Wil Wheaton's Blog, page 30

i got better

Thanks for all your kind thoughts and empathy about my damn panic attacks. It really means a lot to me, and it makes me feel like less of a weird alien who is doing his best human impression.

Since I shared my shitty night terror experiences, things have gotten significantly better. A lot of you recommended looking into CBD, and because California is a state that ended cannabis prohibition (get with the program, rest of America), I was able to talk with my doctor about using it for my anxiety and insomnia. He recommended that I give it a try, and it’s made all the difference for me. I put a dropperful of this tincture under my tongue every morning, and … it just works. I don’t feel intoxicated or weird or anything. I just feel calm and not anxious. In just four days, I went from having nightmares every night, waking up every couple of hours with a panic attack, and living every waking moment surrounded by a swarm of anxiety bees, to sleeping soundly and all the way through the night, and feeling like a regular person who isn’t terrified and worried and afraid all the time. It really is a miracle, and it’s going to be a significant challenge for me to not become one of those obnoxious evangelists about it. Blaze it bro you can make rope out of it man!

Because I was able to get the constant fear and anxiety under control, I was able to look back on things as objectively as possible, and see what the triggers for the latest round of Mental Health Funtimes were. I’m not ready to share those publicly, but I am fairly certain that the CBD got my shit under control enough to allow me the insights I needed, and I was able to confront what was causing the fear and anxiety that was controlling me. I’m not sure that I’m like 100% back to normal (for my personal values of normal) but I feel like a person again. In fact, I told Anne that I felt so good day before yesterday, I wasn’t sure if it was genuinely feeling great, or if it was just the absence of that terrible anxiety and worry that had been engulfing me. I guess the end result is what really matters, and the end result has been really good.

Part of that end result? Oh, let me show you the most recent entry in my daily writing word count blog thing:

840 words (70782 total) on the rewrite of All We Ever Wanted Was Everything.

And that is a completed first rewrite. I thought for sure I would have to do massive rewriting in the last 10K words, because I wrote them all in a single day, but they really (surprisingly) hold up!

I’m going to send my manuscript to a few close, trusted friends for feedback, so I can get fresh eyes and perspectives on the story. Once I have that information, I’ll be able to do a second rewrite, and then I think it’ll be time to give it to my editor and start making plans to publish it.

You guys. I totally finished the rewrite! It felt so good and so rewarding. And the coolest thing, ever, is that I don’t worry that it’s terrible. I worry that it isn’t long enough. THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID HEYOOO.

I’m sharing it with some early readers, and when they get their feedback to me, I’ll do another pass based on what they tell me. Then it goes to my editor for the Red Pen of Doom.

I haven’t decided if I’m going to shop it, yet. I think that it’s a solid story that readers will relate to, so I think it’ll be a reasonably easy pitch, but after the less than awesome experience I had with Just A Geek, I am very concerned that I won’t find the right publisher for it.

panic attacks suck

This is a reprint and expansion of today’s word count entry on my tumblr thing.

I had panic attacks all night long, last night. Each time I fell asleep, I woke up what felt like minutes later, in absolute terror. Like, imagine that you’re on an airplane and everything seems fine, and then it suddenly drops like 1000 feet. You know how you think you’d feel? The rush of adrenaline, the certainty that you were about to die, the helplessness to do anything about it … that’s how I felt all night long (all night, yeah).

I recall four specific times this happened, because each one had some different physical sensation when I woke up. There was the hot tingling in my arms and legs, there was the sense that I was not quite awake, but awake enough to know that the terror was about to hit, and then struggling in vain to prevent it, this cold wave that started in my chest and spread out all over my whole body like ripples in a pond, and the time my heart was beating so hard, I thought I was having a heart attack. Oh, and each time I woke up, I didn’t know where I was. Once, I didn’t know who I was. So I guess that’s five times I can recall, but I know it happened more than that because I didn’t get any meaningful rest. Also, a lot of the neurochemicals that I need to function are only created in my brain when I’m sleeping, so my dumb brain, which is already sort of challenged to give me the juice I need to exist, didn’t get to do its thing. That’s been really great.

