapism through entertainment, and the brand new internet gave me false focus, eating up time, masking my feelings, and distracting me from the important elements of my life. I had lost hope.

I spent four years sinking deeper and deeper into the blackness, then nine years climbing out of it. Eventually, I learned to overcome depression’s influence. I trained myself to think optimistically. I developed a sense of gratitude for my gifts and blessings—an incredibly difficult task in the beginning. I embraced my stay-at-home life and fatherhood more. I smiled more. I blogged about my struggles, my victories, and the lessons I learned. I shared my insights with other depressives and eked out a small corner of success on the internet. My message was simple: You have the power within yourself to defeat depression. As with most things in life, that was easier said than done.

The Beast We Have in Common

Clinical depression, or Major Depressive Disorder, affects more than 15 million American adults¹. My experiences with clinical depression began when I entered High School. I had been shy and introversive through my early teenage years, but by the time I became fifteen, my feelings of isolation and sadness began to affect my social and private life. I began writing poetry. Yes, deep, dark, morbid poetry. Thankfully, none of it survives to embarrass me today. However, when my mother found it, I was whisked off to Boston Children’s Hospital for immediate analysis. Not much came of that experience because children and teens weren’t diagnosed with depression in the early 80s. One memory of the experience that I retain was that they gave me a nine digit number to remember, then asked me to recall it later. I was even able to recite it backwards when prompted. I would love to have that power of recall today! They assessed my intelligence thoroughly, but my sleep and depression issues weren’t addressed to our satisfaction. The whole experience angered me then. I was embarrassed to be forced to participate in such an indignity, but now, as a dad, I appreciate the love and concern that my parents had for me.

Fortunately, I had ADHD, and that impulsiveness helped me have fun in high school despite my pervasive sadness. The party ended in my mid-twenties just after I became married. Maybe it was debt, marital difficulties, stress from school, or all of the above. Maybe it was my terrible sleep schedule, or my life’s failures catching up with me. Whatever was wrong, my wife at the time and I knew I needed help. I was already aware that I had ADHD, and had been treating that medicinally all my life (previously diagnosed as Hyperkinesis), but when I was diagnosed with clinical depression at twenty-four, there was a part of me that sighed a little, “So that’s what’s wrong with me…” At last! I finally understood why I wrote all those terribly bleak poems in high school, and why I had created so many self-portraits with my face in agony. And here I thought I was just a little bit moody.

I had been on a wide variety of ADHD and anti-anxiety meds in the previous years, but my new doctor gave me Desoxyn for ADHD and Zoloft for depression. Thus began a three week period of unprecedented organization and productivity. “So this is what it’s like to be normal,” I distinctly remember thinking, but my personal paradise of productivity didn’t last long. Suddenly, I developed violent limb and body tics. My entire nervous system was in turmoil. The doctor immediately took me off Desoxyn, which many of you might know of by the name “Methamphetamine”, but kept me on Zoloft. I limped along for a while, though the ticking didn’t abate, and then the Zoloft began to affect me negatively, too: it made me suicidal—something that is a known side-effect now, but which wasn’t widely known in 1992. I was a mess, and everything in my life seemed to be going wrong. In fact, I wanted to die. After a failed attempt at suicide (which I stopped before causing myself serious harm), I realized that something had to change. If I was moody before taking the meds ( Oh, so many meds!), and the meds were making me disconnected, loopy, and suicidal, then I would just live with being moody without meds again. I didn’t taper off. I just stopped taking my meds cold turkey.

A few weeks later I met with my doctor again and gave him my update. He told me that I shouldn’t have stopped taking Zoloft that way because a high percentage of people get suicidal when discontinuing it. I said dryly, “Ah, that would explain why I had such a rocky month.” I was always cracking jokes of the gallows variety, so deadpan wry that people often took my jokes seriously. However, that experience taught me something. I couldn’t trust anti-depressants and ADHD meds to fix my problems for me no matter how eager or confident my doctors were. Some people are non-responsive to psychmeds, and I was one of them.

The School of Hard Knocks

By 1997, I was a stay-at-home dad with two daughters when I had a life changing epiphany. There were a convergence of influences that came together in that year. There was the therapist who suggested I had a perception problem. There was the title of a book (Learned Optimism²) that I couldn’t get from my library but which struck me as a brilliant concept. There were the friends who came over every Friday & Saturday to be with me despite my moods. There was the wife who stood by me, and the parents who loved me. There was the unconditional love and warmth of my daughters, too, that affected me deeply. I had begun to notice that my sadness and self-pity hurt them because they cared about me. They were two-and-a-half and four, but they were my world. So one day I decided to test my perception problem. Yes, I had depression, but did it cloud my judgement? Did it warp my outlook? I was skeptical. I had solid reasons for thinking everybody hated me.

I created two email folders: Flame Mail & Compliments. I published anime fan art online at the time for fun and to spur me towards more drawing. This was in the day when we didn’t fear to put our email addresses on our webpages. Spam was not the scourge it is today. At the time, drawing was becoming increasingly difficult for me because of all the ticking, which depressed me, thus making me less inclined to draw. I was worse, not better, as a illustrator, and, consequently, I was very discouraged, so I took criticism of my work to heart. In fact, I was certain that my Flame Mail folder would fill up in days. As the emails came in, I sorted them to their appropriate folders.

