Wil Wheaton's Blog, page 20

we are so close. he is almost gone.

I made this countdown four years ago, because I needed to have something to work toward, and to look forward to.

I don’t expect anyone to look back into my blog from four years ago, so I’ll just repaste the code here:

Years00Months00Weeks01Days00Hours10Minutes15Seconds29 jQuery(document).ready(function($) { $('#5ffe970aaab19-dashboard').tminusCountDown({ targetDate: { 'day': 20, 'month': 01, 'year': 2021, 'hour': 09, 'min': 01, 'sec': 00, 'localtime': '1/12/2021 22:45:30' }, style: 'jedi', id: '5ffe970aaab19', event_id: '', debug: '', launchtarget: 'countdown', onComplete: function() { $('#5ffe970aaab19-countdown').css({'width' : 'auto', 'height' : 'auto'}); $('#5ffe970aaab19-countdown').html(" Our national nightmare is finally over."); }}); });

There is so much work to be done, but at least America won’t have a Fascist in the White House.

 

Hi. I’m Wil, and it’s been five years and one day since my last drink. Happy birthday to me.

Yesterday, I marked the fifth anniversary of my decision to quit drinking alcohol. It was the most consequential choice I have ever made in my life, and I am able to stand before you today only because I made it.

I was slowly and steadily killing myself with booze. I was getting drunk every night, because I couldn’t face the incredible pain and PTSD I had from my childhood, at the hands of my abusive father and manipulative mother.

It was unsustainable, and I knew it was unsustainable, but when you’re an addict, knowing something is unhealthy and choosing to do something about it are two very different things.

On January 8, 2016, I was out in the game room, watching TV and getting drunk as usual. I was trying to numb and soothe the pain I felt, while also deliberately hurting myself because at a fundamental level, I believed the lies the man who was my father told me about myself: I was worthless. I was unworthy of love. I was stupid. The things I loved and cared about were stupid. It did not matter if I lived or died. Nobody cared about me, anyway.

I knocked a bottle into the trash, realized I had to pee, and — so I wouldn’t disturb Anne — did not go into the bathroom, but instead walked out into the middle of my backyard and peed on the grass. I turned around, and there was Anne. I will never forget the look on her face, this mixture of sadness and real fear.

“I am so worried about you,” was all she had to say. I’d been feeling it for a long time, and I faced a stark choice that I had known I was going to face sooner or later.

“So am I.”

Roughly 12 hours later, I woke up with the headache (hangover) I always had. For the first time in years, I accepted that I brought it on myself, instead of blaming it on allergies or the wind.

I picked up my phone, and I called Chris Hardwick, my best friend, who had been sober for over a decade at that point.

“I need help,” I said. “I don’t think going to AA is for me, but I absolutely have a problem with alcohol and I need to stop drinking.”

He told me a lot of things, and we stayed on the call for hours. I realized that that it was as simple and complicated as making a choice not to drink, one day or even one hour at a time. So I made the choice. HOLY SHIT was it hard. The first 45 days were a real struggle, but with the love and support of my wife and best friend, I got through it.

2016 … remember that year? Remember how bad things got? I was constantly making the joke about how I picked the wrong year to quit drinking, while I continued to make the choice to not drink.

Getting clean allowed (and forced) me to confront *why* I drank to excess so much. It turns out that being emotionally abused and neglected by both parents, then gaslit by my mother for my entire life had consequences for my emotional development and mental health.

I take responsibility for my choices. I made the choice to become a drunk. I own that.

But I know that, had the man who was my father loved me the way he loves my siblings, had my mother just once put my needs ahead of her own, the overwhelming pain and the black hole where paternal love should be would not have existed in my life.

I made a choice to fill that black hole with booze and self-destructive behavior. That sort of put a weak bandage over the psychic wound, but it never lasted more than a few hours or days before I was right back to believing all the lies that man planted in my head about myself, and feeling like I deserved all of it. If he wasn’t right, I thought, why didn’t my mother ever stand up for me? If he wasn’t right, how come nothing I ever did was good enough for him? I must be as worthless and contemptible as he made me believe I was. Anyone who says otherwise is just being fooled by me. I don’t really deserve any happiness, because I haven’t earned it. Anne’s just settling. She probably feels sorry for me.