I’m lucky that I didn’t have anywhere to be today, so when I finally fell to sleep for more than a few minutes at a time, around 6am after my dog asked to go outside, I slept until almost 11. I can function on five hours of sleep, but I can’t function on five hours of sleep after eight hours of intense, adrenaline-draining night terrors.

So this is a long way of saying that I really wanted to work on my rewrite today, but I am mentally exhausted the way I would be physically exhausted if I’d been forced to walk on a treadmill for hours at a time.

I honestly don’t know what to do about this. I’ve had a sleep study done, and I don’t have sleep apnea. I’ve changed my meds more than once, hoping to find one that works for my depression and anxiety when I’m awake, and also when I’m asleep, but there doesn’t seem to be a correlation between these panic attacks and one med or another. I’ve tracked my food (and I don’t drink any more, but it was nights like last night that, until I quit two years ago, drove me to drink so much that I wasn’t capable of waking up), I’ve tried meditation. I’ve tried tons of exercise. I’ve tried no exercise. I’ve tried every bullshit herbal tea pseudo science hokum whatever (and of course none of those things work because they are bullshit, but … desperate people and such). Nothing works, and these panic attacks are the most terrifying and frustrating and upsetting things that just show up without warning, and then just as suddenly go away. I really wish there was something I could do to make them stop, or at least to understand what causes them, so I could get to work on getting my sleeping life back from them.

And because it wasn’t bad enough overnight, all day today, I’ve been anxious and afraid, with a generous helping of existential dread thrown in, because fuck me, right. Go back to imagining that you’re on a plane. Now imagine that the plane is in terrible turbulence, bouncing around, shaking side to side, with a violence that makes you worry that the plane will be torn apart in midair. That’s how I’ve felt all day, like I’m in a swarm of bees. It’s totally irrational, and I know that it’s all in my head and isn’t real, but when the part of my body that is responsible for how I perceive the world and how I exist in it is fucked up, it’s challenging to separate what’s real from what’s just in my head. I’m super grateful that I’ve done so much work with so many licensed professionals over the years, so I can do my best to manage this … because I can assure you that while this is a challenge for me now, it would be close to impossible to deal with if I didn’t have that professional help (ask for and use professional help if you deal with any of the mental health issues I deal with, gang. Please. Trust me on this.)

All of these things go together to ruin my ability to be creative, which is a giant bummer, because I really love being creative. I’m having the time of my life rewriting this manuscript, and I’m so excited to finish this pass so I can give it to some early readers for their feedback. I hope that tonight goes better than last night, so that I can work on it tomorrow. And I just love it that I am having such a good time with this draft, and it’s so satisfying to work on, that I want to stay at my desk and work on the weekend.

this is a post about sweaters (no, not those sweaters)

It’s been a strange couple of weeks, here in Castle Wheaton. Anne was gone for six days, came home for literally twenty-two minutes and left again for another day. When she got home, we saw each other for about an hour, and then I had to go to sleep early to wake up early to fly across the country for two days. When I got back, she had to leave again for Piggy and Pug promotion, and it wasn’t until last night that we finally had an opportunity to make dinner together and catch up on all the stuff we did while we were gone.

“I have been feeling this strong compulsion to clean stuff up,” I told her while we were finishing dinner. “I wonder if it’s some kind of Spring Cleaning impulse that I’ve never noticed before.”

“More like never had before,” she reminded me.

“Okay, that’s fair,” I said.

We ate the empanadas we’d made. They were better than I expected.

“Hey, speaking of that,” she said, “will you come into our bedroom with me for a minute?”

Heckyeahsexytimesdottumblrdotcom I thought. “Sure,” I said.

I have this big pile of sweaters and hoodies at the foot of our bed. I keep meaning to put them away, but my closet is a shitshow and the shelves are a disaster. I have a box on the top shelf where most of my sweaters and scarves live when we aren’t having our three to five weeks of winter in Los Angeles. It is currently … not optimal.

“What’s going on with …” she indicated with her hand, sort of twirling it around like Vanna White, but with a little more distaste, “… this … stuff. Here.”

“Oh, those are all my dumb sweaters. I already put a bunch of them away, and I just need to find some room in the closet to put the rest of them away.”

“Isn’t that what your box is for?”

“Yes, but it’s already full. I must have added sweaters to my life this winter, and now I’m past the critical mass for sweaters.” I shrugged. “But don’t worry, I’m going to put them away tomorrow. I just need to clean up that shelf and get it more organized.”