At the end of thirty days, I had thirty compliments and one hate mail, which obviously was a fluke. So I extended the test for another month. At the end of that time period, I had an additional thirty-one fan letters, and one more hate mail. The tally was a conclusive 62 to 2. I had a perception problem.

That test transformed my life as I embraced the truth of it and took a long, hard look at myself. Did clinical depression have to shape how I perceived the world? At that time, I managed my ADHD with a PDA and a quiver of quips to shoot out as fast as I made mistakes. I laughed at my gaffes. I managed my ADHD and stopped beating myself up about it. Shouldn’t I manage my sadness, too? My tic disorder qualified me for disability payments, but was my joke that I was now a certified loser really that funny? Nobody else laughed when I told that joke. Maybe I shouldn’t have been laughing at it either.

In the years since that Fall in 1997, I have trained myself to change how I think about depression, disability, negativity, and my own weaknesses. I rolled up my sleeves and began to take charge of my life again. I changed my outlook and called it “enforced optimism”. I even started blogging about mental health in 2005, sharing my struggles and discoveries with others. When people began to ask me how I managed my depression without meds, I wrote a blog post (“Depression: Ten Ways to Fight It Off, Part 1”)³ that became one of my most popular posts. It remains popular even after twelve years. There is a hunger out there for help with depression without the side-effects and costs of medications. Despite what some in the mental health community might have you believe, not everybody responds well to anti-depressants. In fact, many people are highly sensitive to psychotropics and, like me, experience many of the detrimental side-effects with none of the benefits.

Are Anti-Depressants Really That Bad?

The purpose of this book is not to replace your psychiatrist. It is not to denegrate your coping mechanisms. I write it for those who can’t use psychmeds, but it intended to benefit all people who struggle with clinical depression. I have been accused in the past of being anti-psychiatry because of my early stance against psychmeds. It is true that I was more hostile towards psychmeds when I first began my blogging journey, especially since I was still reeling from their negative effects, but I always have recognized the need for a good therapist, especially a Cognitive Behavior Therapist (CBT). As for my anti-med hostility, my readers quickly tempered that antagonism. I learned through their heartfelt stories that many people rely on psychmeds as a lifeline because the meds gave them a fighting chance. Anti-depressants weren’t as evil as I had painted them in my mind. For some, they are still dangerous, so I always advise caution, but if meds give you benefits and help you manage the black beast, then please keep using them.

What you will find in these pages is a much expanded version of my original blog post. These are explorations of the CBT techniques I use to put myself in a better frame of mind so that I can manage my depression without meds. Many readers either learned to use these techniques as well, or they found these coping strategies on their own and let me know how glad they were to see somebody validating their experience. I can’t count all the letters I have received over the past twelve years that have thanked me for writing that blog post. We’ll begin our journey together changing the way we think about depression. This will set the stage for the next section which covers various coping strategies and why they work.

Let’s begin!

¹ Anxiety and Depression Association of America https://www.adaa.org/about-adaa/press... ² Learned Optimism by X S. ³ “Depression: Ten Ways to Fight It Off, Part 1” – http://douglascootey.com/2006/03/depr...

⁂

If you want to read more about overcoming depression, you should read my book.

Depression: The Beast We Have in Common

Learned Optimism Thought #1:

I am grateful for beautiful daughters who made my 50th birthday a memorable one.

If you can’t take medication to combat depression or suicidal depression, how do you cope? Do you resign yourself to desolation, or do you fight back? Can you fight back? How‽ This was the dilemma I faced years ago when anti-depressants had failed me and my life was worse off because of side-effects. What I learned in my battle against depression not only changed my life for the better, but helped me change other lives, too. Fighting off depression seems like hard work, but when you break down the coping strategies into smaller steps, depression becomes easier to conquer. That concept can seem daunting at first. I know it was for me. I spent years learning how to overcome depression. I could continue living a miserable half-life, or I could make incremental changes and begin my recovery. I chose recovery and spent many years experimenting and analyzing my patterns of behavior to work out the best path forward. Now depression doesn’t define my world, but instead is a hinderance that I work around. The scale of its magnitude has diminished, and I spend less time managing it. Whether you treat your major depressive disorder with anti-depressants or not, the coping strategies I discovered should prove very beneficial, especially after you adapt them to your own needs.

Pills don’t teach skills. At some point, we have to make choices, and, as is often the case, we must make those same choices over and over again until we start to see true changes in our behavior. As happy and well-balanced as I am today, there was a time when clinical depression defined my entire world. My first marriage was developing issues, my career was stalled, school was a chore, and I began motor ticking due to a side-effect to ADHD medicine that I was prescribed. Although there were many joys in my life, such as my newborn daughter, family that loved me, and friends that visited me weekly, I was deeply unhappy. I felt justified in embracing my sadness to the point of suicidal ideation.