All of that was just so much. It was so hard. It hurt, all the time. Because my mother made my success as an actor the most important thing in her life, I grew up believing that being the most successful actor in the world was the only way she’d be happy. And if that would make her happy, maybe it would prove to the man who was my father that I was worthy of his love. When I didn’t book jobs, I took it SO PERSONALLY. Didn’t those casting people know how important this was? This wasn’t just an acting role. This was the only chance I have to make my parents love me!

The thing is, I didn’t like it. I didn’t love acting and auditioning and attention like my mother did. It was never my dream. It was hers, and she sacrificed my childhood, and ultimately my relationship with her and her husband, in pursuit of it.

I didn’t jump straight to “get drunk all the time” as a coping mechanism. For *years* I tried to have conversations with my parents about how I felt, and every single time, I was dismissed for being ungrateful, overly dramatic, or just making things up. When the man who was my father didn’t blow me off, he got mad at me, mocked me, humiliated me, made me afraid of him. I began to hope that he’d just blow me off, because it wasn’t as bad as the alternative.

It was so painful, and so frustrating, I just gave up and dove into as many bottles as I could find.

But then in 2016 I quit, and as my body began to heal from how much I’d abused it, my spirit began to heal, too. I found a room in my heart, and in that room was a small child, terrified and abused and unloved, and I opened my arms to him. I held him the way he should have been held by our parents, and I loved him the way he deserved to be loved: unconditionally. I promised him that I would protect him from them. They could never hurt him again.

I realized I had walked up to that door countless times over the years, and I had always chosen to walk right past it and into a bar, instead.

But because I had made the choice to stop drinking, to stop hiding from my pain, to stop self-medicating, I could see that door clearly now. I could hear that little boy weeping in there, as quietly as possible, because he was so afraid that someone was going to come in and hurt him.

Sobriety let me see that my mother had been lying to me, and maybe to herself, about who that man was to me. I realized that the man who was my father had been a bully to me my whole life. I accepted and fucking OWNED that it wasn’t my fault. It was a choice he made, and while I will never know why, I knew what had happened to me. I knew my memories were real, and I hoped that, armed with this new certainty and confidence, I could have a heart-to-heart with my parents, and begin to heal these wounds. So I wrote to my parents, shared a lot of my feelings and fears, and finally told them, “I feel like my dad doesn’t love me.”

I know some of you are parents. What do you do when your child says that to you? What is your first instinct? Pick up the phone right away? Send a text right away? Somehow communicate to your child immediately that, no, they are wrong and they are not unloved, right? Well, if you’re my parents, you ignore me and go radio silent (for two months if you’re my mother, four months if you’re my father.) And then when you finally do acknowledge the email, you are incensed and offended. How dare I be so hateful and cruel and ungrateful! Nothing is more important than family! How could I say such hurtful things?! Why would I make all that up?

I had changed. They had not. They will not. Ever.

So, I want to be clear: I take responsibility for the choice I made to become a full-time drunk. But I also hold my parents accountable for the choices they made, including this one.

Their silence during those long weeks told me everything I needed to know, and my sobriety was severely tested for the first time. Everything I had always feared, everything I had been drinking to avoid, was right there, in my face. When they finally acknowledged me, and made it all about their feelings, I knew: this was never going to change. I mean, I’d known that for years, maybe for my whole life, but I still held out hope that, somehow, something would be different.

During those weeks, I spent a lot of time on the phone with Chris, spent a lot of time with Anne, and filled a bunch of journals. But I didn’t make the choice to pick up a drink. I’d committed to taking better care of myself, so I could be the husband and father my family deserved. So I could find the happiness that *I* deserve.