“You’re going to put them in the bin that’s already full?”

“No, I’m going to put them in the spot next to the box, which is currently a jumble of kilts and horsemasks.”

She looked at me with a mixture of amusement and disbelief.

“…a jumble … of …” she was unable to finish the thought.

“This is who you married,” I said. “You did this on purpose.”

 

an incomplete collection of #wordmetrics from my recent rewrites

Before I get into this post, I want to thank everyone who has sent me feedback about .

I never know how these things are going to go over, and I never know if what I had in my head and my heart when I wrote a thing will translate into something similar in the audience. I am always anxious about being misunderstood, even when I’m speaking on a topic I know a lot about. Yay for anxiety! It’s super effective!

It means so much to me to know that I’m helping people. I’ve heard from a ton of parents who didn’t know their kids were living with anxiety, but after reading (or hearing) my stories about my experiences, they can see that their kids need the help that I didn’t get. All I want to do with my time on this Earth is make things that matter, and use the privilege and success I have to help make other people’s lives better. It’s so wonderful to know that this speech I gave (and the essay it is when it’s written) is making a positive difference in the world.

Okay, on to what this post is about: Writing!

Well, rewriting, specifically.

I’ve been working on the rewrite of my novel, which is currently titled All We Ever Wanted Was Everything. It’s a semi-autobiographical work of fiction, about a twelve year-old, coming of age in 1983. The protagonist is a kid who wants to be a writer, and I have no idea where that inspiration came from.

So every time I finish work, I make a post on my Tumblr thingy with the word count and some thoughts about what I did that session. It’s kind of how I cycle the airlock when I come back inside from the deep space solitude of writing all day. It feels good to write it, and I look forward to it every day. It’s like my reward for doing the work, in a way, and it’s nice to have this little diary of the process that I can look back on, to see my progress in more detail that just a word count. I know that some of you who read my blog want to know what’s going on in my creative life, and what I’m working on, so I thought I’d share some of the recent entries.

Each bolded part, and the words that follow it until the nifty little horizontal line, represents one day’s work.

6595 words (61486 total) on All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

…and that is a completed first draft of my first novel.

21 pages of rewrites on All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

Mostly going over the first part of the story now, seeing where I was clearing my throat, figuring out how I can smooth it out and lay the foundation that the rest of the story will build upon, and discovering that a lot of it holds up better than I expected it would, a year after I wrote it.

I made a few small cuts, added some stuff here and there and smoothed out a few places where I was clear in my head but not on the page. I can tell that I’m going to have to go over this part again, after I’ve done the real heavy lifting in the later chapters, and I may even wait until it goes to a couple of first readers to hear their feedback on this part, because I’m a little too close to it.

Twenty-one pages doesn’t feel like a lot, but it’s about 10%, which feels like a solid start to the rewriting process.

Rewrote about 4000 words on All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

It works out to just about ten pages, and it overlaps with the twenty-one I already worked on, but I needed to go back and make this as good as it can be, because it’s introducing the reader to the world and the characters.

I feel good about what I wrote today. I felt good enough to print it out and share it with Anne, which I never do. She’s reading it right now.

I’m probably going to go over this again after I get beta reader feedback, but I’m happy enough with where it is now (and it’s helped me focus on bringing out the narrative voice I eventually found over 61000 words) to save it and keep moving forward.

I really love this process. It’s incredibly rewarding and satisfying.

1400ish words (62439 total) on the Rewrite of All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

I worked for about seven hours, and I thought I was making a lot of cuts today, but it turns out that I was adding more than I took away.

I’m going to come back to this section one more time, because it’s not quite there, yet, but it’s closer than it was before I started, and that’s the point of the work right now.

11 pages and about 1000 words on the All We Ever Wanted Was Everything rewrite

I got to the first part of the existing draft that made me go, “Oh this part is awful. What was I thinking?”

It turns out that I was thinking that I needed that part (about half a page) to get from the part that preceded it to the part that followed it, so I cut it and wrote something new to connect them.

There’s a big scene that I’m on the fence about. I stared at it for an hour, starting and stopping and undoing and redoing and finally deciding to just walk away from right now. I’ll come back and do some more work on the second rewrite pass, I think.