Depression settled over my life as a thick, murky mist, making the world around me almost impossible to experience without a negative bias. I was angry, bitter, jaded, but worst of all, I was pessimistic. I lost interest in drawing for a year, which until that time was a lifelong passion. I lost interest in people and withdrew from social activities. I wouldn’t even attend a club I had founded that met in my own living room! Video games, escapism through entertainment, and the brand new internet gave me false focus, eating up time, masking my feelings, and distracting me from the important elements of my life. I had lost hope.

I spent four years sinking deeper and deeper into the blackness, then nine years climbing out of it. Eventually, I learned to overcome depression’s influence. I trained myself to think optimistically. I developed a sense of gratitude for my gifts and blessings—an incredibly difficult task in the beginning. I embraced my stay-at-home life and fatherhood more. I smiled more. I blogged about my struggles, my victories, and the lessons I learned. I shared my insights with other depressives and eked out a small corner of success on the internet. My message was simple: You have the power within yourself to defeat depression. As with most things in life, that was easier said than done.

The Beast We Have in Common

Clinical depression, or Major Depressive Disorder, affects more than 15 million American adults¹. My experiences with clinical depression began when I entered High School. I had been shy and introversive through my early teenage years, but by the time I became fifteen, my feelings of isolation and sadness began to affect my social and private life. I began writing poetry. Yes, deep, dark, morbid poetry. Thankfully, none of it survives to embarrass me today. However, when my mother found it, I was whisked off to Boston Children’s Hospital for immediate analysis. Not much came of that experience because children and teens weren’t diagnosed with depression in the early 80s. One memory of the experience that I retain was that they gave me a nine digit number to remember, then asked me to recall it later. I was even able to recite it backwards when prompted. I would love to have that power of recall today! They assessed my intelligence thoroughly, but my sleep and depression issues weren’t addressed to our satisfaction. The whole experience angered me then. I was embarrassed to be forced to participate in such an indignity, but now, as a dad, I appreciate the love and concern that my parents had for me.

Fortunately, I had ADHD, and that impulsiveness helped me have fun in high school despite my pervasive sadness. The party ended in my mid-twenties just after I became married. Maybe it was debt, marital difficulties, stress from school, or all of the above. Maybe it was my terrible sleep schedule, or my life’s failures catching up with me. Whatever was wrong, my wife at the time and I knew I needed help. I was already aware that I had ADHD, and had been treating that medicinally all my life (previously diagnosed as Hyperkinesis), but when I was diagnosed with clinical depression at twenty-four, there was a part of me that sighed a little, “So that’s what’s wrong with me…” At last! I finally understood why I wrote all those terribly bleak poems in high school, and why I had created so many self-portraits with my face in agony. And here I thought I was just a little bit moody.

I had been on a wide variety of ADHD and anti-anxiety meds in the previous years, but my new doctor gave me Desoxyn for ADHD and Zoloft for depression. Thus began a three week period of unprecedented organization and productivity. “So this is what it’s like to be normal,” I distinctly remember thinking, but my personal paradise of productivity didn’t last long. Suddenly, I developed violent limb and body tics. My entire nervous system was in turmoil. The doctor immediately took me off Desoxyn, which many of you might know of by the name “Methamphetamine”, but kept me on Zoloft. I limped along for a while, though the ticking didn’t abate, and then the Zoloft began to affect me negatively, too: it made me suicidal—something that is a known side-effect now, but which wasn’t widely known in 1992. I was a mess, and everything in my life seemed to be going wrong. In fact, I wanted to die. After a failed attempt at suicide (which I stopped before causing myself serious harm), I realized that something had to change. If I was moody before taking the meds ( Oh, so many meds!), and the meds were making me disconnected, loopy, and suicidal, then I would just live with being moody without meds again. I didn’t taper off. I just stopped taking my meds cold turkey.

A few weeks later I met with my doctor again and gave him my update. He told me that I shouldn’t have stopped taking Zoloft that way because a high percentage of people get suicidal when discontinuing it. I said dryly, “Ah, that would explain why I had such a rocky month.” I was always cracking jokes of the gallows variety, so deadpan wry that people often took my jokes seriously. However, that experience taught me something. I couldn’t trust anti-depressants and ADHD meds to fix my problems for me no matter how eager or confident my doctors were. Some people are non-responsive to psychmeds, and I was one of them.

The School of Hard Knocks

By 1997, I was a stay-at-home dad with two daughters when I had a life changing epiphany. There were a convergence of influences that came together in that year. There was the therapist who suggested I had a perception problem. There was the title of a book (Learned Optimism²) that I couldn’t get from my library but which struck me as a brilliant concept. There were the friends who came over every Friday & Saturday to be with me despite my moods. There was the wife who stood by me, and the parents who loved me. There was the unconditional love and warmth of my daughters, too, that affected me deeply. I had begun to notice that my sadness and self-pity hurt them because they cared about me. They were two-and-a-half and four, but they were my world. So one day I decided to test my perception problem. Yes, I had depression, but did it cloud my judgement? Did it warp my outlook? I was skeptical. I had solid reasons for thinking everybody hated me.