Once I was clean, I had clarity, and so much time to do activities! I was able to clearly and honestly assess who I was, and *why*. I was able to love myself and care for myself in ways that I hadn’t before, because I sincerely believed I didn’t deserve it.

I will never forget this epiphany I had one day, while walking through our kitchen: If I was the person the man who was my father made me believe I was, there is no way a woman as amazing and special as Anne would choose to spend her life with me. Why this never occurred to me up to that point can be found under a pile of bottles.

Not having parents sucks. It hurts all the time. But it hurts less than what I had with those people, so I continue to make the choice to keep them out of my life.

After five years, I don’t miss being drunk at all. It is not a coincidence that the last five years have been the best five years of my life, personally and professionally. In spite of everything 2020 took from us (and I know it’s taken far more from others than it took from me), I had the best year I’ve ever had in my career — and this is *my* career, being a host and a writer and audiobook narrator. This is what *I* want to do, and I still feel giddy when I take time to really own that I am finally following *MY* dream. It’s a shame I don’t have parents to share it with, but I have a pretty epic TNG family who celebrate everything I do with me.

I wondered how I would feel, crossing five years without a drink off the calendar. I thought I’d feel celebratory, but honestly the thing I feel the most is gratitude and resolve.

I am grateful that I have the love and support of my wife and children. I am grateful that I have so much privilege, this wasn’t as hard for me as it could have been. I am grateful that, every day, I can make a choice to not drink, and it’s entirely MY CHOICE.

Because I quit drinking, I had the clarity I needed to see WHY I was drinking, and I had the strength to confront it. It didn’t go the way I wanted or hoped, but instead of numbing that pain with booze, I have come to accept it, as painful as it is.

And even with that pain, my life is immeasurably better than it was, and for that I am immeasurably grateful.

Hi. I’m Wil, and it’s been five years and one day since my last drink. Happy birthday to me.

In loving memory of Seamus Wheaton, the best dog.

Yesterday afternoon, Seamus collapsed on our living room floor. We took him to the emergency vet, where they ran some tests, and discovered a large mass on his spleen. He had a 105 fever, and he wasn’t responsive. The doctor told us he was in critical condition.

At almost 12 years-old, Seamus wasn’t a candidate for surgery (and we weren’t going to put him through that, anyway), so at midnight last night, we said goodbye to the best boy in the world.

I know that a lot of you care about our pets, because we post lots of pictures of them and talk about them all the time. You know how much we love them, and you know how much you love your pets, so you know how much this loss hurts all of us.

This overwhelming pain I feel right now is the price we know we’re going to pay for the years we have with our four-legged family memebers. We’ve always known the day would come when he wouldn’t be in our lives, but that didn’t make the arrival of that day any easier.

I’m so grateful we got to be with him in his final moments, and we got to tell him goodbye. We got to thank him for all the joy and love he brought into our lives. We got to kiss him and hug him, and he passed peacefully, with the two people who loved him more than anything by his side.

Seamus was a special dog. At doggy daycare, they used him to evaluate new dogs, because they knew what a good citizen he was. I was always like a proud parent about that. He was a fantastic pack leader for Marlowe. He taught her how to be a dog, and he lives on in her, a little bit.

I’m going to miss him so much. I keep automatically looking for him in all of his places around the house. I know the next few weeks are going to be tough. Eventually, all that will be left is the memory of the joy and love he gave us.

But right now, today, it hurts so much. I miss his grey face so much, and I want to kiss the spot on his big old blockhead one more time.

He was such a wonderful dog, and such a blessing to have in our family. I love him, and I will miss him forever.

Bye bye, Seamus. You were the best boy, and your whole pack loves you. If heaven exists, and dogs go there, I hope you’re playing ball with Riley and Ferris.

Thirty-three years of TNG

A couple of days ago, in 1987, Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered.

I am one year older today than Patrick Stewart was when we filmed Encounter At Farpoint. I literally grew up on the Enterprise.

It’s been a long and complicated journey to get from 14 to 48. It’s been joyful and painful, and all of it has happened on the shoulders (and occasionally in the shadow) of this television show that is so much more than a television show.