I have come to realize that this first rewrite isn’t about getting the book to its final form; this is about getting the manuscript from what I thought it was to what it became, so the tone and pacing all work out in a logical way. It’s about cutting out the things that I thought would lead into stuff later on that never materialized, and adding new stuff in places where I decided I wanted to pay something off.

I have a lot of work ahead of me, but I’m enjoying the process that I’m in right now, even when it feels like I’m spinning my wheels in some mud.

About 10 pages and 1400 new words on the rewrite of All We Ever Wanted Was Everything.

Right now, the manuscript is sitting at  64222 words. At one point today, it was over 65000, so I know that I’m doing a lot of shaping and scraping and cutting and other things that you do with clay but can be applied to writing if you squint.

This is really starting to come together, and I’m making a good deal of progress turning what I thought I was writing when I started into what I figured out I was writing when I finished. And I’m still enjoying the process, which I keep mentioning so I can remember when I inevitably decide that this is all terrible and I never should have started it in the first place.

This is the third day in a row that I’ve wanted to keep working, but I’ve sort of run out of creative focus and energy after five or so hours. That seems like a very short work day, and maybe someday I’ll stop feeling like I’m slacking off when I do what is a full day of work for me.

Four pages and a couple hundred words on the rewrite of All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

I had a lot of actor-y work to do today, so I didn’t have the time or creative focus to do much writing. I didn’t accomplish all that much, but I did make a lot of notes about what I want to do tomorrow when I have the day to focus and do the work I want to do.

Imagine that: working on a Saturday, on purpose, because you’re so excited about the work you’re going to do.

A few hundred words added and cut from All We Ever Wanted Was Everything (current count: 64896 words).

I’m at a point in the manuscript where I felt really confident on the first draft, so I’m not making a ton of changes, just cleaning up things where I find repetitions and expanding a little bit, here and there, when I find a spot that can use a little more detail.

I spent about four hours with the manuscript today, reading most of it aloud so I can literally hear it. It’s tiring work, but it’s deeply satisfying and a lot of fun. I’d keep going, but I know that I’m at a point where I’ll get diminishing returns and a lot of stuff that just has to be rewritten tomorrow. So even though I feel like a slacker for not doing more work, I’m going to call it for the day and quit while I’m ahead.

1464 words (66363 total) on the rewrite of All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

For those of you who are new to my Tumblr thing: this is a coming of age story, set in 1983. It’s semi-autobiographical, but a work of fiction. I started it as a blog post, it grew into a short story, then a novella, and I eventually stopped fighting it and let it become a novel.

Today, I cut and massaged a few hundred words, and then added a scene that I’m probably going to cut, but I needed to write it for reasons that I don’t fully understand, but know to be true. Writing is weird like that for me, this intersection of technical work and intangible inspiration that somehow comes together to make a story happen. It isn’t always easy going, and at least once in every draft, I feel like I’m a complete fraud and it’s all terrible, and what was I ever thinking trying to tell this story … but I’ve learned that when that happens, it’s just part of the process. I don’t listen to those voices of doubt and nonconstructive criticism, and I just keep on going so I can fix it later.

Today was a little tough, because this scene came out of nowhere and demanded to be written, and it wasn’t what I was planning to do with my time. But it was satisfying to work on and even if I do end up cutting it, I know that it served some purpose that will reveal itself to me eventually.

I wish I had more creative energy and focus to keep going, but I know it’s time to stop, so I’m calling it a day.

I just realized that I feel like this every day, and if I’m going to be a full time storyteller, I guess that’s a good thing.

607 words (66970 total) on the rewrite of All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

I got through about 30 pages today, and if my math is correct, I’m a little over 60% through this draft.

I was very happy when I first wrote the section I went through today, and I was pleasantly surprised to feel like it held up. I’d even forgotten parts of it, so it was like reading something for the first time (that I hadn’t even written).

The last couple of pages feel kind of jarring, which I think is okay because it’s at that dramatic point in the story, but I’m not entirely sure it works and flows together as well as it can. I’ll have to get feedback from early readers on that, and it’ll be pretty easy to fix if a consensus emerges.