I created two email folders: Flame Mail & Compliments. I published anime fan art online at the time for fun and to spur me towards more drawing. This was in the day when we didn’t fear to put our email addresses on our webpages. Spam was not the scourge it is today. At the time, drawing was becoming increasingly difficult for me because of all the ticking, which depressed me, thus making me less inclined to draw. I was worse, not better, as a illustrator, and, consequently, I was very discouraged, so I took criticism of my work to heart. In fact, I was certain that my Flame Mail folder would fill up in days. As the emails came in, I sorted them to their appropriate folders.

At the end of thirty days, I had thirty compliments and one hate mail, which obviously was a fluke. So I extended the test for another month. At the end of that time period, I had an additional thirty-one fan letters, and one more hate mail. The tally was a conclusive 62 to 2. I had a perception problem.

That test transformed my life as I embraced the truth of it and took a long, hard look at myself. Did clinical depression have to shape how I perceived the world? At that time, I managed my ADHD with a PDA and a quiver of quips to shoot out as fast as I made mistakes. I laughed at my gaffes. I managed my ADHD and stopped beating myself up about it. Shouldn’t I manage my sadness, too? My tic disorder qualified me for disability payments, but was my joke that I was now a certified loser really that funny? Nobody else laughed when I told that joke. Maybe I shouldn’t have been laughing at it either.

In the years since that Fall in 1997, I have trained myself to change how I think about depression, disability, negativity, and my own weaknesses. I rolled up my sleeves and began to take charge of my life again. I changed my outlook and called it “enforced optimism”. I even started blogging about mental health in 2005, sharing my struggles and discoveries with others. When people began to ask me how I managed my depression without meds, I wrote a blog post (“Depression: Ten Ways to Fight It Off, Part 1”)³ that became one of my most popular posts. It remains popular even after twelve years. There is a hunger out there for help with depression without the side-effects and costs of medications. Despite what some in the mental health community might have you believe, not everybody responds well to anti-depressants. In fact, many people are highly sensitive to psychotropics and, like me, experience many of the detrimental side-effects with none of the benefits.

Are Anti-Depressants Really That Bad?

The purpose of this book is not to replace your psychiatrist. It is not to denegrate your coping mechanisms. I write it for those who can’t use psychmeds, but it intended to benefit all people who struggle with clinical depression. I have been accused in the past of being anti-psychiatry because of my early stance against psychmeds. It is true that I was more hostile towards psychmeds when I first began my blogging journey, especially since I was still reeling from their negative effects, but I always have recognized the need for a good therapist, especially a Cognitive Behavior Therapist (CBT). As for my anti-med hostility, my readers quickly tempered that antagonism. I learned through their heartfelt stories that many people rely on psychmeds as a lifeline because the meds gave them a fighting chance. Anti-depressants weren’t as evil as I had painted them in my mind. For some, they are still dangerous, so I always advise caution, but if meds give you benefits and help you manage the black beast, then please keep using them.

What you will find in these pages is a much expanded version of my original blog post. These are explorations of the CBT techniques I use to put myself in a better frame of mind so that I can manage my depression without meds. Many readers either learned to use these techniques as well, or they found these coping strategies on their own and let me know how glad they were to see somebody validating their experience. I can’t count all the letters I have received over the past twelve years that have thanked me for writing that blog post. We’ll begin our journey together changing the way we think about depression. This will set the stage for the next section which covers various coping strategies and why they work.

Let’s begin!

¹ Anxiety and Depression Association of America https://www.adaa.org/about-adaa/press... ² Learned Optimism by X S. ³ “Depression: Ten Ways to Fight It Off, Part 1” – http://douglascootey.com/2006/03/depr...

⁂

If you want to read more about overcoming depression, you should read my book.

Pokémon eBook Giveaway for Kindle & iBooks Readers

This is “Writing in a Fishbowl v3 – Day Ten”, but I’m going to title it something more descriptive for the ebook promotion. Read on for the scintillating details.

2:54 PM: My day began with alarming, dank dreams that I cannot describe since my daughters read this blog.

Well, that’s all I really wanted to say about the subject.

Yes, my mind is in a fog today, but I can still make out the road, and I haven’t run over any mailboxes yet. In fact, I’m starting to find some clarity. I just realized that I turn fifty in two days. Yes, there it is! The adrenaline rush of regret and fear is sweeping the fog away as I type. Birthdays mean year end goals for me. I still haven’t posted the first chapter of my new book, nor have I begun writing my middle grade novel as I promised myself. I also haven’t begun dating again. I suppose there’s still time to accomplish all of those goals before I hit the half century mark. I’m formulating the Craigslist ad right now:

SWM seeking SWF to help break divorce doldrums. Must date before Friday. I’m totally not desperate at all. Transcendent beings preferred. No Smokers.

I may need to sit on that one for a bit.