I am so proud and so grateful to be part of Star Trek. I love my Star Trek family so much; they are the closest thing to parents I have in my life, and I am so grateful for them.

I am so lucky to be part of something that will likely endure for generations, inspiring kids whose parents haven’t even met, yet, to do great things with their lives.

I wish I’d been able to fully appreciate it when I was there, but I just couldn’t. I was young, immature, and in so much emotional pain, all the time, it kind of overwhelmed everything else in my life. Luckily, I was able to appreciate it from time to time, and because of that, I have some of my most joyful memories as a kid, and as an actor.

I met Anne because of Star Trek. I was on a Trek cruise when I was 18, and met my friend Stephanie, who was also on the ship, but not part of the Star Trek group. We became friends (still are, she was in our wedding), and years later, she introduced me to her friend from work.

I owe every bit of happiness I have in my life to Star Trek, and when I think about that, it kind of blows my mind.

Happy birthday, Next Generation. Happy birthday, to my space family. I love you.

報復性熬夜

I feel like I’m always the last person to learn about something, and that makes me reluctant to share things that now seem obvious to me. But I feel like a lot of y’all who read this page are similar to me in some ways, and maybe you’ll be glad to know about this, if you don’t already.

I saw a post on Tumblr about something called “revenge bedtime procrastination”. The original term in in a non-English language that I don’t speak or write, but that’s the closest we can get to a literal translation.

Revenge Bedtime Procrastination, which has a much more beautiful name in Chinese (the literal translation for revenge bedtime procrastination means “suffering through the night vengefully.”), is a phenomena unique to people who feel out of control in their daily lives, so we refuse to go to sleep early, to exert some control over our lives, and to enjoy some quiet time alone, when the rest of our people are sleeping.

I’ve always identified as a night owl. I’ve always had trouble falling asleep, and as long as I can remember, I prefer to sleep from about 0100 to about 0930 or 1000. I’ve been like that my whole life, and until I heard about this sleep revenge procrastination, I didn’t know why.

But now it all makes sense. When I was a kid, I lived in an environment where I was decidedly not in control, nor did I feel safe and loved. The man who was my father was a relentless bully who delighted in mocking me, teasing me, making me cry, as he made it crystal clear that he did not approve of, or love me. He made it very clear that I was not enough for him, through direct and indirect actions that have left me with a deeply painful wound that I don’t know will ever heal. Now, I know he had love to give, because he gave it freely to my siblings. He worshiped my brother, who grew up to be exactly like him, and I never saw him be cruel, dismissive, or disdainful toward my sister. It was just me, for some reason. And my mother did nothing to protect me, or to call out his emotionally abusive behavior. He was endlessly cruel and emotionally abusive to me, but they convinced themselves that, because he didn’t leave marks when he grabbed me in anger, he wasn’t actually, you know, abusive. Angrily shaking me by my shoulders, jabbing me in the sternum while he raged at me, calling me names like “dumb little fuck” all seems like abuse to me. They say I’m too sensitive. More than once, they told me I made it up.

News flash: the man who was my father was abusive to me, and my mother let it happen. Worse, she gaslighted me about it when I came to her for help.

So my waking hours in my childhood home just sucked. When I was a child, I’d retreat into my bedroom and read books, design D&D characters and dungeons, and escape into my imagination, but there was always the threat of that man walking in and mocking me for existing.

As a result, I developed this Revenge Bedtime Procrastination, which gave me truly free and quiet moments of relief from his cruelty and her manipulation, when they were asleep and I was the only person who was awake in the house. That’s when I could write, when I could read books, when I could listen to music, when I could exist as a human being who wasn’t always afraid.

Today, I love my life and my family. I couldn’t be happier about my career. I mean, right now things are generally not great for all of us, and I’m ready for our current trauma to be over, but if the dual traumas of pandemic and Fascism were removed, my life would be really great, in no small part because I have no relationship with my abusers.