I had this lovely moment of tremendous satisfaction while I was working today, when I felt like I loved this story a lot, felt good about the work I’d done to create it, and like it didn’t suck. I felt … I guess I felt proud of myself, which is not a thing I usually feel (that’s not false humility, I just do my best to stay as neutral and close to even on the scale of delighted to despondent). I felt legit excited for other people to read this book, which is a welcome respite from the paralyzing fear that nobody will like this and I’m terrible at everything I try to do.

As usual, I really want to keep working, but I’m going to roll my document back about ten pages and pick it up tomorrow, overlapping on where I worked and finished today, just in case I have better perspective when I haven’t been working on it for hours.

912 words (67882 total) on the rewrite of All We Ever Wanted Was Everything.

As I suspected at the end of the day yesterday, I went back over a lot of what I did yesterday, and did a lot of work around it. I made some cuts, expanded some scenes, and rewrote some stuff even more than I had yesterday, to bring it in line with the character arcs that weren’t ultimately defined until I finished the entire first draft.

I’m at a point in the narrative where there’s a lot of conflict, some of it pretty intense, and it’s not my favorite thing to write. The part of me that’s been an actor my whole life comes out when I’m writing, and I emotionally share in the experiences of the characters. I don’t just hear their dialog as I’m writing it; I feel their dialog as they say it.

Maybe this is all booga booga and indulgent, but it’s the way I work and always have. I haven’t asked other writers if they have a similar experience when they’re working, and I think I will, so I know how many standard deviations away from normal writers I am on this one.

If I’m doing pages, I stayed on the same six-ish pages all day today, and I’ll probably stay on the sixth page for much of the next time I work on this, because I know that particular, conflict-y, bit of the story needs me to work on it more, when I’m not feeling all worn out by it.

I wrote that yesterday. I thought I’d write today, but I have an early flight tomorrow morning and I ended up spending all of today getting ready for the trip.

But if you’ve gotten this far, you are probably interested in this ask from my ask thingy:

steellily asked 

When you’re in your editing phase, how do you quantify your progress? When writing initially it’s easy to say, “today I wrote 1,000 words,” but when editing I’m struggling to feel like I’ve accomplished anything if I’m not generating new words. Which, I’m sure you know isn’t a great way to mark editing progress. How are you measuring your progress right now?

Well just doing the work is progress, and you can always quantify things by pages, but the risk there is that you start skimming pages and not doing the deep work that you may need to do, because it doesn’t feel as productive to really work out something over three pages as it does to get twenty pages behind you.

More specifically to your question: every day and every project is different, but my progress on rewrites is usually counted in pages done and hours worked. But because I started doing daily words here when I was on my first draft, I’ve kept the same format. It’s sort of like punching out at the end of the day for me, and I like the ritual.

If I counted today in pages, I made it through about eight pages, and I added about two and a half, maybe almost three. I worked for about four hours before I ran out of gas (because I spent three hours before I got started doing boring Adulting things, like going to the store, taking care of my dogs, answering emails, approving comments on my blog, etc.)

In LibreOffice, I’m on page 68 of 139, so I have a ways to go before I finish the first rewrite, and can hand it off to some beta readers for feedback before I go at it again.

I suspect this post won’t get a ton of comments, because it’s one of those things that people tend to skip over. But if you got all the way to the end, you’re probably one of the people who cares about this process. If you have questions about my writing process, please ask them. I’ll do my best to answer them all over the coming days.

My name is Wil Wheaton. I live with chronic Depression, and I am not ashamed.

I’m about to go speak to NAMI Ohio’s statewide conference, Fulfilling the Promise. These are the remarks I prepared for my speech.

Before I begin, I want to warn you that this talk touches on many triggering subjects, including self-harm and suicide. I also want you to know that I’m speaking from my personal experience, and that if you or someone you know may be living with mental illness, please talk to a licensed and qualified medical professional, because I am not a doctor.

Okay, let’s do this.

Hi, I’m Wil Wheaton. I’m 45 years-old, I have a wonderful wife, two adult children who make me proud every day, and a daughter in-law who I love like she’s my own child. I work on the most popular comedy series in the world, I’ve been a New York Times Number One Bestselling Audiobook narrator, I have run out of space in my office for the awards I’ve received for my work, and as a white, heterosexual, cisgender man in America, I live life on the lowest difficulty setting – with the Celebrity cheat enabled.