In the meantime, my new book, Pokémon Legendaries in 7 Easy Steps, is ready for you to enjoy, assuming you play Pokémon with your kids, or even by yourself. It is both a parent’s guide and a pathway towards cracking the Pokémon Global Trading System to get almost any Pokémon that you might want. The mythical legendaries are unobtainable, obviously, since they are special event Pokémon, but using my trading method will help you complete your or your kids’ national pokédex in a few short months. It’ll take some time to collect over 700 Pokémon, but setting up trades is painless. You can set a new one up every night and complete your dex in less than two years! Maybe that’s not such a great sales pitch. You might want to be a tad more aggressive than that. In the meantime, you can score yourself some sweet Pokémon Legendaries within a day or two. AND, unlike recent Nintendo products, my ebook will always be in stock.

As I mentioned in other blog posts, I took on this project as a break from Saying “NO” to Suicide. Because of false starts and endless rewrites, that project took two years. I needed a light-hearted break. Even if you don’t play Pokémon XY* or Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire*, or have children to play those games with, you can gift the ebook to somebody that might appreciate it. For Christmas, I’ll be doing just that. I’d like to gift eleven piping Kindle readers my new ebook, and as well as ten a’leaping iBooks readers, and nine dancing Kobo readers. All you need to do is promise to write an honest review soonish, like before I turn fifty. Also, when I have your email address, I'll bug you ever so gently about the review, but I won't sell your email address to Russian hackers. That's a promise. Obviously, I’ll be wanting to see ★★★☆☆ to ★★★★★ reviews, but I’m not demanding them. I think that’s unethical (which means you will need to reveal in your review that you got the book from me for free). If you leave me a ★☆☆☆☆ review, just be kind, but I find ★★★★★ reviews to be the kindest. No pressure.

To be one of the Kindle, iBooks, or Kobo readers, be one of the first to reply. Follow @DouglasCootey on Twitter. Tag me in a tweet when you do, and I’ll follow you back. Then DM me your email address. Or leave a comment on the A Splintered Mind Facebook page for this post.

Next up, I’ll post the first chapter of Twelve Ways to Fight Off Depression by the end of the day. Also, I will make cookies.

Writing in a Fishbowl v3 – Day Nine

3:13 PM: So much for waking up this morning and taking advantage of prime social media hours to promote my book before moving on to my next one. My daughter had a seizure at school, so the entire day was tossed into disarray. I hurried over, driving my manual transmission car for the first time since my surgery. There is a chance that I was an incandescent comet on four wheels on my way to the school, although I am not admitting to anything. I will admit, however, to using my horn like a mystic hand to push traffic out of my way. Once I arrived, I dealt with her needs, fielded questions from the EMTs, and experienced my stress levels pushing through the roof.

The seizure was over, technically, by the time I arrived, but as I watched her thrash and moan on the floor, I questioned the EMTs assessment. My daughter did not recognize me! The sound of my voice did not soothe her as it usually does. She was agitated and distressed. No matter how much the EMT insisted that this was the postictal phase, and having seen my daughter’s tonic clonic and complex partial ictal phases for the last fifteen years, I could see his point, but that didn’t change the fact that she was clearly not better yet. Then after maybe ten minutes of debating with myself and the EMTs, she went to sleep. NOW the seizure was over.

Bringing her to the hospital usually doesn’t accomplish much. They check her oxygen levels and vitals. They poke at her to get her to respond when she’d rather be asleep. Then we sit there for two hours until they feel confident in releasing her. The seizures are usually over by the time we arrive to the emergency room. The problem was will this be the one time the seizure wasn’t over? These moments are difficult for any parent, but with ADHD, my mind feels like I’m being pelted from every side. Teachers, administrators, aides, EMTs, police, and my daughter… Everyone is concerned. Everybody wants to help. But I can’t filter out the commotion. I’d like to be the cool, collected parent in command of the moment. Instead, I feel like:

Created with Tagul.com

At this point, she’s been asleep for over four hours, which is very unusual. My stress levels feel as if they have departed their celestial orbit and returned to earth. I’ve made important phone calls, and now I’m ready for my own work. I believe I injured myself in the rush, though. There is pain deep inside where there wasn’t yesterday, but at least my daughter is asleep soundly in the other room, safe and free from seizures for the time being. I can feel depression creeping in. I’ve overexerted myself, so this doesn’t surprise me. I think I will create a text file filled with all my planned tweets and promotional Facebook commentary to cut & paste from in the morning. Then I will focus on dinner, my daughter, and, if I’m lucky, get some writing in.

⁂

Writing in a Fishbowl v3 – Day Eight

Writing in a Fishbowl v3 – Day Eight

3:40 AM: I feel as if I am on the cusp of returning to normal—as if I woke up today and suddenly noticed that pants are supposed to be worn on my legs. I almost imagined that I could resume my normal daily activities. I have to admit, I haven’t been happy about my writing schedule since October. My blog comments are still broken. I’ve also got an itch to write about more than fishbowls. All my focus has been on finishing Pokémon Legendaries in 7 Easy Steps. I don’t believe I will schedule two surgeries across a book launch window ever again. You can’t believe the stupid mistakes I’ve made. I imagine the approval committees over at Smashwords & Amazon are thinking, “What? This guy again? Didn’t we just post his latest update ten minutes ago?”