And yet, I still struggle to fall asleep before 0100, even with the help of my CBD tinctures and meditation. It’s something I’ve lived with my whole life, and something I never truly understood, until I read this post I referenced above.

I don’t know if, now that I know this is a thing, I can start working to convince myself I don’t need that time like I did then, because I am in a house filled with love, shared with a partner who won’t ever hurt me. I don’t know if I’m going to ever be a person who can fall asleep easily, or before the middle of the night, but at least I know WHY I am the way that I am, and that makes me feel a little less broken and weird.

just thinking

I’m thinking about kids who are doing online learning, when they want to be at school with their peers. I’m thinking about their parents who are suddenly thrust into an educator role they may not want or feel prepared for. I’m thinking about good, honest, hardworking people who are in danger of losing their homes through no fault of their own, desperate for some protection from predatory lenders and landlords. I’m thinking about the people who are getting up and going to work every day, for corporations who don’t care if they live or die, so the rest of us can have food and other essentials. I’m thinking of the people who did everything right, and still got sick because a selfish person refused to take this pandemic seriously. I’m thinking of the nearly 200,000 people who have died and the loved ones who are mourning their loss. I’m thinking of the BIPoC who are living through the dual traumas of being BIPoC in America in 2020, and living through a pandemic that affects people who look like them more harshly than it affects people who look like me. I’m thinking about teachers and educators who don’t want to be in classrooms because of the pandemic, but who also want to be there for their kids. It’s going to be unimaginably difficult to keep kids safe (think of how hard it is to get us to sit still) and give them the best quality education these teachers can provide.

I’m thinking about all these things, and how overwhelming all of this is, for all of us. If it’s tough for me, I can’t comprehend how tough it is for someone without my privilege.

I know that my experience is substantially easier and less disruptive to my life than it is to almost everyone else, and maybe that allows me the space to be the person I need in the world right now. So I’m sharing the reminder and the advice I gave myself, earlier today, when I needed it.

Remember to look for the Helpers.
Remember to BE a Helper.
Remember that this is not forever.
Remember that, as terrible as everything is right now, we’ve been here before and come back from it. We owe it to ourselves and to our children to be as resilient and committed as our ancestors were in their day.
Remember that we are living through a major trauma unlike anything most of us have ever experienced in our lives. We haven’t done this before, so we are figuring it all out in real time. It’s hard and it’s scary, and we need to be as gentle with ourselves as we are with our kids and loved ones.

This stuff is helping me today. Maybe if you need it, it’ll be helpful to you, too.

Also, real quick before I hit publish: Teachers, I see you. I’m grateful for you and I love you.

i’m writing a new book

I can’t talk about what, specifically, I’m writing, but I am excited af to say that today, I began work on my next writing project.

It’ll be about a year or so before this project is finished and on shelves, but today, I got into it for the first time.

The beginning is always a slog. I have to just puke up whatever is in my brain, so I can put down a foundation and some framing. I’m doing work that likely won’t be seen by anyone other than my editor, but it’s still vital to the process.

This particular beginning isn’t as tough as I was expecting, which is a blessing. Every book, every essay, every speech, all have their own process, their own discovery, their own expression of my creative self. Each one is different, and each one takes some time to tell me how it’s going to be written. This thing seems to be easier and more fluid than I expected it would be, and the words came very easily this morning.

I expect that I’m going to rewrite and reject a lot of what I’m doing today, but HOLY SHIT does it feel good to be doing it. I haven’t been a capital-w Writer for a long, long time, and though the Writer Outfit is a little wrinkled and musty, it still fits.

i am grateful

I don’t fall asleep easily. I never have. For much of my adult life, I actually dreaded going to sleep, because I had panic attacks every night that woke me up in absolute terror. (Once I figured out why they were happening, they stopped. It only took 45 years. Go me.)

It’s tough to fall asleep for me, because that’s when my anxiety does its most aggressive work expressing itself. Before I even hit the pillow, my brain is replaying everything I’m pretty sure I did wrong that day, taking occasional breaks to worry about, well, everything. My brain will work itself up so much it actually makes my heart speed up. When I’m supposed to be relaxing.