My life is, by every objective measurement, very very good.

And in spite of all of that, I struggle every day with my self esteem, my self worth, and my value not only as an actor and writer, but as a human being.

That’s because I live with Depression and Anxiety, the tag team champions of the World Wrestling With Mental Illness Federation.

And I’m not ashamed to stand here, in front of six hundred people in this room, and millions more online, and proudly say that I live with mental illness, and that’s okay. I say “with” because even though my mental illness tries its best, it doesn’t control me, it doesn’t define me, and I refuse to be stigmatized by it.

So. My name is Wil Wheaton, and I have Chronic Depression.

It took me over thirty years to be able to say those ten words, and I suffered for most of them as a result. I suffered because though we in America have done a lot to help people who live with mental illness, we have not done nearly enough to make it okay for our fellow travelers on the wonky brain express to reach out and accept that help.

I’m here today to talk with you about working to end the stigma and prejudice that surrounds mental illness in America, and as part of that, I want to share my story with you.

When I was a little kid, probably seven or eight years old, I started having panic attacks. Back then, we didn’t know that’s what they were, and because they usually happened when I was asleep, the adults in my life just thought I had nightmares. Well, I did have nightmares, but they were so much worse than just bad dreams. Night after night, I’d wake up in absolute terror, and night after night, I’d drag my blankets off my bed, to go to sleep on the floor in my sister’s bedroom, because I was so afraid to be alone.

There were occasional stretches of relief, sometimes for months at a time, and during those months, I felt like what I considered to be a normal kid, but the panic attacks always came back, and each time they came back, they seemed worse than before.

When I was around twelve or thirteen, my anxiety began to express itself in all sorts of delightful ways.

I worried about everything. I was tired all the time, and irritable most of the time. I had no confidence and terrible self-esteem. I felt like I couldn’t trust anyone who wanted to be close to me, because I was convinced that I was stupid and worthless and the only reason anyone would want to be my friend was to take advantage of my fame.

This is important context. When I was thirteen, I was in an internationally-beloved film called Stand by Me, and I was famous. Like, really famous, like, can’t-go-to-the-mall-with-my-friends-without-getting-mobbed famous, and that meant that all of my actions were scrutinized by my parents, my peers, my fans, and the press. All the weird, anxious feelings I had all the time? I’d been raised to believe that they were shameful. That they reflected poorly on my parents and my family. That they should be crammed down deep inside me, shared with nobody, and kept secret.

My panic attacks happened daily, and not just when I was asleep. When I tried to reach out to the adults in my life for help, they didn’t take me seriously. When I was on the set of a tv show or commercial, and I was having a hard time breathing because I was so anxious about making a mistake and getting fired? The directors and producers complained to my parents that I was being difficult to work with. When I was so uncomfortable with my haircut or my crooked teeth and didn’t want to pose for teen magazine photos, the publicists told me that I was being ungrateful and trying to sabotage my success. When I couldn’t remember my lines, because I was so anxious about things I can’t even remember now, directors would accuse me of being unprofessional and unprepared. And that’s when my anxiety turned into depression.

(I’m going to take a moment for myself right now, and I’m going to tear a hole in the fabric of spacetime and I’m going to tell all those adults from the past: give this kid a break. He’s scared. He’s confused. He is doing the best he can, and if you all could stop seeing him as a way to put money into your pockets, maybe you could see that he’s suffering and needs help.)

I was miserable a lot of the time, and it didn’t make any sense. I was living a childhood dream, working on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and getting paid to do what I loved. I had all the video games and board games I ever wanted, and did I mention that I was famous?

I struggled to reconcile the facts of my life with the reality of my existence. I knew something was wrong with me, but I didn’t know what. And because I didn’t know what, I didn’t know how to ask for help.

I wish I had known that I had a mental illness that could be treated! I wish I had known that that the way I felt wasn’t normal and it wasn’t necessary. I wish I had known that I didn’t deserve to feel bad, all the time.