This Fall has been an awkward dance with knives with long walks along a ragged beach. Perhaps that’s painting the experience too luridly. Let’s just say that my surgery last week went well, and although EnvisionRX should go die in a hole somewhere for tying up my pain meds, there were relatively no complications. In fact, I thought I was ready for primetime on Saturday and began writing my last Family Guy article for the month. As I finished, I leaned back and thought, “Dang…this is good stuff.” It was that good. Of course, I needed to send it off right away. That’s when I discovered that I had already sent my editor a copy of the article. Obviously, that couldn’t be. I had just finished writing it, yet there is was with the exact same title and emailed two months ago! I was so out of it, I wrote a new article about an anecdote that I had already written about and submitted. It’s already published! I laughed long and hard over that screw-up.

So I decided to write about goofing up and still liking myself. As soon as it’s up, I’ll share it with you. Dang, it’s good stuff.

In the meantime, I have redesigned Pokémon Legendaries in 7 Easy Steps’ book cover…again…fixed up the copyright page, discovered a block of text in the book had been deleted accidentally, hacked the epub file, and resubmitted it all. As soon as it posts, I’ll tell the world about it. I also disassembled my Apple Magic Trackpad and fixed the sticky left click, but who cares about that sort of stuff?

And now I need to sleep. Hopefully, I’ll have something more exciting to write for you tomorrow. Maybe it will be about the dream I had the other day where I inherited the powers of Thor AND Spider-man, then somehow became god-like and flew around the world in a beat-up, green, 1980 Toyota Corolla. I should dream like that more often.

Listening to *Broken Promises Land* by Claire ♪

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Writing in a Fishbowl v3 – Day Six

12:35 PM: It's been more than a few days since my last entry. I'm not writing so well in a fishbowl, but I sure am discovering my limits. As I sat in church today, I found myself restless and unable to focus on the lesson. I tried to keep a seat empty between myself and the person to my right, but somebody kept filling it. After budging over twice, I sought out an empty room. I'm now sitting in the dark, illuminated only by the dim glow of my iPad, while in the distance somebody plays slow, soothing Christmas arrangements on the piano.

It's perfect.

I had no idea how much I needed the solace of a sensory deprived environment, but my subconscious led me. No bustle and visual commotion. No intruding voices. Just darkness and the silhouettes of my thumbs bringing my thoughts to life.

Church isn't the problem. I was restless earlier at home when I quickly grew tired of Twitter. The progressives were whining about how half a nation didn't align with their need for liberal consensus, and the conservatives griped about liberal overreach that disregarded limited government ideals. It seemed that nobody was happy, especially me while reading all of that clamoring.

As much as I like to focus here on the positive things that happen to me, the negative events are often more prevalent in my life. I'm recovering from knee surgery, but unable to exercise because of an umbilical hernia. I'll soon be recovering from a hernia operation, too, whereupon I will still be unable to exercise. Aside from time lost and professional delays (I haven't submitted a Family Guy article since October), my tight pants this morning proved without a doubt that my goal to lose thirty pounds by my birthday will fail as I regain the ten pounds that I lost since August. Rayo has lost its fun since I am limiting my daily caloric intake to under 2000. Obviously, it is not enough, and further crucifyingly boring changes will need to be made to my diet. Perhaps I'll live off of food-infused water, but knowing me, I'll not only be allergic to it, but I'll gain weight on that as well.

My new book is still having problems. Edits are needed to appease Smashwords, while the flawed, first version languishes in ebook stores awaiting that update. And lastly, my daughter's behavior problems not only contribute to my high blood pressure, but take up colossal amounts of time when I'm not already ticking and couch-bound.

I am deeply discouraged. Is it any wonder that my depression has become more prominent lately?

Writing all that down doesn't make me feel better, but it helps me see what weighs down the yoke I carry. It is a heavy yoke, with more weight yet to be laden upon my shoulders.

So what am I going to do about it? That seems to be the relevant question, and, frankly, in line with the point of this blog.

I'm happy to say that my coping strategies for ADHD have been holding me together. Knowing that I will undergo surgery this Tuesday, I have been racing to complete major tasks before my period of convalescence. I have purchased and wrapped all Christmas presents except for two, which arrive tomorrow. I'll make short work of them just in time for surgery. The rest of my gifts are going to be baked goods, and by the time Christmas week rolls around, I should be able to hobble about the kitchen and get the task done. I, also, with the great help of two dear friends, consolidated two storage units into one yesterday. It was quite painful moving all those boxes, and my friends did all of the heavy lifting, both metaphorically and physically. After Tuesday, I will not be allowed to lift anything heavier than ten pounds for four weeks, so getting things done yesterday was key, even if it did risk strangulating an intestine. And now I'll save 100 bucks a month to boot!

Tonight I will make the changes that Smashwords requires, and I'll write two articles for family guy. It's not the typical Sabbath day activity that I prefer, but the ox is in the mire. This will allow me to work Monday on two product reviews that are long overdue. After Tuesday's surgery, I have no idea when I might be able to get to any of these tasks. Going under the knife is stressful enough without having unfinished projects weighing on my mind. I can do a lot in the next 48 hours to lift that yoke of mine. When I start to come to my senses by Thursday, I'll have a free state of mind knowing that I completed the tasks that were important to me.