It’s not great, Dan.

But I started doing something that’s been incredibly helpful, and I thought I’d share it.

Every night as I’m getting ready for bed, I focus on a list of things for which I am grateful. I call it “doing my gratitudes”. I just start somewhere, like “I am grateful that I am going to sleep in a warm, safe bed. I am grateful that I get to share this bed with Anne. I am grateful I have enough food.” Stuff like that. I remind myself that there is so much that is good in my life, and by thinking about those things, recognizing those things, and making space to feel grateful for them, I do not give my anxiety an opportunity to grab hold of anything and go to work on me.

Sometimes, it starts with silly stuff like “I’m grateful I got a shutout in NHL20” or “I’m grateful we have more LaCroix than we can drink in a day” and then I quickly get to “I am grateful I can afford a PS4 and NHL20. I am grateful that I have the dexterity required to play video games. I am grateful we can afford more LaCroix than we can drink in a day” and so on.

There’s no right or wrong way to do this. If you’re anxiety prone like I am, you may lock up trying to do your gratitudes the right way. Tell your anxiety I said, “Go fuck yourself. There’s no right or wrong way to be sincerely grateful. You just are grateful, and that’s enough.”

I’ve been doing this for months now. Maybe it’s a year or so? I don’t know. What even is time these days and how is it Thursday when it was literally just Friday yesterday that doesn’t even make sense.

You don’t have to tell anyone you’re doing this, and it’s not a contest to see who is the most grateful. It’s just a way to focus on the good things in this world that are worth fightin’ for, Mister Frodo, and to remember that even though everything is terrible, there are still bright lights shining in all this darkness.

Those bright lights are so important right now, whether they are stadium lights turning night into day, or pinpricks that barely allow candlelight through black velvet. Spending time in gratitude makes it easier for me to find the light, and remember that it is there, even when I can’t see it.

I’ve found that, even when I’m having a rough day, deliberately switching my brain into gratitude is my escape hatch. Maybe it’ll work for you, or at least help you find yours.

Exciting and New

When I was … 22 or so, I bought my first house (very young, too young, to be a homeowner, but that’s a whole other story for another time).

It was a small house, built in the 30s. I bought it from the man who built it, which was really cool.

I didn’t know how to decorate my house, because I shouldn’t have even owned a house. I should have been in an apartment somewhere. Again, another story for another time. I decorated it the way a child decorates his dorm room, because that’s about how mature I was.

Anyway, I was at Hollywood Book and Poster or some shop like that, and they were selling cast photos from pretty much every television show that had existed to that point, so I bought a bunch of pictures of the cast from The Love Boat, and I put them in frames all over my house, like they were my family.

Not a lot of people noticed, or got the joke, but this girl I was dating at the time got the joke, appreciated the joke, and has been married to me for twenty years.

“Host” is a fantastic horror movie.

A few days ago, my friend, Bonnie, recommended a movie to me that she’d seen on Shudder.

It’s called Host:

Six friends get together during lockdown for their weekly zoom call. It’s Haley’s turn to organise an activity and instead of a quiz, she’s arranged for a Medium to conduct a séance. Bored and feeling mischievous, [I removed something here that’s kind of a spoiler. It’s better to discover this in the narrative]. The friends begin noticing strange occurrences in their homes as the evil presence begins to make itself known, and they soon realise that they might not survive the night. A SHUDDER ORIGINAL.

I haven’t been legit scared by a horror movie in YEARS, but Host really nailed it. It’s creepy, unsettling, genuinely scary, and BRILLIANT. I watched it alone in my gameroom after Anne had gone to sleep, and by the end, I was looking at every shadow in the room.

This is the first thing I’ve seen that was made post-Coronavirus, the first thing that is set in the fucked up world we’re trapped in right now. The filmmakers just fucking NAILED it. It’s so good, I’m not afraid of overselling it.

It’s only 56 minutes long, and every minute is just perfect. I love this movie, and I can’t recommend it enough.