Interesting. I just noticed that somewhere between when I was describing in maudlin detail the things that pressed upon my mind and this moment, I started pacing while writing. I have a renewed sense of purpose and higher energy levels. Looks like my coping strategies for combating depression are also still working. Maybe it's time to come out of the darkness and partake of the light again.
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Writing in a Fishbowl v3 – Day Five

7:21 PM: Hello, Tuesday! It’s time to write before you turn into Wensday.

Just for your information, I won’t be writing these posts on Sundays. And yesterday’s excuse for not writing was an umbilical hernia. I’m patiently awaiting surgery for next month and moved a heavy box absentmindedly. How could I forget that I had a hernia? Well, I certainly remembered in a hurry once I injured myself. You know those core exercises done on exercise balls? The kind that were all the rage in the aughts? I always found them rather lightweight. I had no idea how much I used my abs to sit and type until I couldn’t do it yesterday. Very painful.

But who cares about my pain, right? You’re here to read about how I manage writing a book while dealing with depression or ADHD. Tonight I write a hoary tale of how one moment of ADHD can come back to haunt us months later.

I discovered to my horror that I had no idea where all my graphics were for my latest book’s blog post. I spent yesterday and today scouring my hard drive in search for them. I couldn’t remember what I called them. I couldn’t remember where I stored them. I had no memory of what happened to them. I even fired up TimeMachine and dug around my past. Still no luck. Why on earth do I do this to myself? Couldn’t I have written myself a note somewhere in all my very organized book notes? So I thought about it. If I were a bonehead with ADHD, what unrelated place would I stick graphics of Pokémon trades? Then it hit me! iPhoto! And there they were, right where they didn’t belong. I have often said that it is a good thing my brain is trapped inside my skull, or else I might misplace it.

The reason these graphics are so important is because they were screen caps of trades I completed on the Pokémon Global Link. Since Nintendo revamped that site to work with Pokémon Sun & Moon, I can’t access those old trades anymore. My plan was to tease gamers about the trading system I devised by posting the screen caps. Now that I have the screen caps again, tonight’s goal will be to create the landing page for my book. Then I can let people know about it and quickly get busy working on my next book…which I already started on Friday because I was so excited about it. Yes, one can be excited writing about depression. I know that sounds funny, but then again, if I didn’t enjoy writing about the subject, I never would have blogged about it here for almost twelve years.

I also need to write tomorrow’s blog post, which I think will be about confusing ADHD symptoms with cold symptoms. But for now, I’m off to gently walk the treadmill at VASA.

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If you’d like a pain free reading experience learning how to help suicidal loved ones, read my book.

Writing in a Fishbowl v3 – Day Four

8:26 PM: Today was a day of recuperation. After my all-nighter Thursday night, I needed it. I slept until eleven. I didn’t dress until noon. I had pizza for breakfast. I played video games with my daughter. I got a haircut. I had a very laid back day.

After periods of intense hyperfocus, I find I need to let my brain spin. I set a limit, then proceed to unwind. We can’t fight ADHD all the time. Breaks are OK, I promise. By the time my daughter left, I had two hours before my friends came over, so I thought “Enough rest!” and I got to work. I thought I was wicked productive! You can probably imagine me with a smug smirk of accomplishment. The very first thing I wanted to do was delete my book project ToDo list. I had no need of it now, and I had already begun book three yesterday. I opened the list up to see if any stray tasks needed to be moved to another list before I chucked it into the void, when I noticed something: I hadn’t done anything on the list! This was my “Finish this before you publish” list. Anytime I thought of something that might need dealing with, I tossed it into this list. Because I would check it before publishing. Things like replacing placeholder text with actual references to the tables once the Appendix was done. Small stuff like that.

In a panic, I fired up the book project, corrected all my mistakes, then uploaded the changes to Smashwords & Amazon. What a dope! I have now hereby labeled that ToDo list “ToDuh List”. I share it with you in all its wicked productive glory.

Writing in a Fishbowl v3 – Day Three

5:22 PM: Success! I published Trading Up to Legendaries in Seven Easy Steps: A Pokémon Trading Guide for Parents & Gamers early this morning. Then I crashed harder than Dow Jones after America made Brexit great again. I woke up just as my daughter arrived home from school. I am waiting for the book to appear on the various ebook stores. Then I’ll post two new landing pages: one for the book, and one for all my books. Hey! I have two of them now. They go together like peanut butter and jelly fish, but it’s uniquely me. I began my freelance writing career by reviewing video games, so this isn’t so far off topic for me.

Next, I will work on rebranding my mental health book to be written by “D.R. Cootey”, upload a new cover, maybe spruce up the descriptions, then get busy working on the hard copy version. My goal is to have that ready by the time I turn 50. But for NOW, we have Pokémon in Alola to capture. I’ll be going.

♪ Listening to: Space and the Woods by Late of the Pier

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If you like reading finished books, you’ll love my first book. My new book isn’t up yet, and it won’t likely interest you, unless you dig Pokémon.

Writing in a Fishbowl v3 – Day One

3:07 AM: It’s time to begin anew my writing in a fishbowl project. The last time was a disaster. I simply couldn’t pack to move, deal with my daughter’s issues, deal with my own disabilities, and write. One aspect of these writing experiments is to set big goals to learn what my limits are. I shot for the stars and hit a ceiling just as I left the launchpad. Kinda discouraging. However, my first efforts to hold myself publicly accountable on this blog worked out so well. I truly believe lightning can strike twice.

Blog Milestone

My blog will cross over 500,000 unique visitors next month. This is an amazing milestone to reach. I have all of you to thank. Please keep sharing your favorite articles and spreading the word. In this day of Facebook and their filtering, the little guys need all the help they can get to be noticed.

Blog Comments

I disabled Disqus because people complained they couldn’t use it. Then I discovered that I couldn’t restore Blogger comments. I even reset my blog template to a Blogger default, but still couldn’t enable comments. I have no idea what is wrong. I’ve spent hours trying to fix it.

Then I decided to reenable the discus comments, but they wouldn’t turn back on. My blog database is apparently corrupted. This is yet another nail in the Blogger coffin for me. It might be easier to migrate to a new platform than to get Google to personally fix my blog database on their end.

Dang it!

I just discovered Blogsy is dead. What’s Blogsy? It was my favorite blogging app on the iPad. I’d link to their website, but apparently, they’ve taken it down. I discovered this week that Blogsy wasn’t authorized to post to Blogger anymore. Then I discovered that the devs posted a good-bye notice on their Facebook page last January. I’ve been using a dead app all year, and I had no idea.

I can’t imagine how I’ll get by without it. From its terribly clever icon (which I only today discovered had hidden messages) to its intuitive and iPad-savvy app with gesture controls, this blogging tool was not only the most cutting edge blogging tool for the iPad, it was the only one that worked reliably with Blogger. I just don’t know if the Byword plug-in for Blogger is up to the task. It requires so much post editing because markdown text doesn’t support target=“elsewhere”, but Blogger on Mobile Safari is a torturous experience. It barely functions. I loathe using Blogger now (and Google, you company-acquiring-addict-with-ADHD). All the stars tell me that I must migrate to a new platform, but moving almost 850 posts with images and tags is no easy task. And what shall I use instead? Wordpress? Its blog front end was designed by demonic, anal retentive CPAs hellbent on making blogging feel like filling out tax returns.

I’ve come up with a work around for the time being. I purchased the Blogger plug-in for the desktop version of Byword ages ago, so I’ll test it with this post. Basically, I write up my blog in markdown text in Byword, export as HTML code, then replace the markdown text with the HTML code. Then I can tweak the code with target=“elsewhere” wherever I need it, then publish to Blogger.

It’s not as complicated as it sounds, but it’s an extra step, and one that is momentarily destructive as I completely erase everything I’ve written with the HTML version. No biggie, right⸮

Book Two

On Friday, the next chapter in Pokémon begins, and my book that was for the previous two games hasn’t been released yet. I am frustrated, but this project has taught me so much about my limitations. Because of family drama, knee surgery, and my tic disorder, I have not made this project a priority. That’s not an excuse; it’s what happened. This project was back-burnered months ago. I allowed myself to get sidetracked. However, I am now determined to release the book by this Friday. I may have to give up on sleep to accomplish this.

What did I learn? Making edits is my kryptonite. I did the research and wrote the book so quickly, but when it came time to go over my editor’s notes, then make those edits to my manuscript, I died. Then, once that was done, I died again when it came time to lay out the book. To be fair, life truly has been chaotic. I haven’t even blogged here much. However, I clearly didn’t have a plan in place to prevent my ADHD from getting me off track. I’ve lost a lot of time. Even with all the chaos, if I had a plan in place to cope with my intolerance for boredom, I would have been a lot closer to being done by now—likely published by now, to be honest. Next time, I will plan on this wall. I won’t need a third failure to drive the importance of having a game plan in place after I finish the final draft. If I can get this book done before Friday, I still would have started and finished a book in under one year. Compared to my previous book, this is amazing progress, but I have to publish it first before I can pat myself on my back.

Book Three

Mothballed. This is a fiction middle grade book that I have wanted to bring to life for some time. My goal is to finish Trading Up to Legendaries: A Parent & Gamer’s Guide to Pokémon, then begin working on this MG book. I’d like to finish it before I turn fifty near Christmas. That’s an aggressive goal, especially since I have a hernia surgery around the corner.

Book Four

Also mothballed. My Fighting Depression book is still going to happen. I’d like to publish one first draft chapter a week here and finish by January. Then I can polish up the book and get it out the door. That’s the original goal, but I’ve had setbacks, so we’ll see how things go.

This was long, but now you’ve read all my plans. They are big. They are aggressive. They will make or break me. This should be fun.

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If you like reading books that are finished, you should read my first book. It’s finished.