And I didn’t know those things, because Mental Illness was something my family didn’t talk about, and when they did, they talked about it like it was something that happened to someone else, and that it was something they should be ashamed of, because it was a result of something they did. This prejudice existed in my family in spite of the ample incidence of mental illness that ran rampant through my DNA, featuring successful and unsuccessful suicide attempts by my relations, more than one case of bipolar disorder, clinical depression everywhere, and, because of self-medication, so much alcoholism, it was actually notable when someone didn’t have a drinking problem.

Now, I don’t blame my parents for how they addressed – or more accurately didn’t address – my mental illness, because I genuinely believe they were blind to the symptoms I was exhibiting. They grew up and raised me in the world I’ve spent the last decade of my life trying to change. They lived in a world where mental illness was equated with weakness, and shame, and as a result, I suffered until I was in my thirties.

And it’s not like I never reached out for help. I did! I just didn’t know what questions to ask, and the adults I was close to didn’t know what answers to give.

I clearly remember being twenty-two, living in my own house, waking up from a panic attack that was so terrifying just writing about it for this talk gave me so much anxiety I almost cut this section from my speech. It was the middle of the night, and I drove across town, to my parents’ house, to sleep on the floor of my sister’s bedroom again, because at least that’s where I felt safe. The next morning, I tearfully asked my mom what was wrong with me. She knew that many of my blood relatives had mental illness, but she couldn’t or wouldn’t connect the dots. “You’re just realizing that the world is a scary place,” she said.

Yeah, no kidding. The world terrifies me every night of my life and I don’t know why or how to stop it.

Again, I don’t blame her and neither should you. She really was doing the best that she could for me, but stigma and the shame is inspires are powerful things.

I want to be very clear on this: Mom, I know you’re going to read this or hear this and I know it’s going to make you upset. I want you to know that I love you, and I know that you did the very best you could. I’m telling my story, though, so someone else’s mom can see the things you didn’t, through no fault of your own.

Through my twenties, I continued to suffer, and not just from nightmares and panic attacks. I began to develop obsessive behaviors that I’ve never talked about in public until right now. Here’s a very incomplete list: I began to worry that the things I did would affect the world around me in totally irrational ways. I would hold my breath underneath bridges when I was driving, because if I didn’t, maybe I’d crash my car. I would tap the side of an airplane with my hand while I was boarding, and tell it to take care of me when I flew places for work, because I was convinced that if I didn’t, the plane would crash. Every single time I said goodbye to someone I cared about, my brain would play out in vivid detail how I would remember this as the last time I saw them. Talking about those memories, even without getting into specifics, is challenging. It’s painful to recall, but I’m not ashamed, because all those thoughts – which I thankfully don’t have any more, thanks to medical science and therapy – were not my fault any more than the allergies that clog my sinuses when the trees in my neighborhood start doin’ it every spring are my fault. It’s just part of who I am. It’s part of how my brain is wired, and because I know that, I can medically treat it, instead of being a victim of it.

One of the primary reasons I speak out about my mental illness, is so that I can make the difference in someone’s life that I wish had been made in mine when I was young, because not only did I have no idea what Depression even was until I was in my twenties, once I was pretty sure that I had it, I suffered with it for another fifteen years, because I was ashamed, I was embarrassed, and I was afraid.

So I am here today to tell anyone who can hear me: if you suspect that you have a mental illness, there is no reason to be ashamed, or embarrassed, and most importantly, you do not need to be afraid. You do not need to suffer. There is nothing noble in suffering, and there is nothing shameful or weak in asking for help. This may seem really obvious to a lot of you, but it wasn’t for me, and I’m a pretty smart guy, so I’m going to say it anyway: There is no reason to feel embarrassed when you reach out to a professional for help, because the person you are reaching out to is someone who has literally dedicated their life to helping people like us live, instead of merely exist.

That difference, between existing and living, is something I want to focus on for a minute: before I got help for my anxiety and depression, I didn’t truly live my life. I wanted to go do things with my friends, but my anxiety always found a way to stop me. Traffic would just be too stressful, it would tell me. It’s going to be a real hassle to get there and find parking, it would helpfully observe. And if those didn’t stop me from leaving my house, there was always the old reliable: What if…? Ah, “What if… something totally unlikely to happen actually happens? What if the plane crashes? What if I sit next to someone who freaks me out? What if they laugh at me? What if I get lost? What if I get robbed? What if I get locked out of my hotel room? What if I slip on some ice I didn’t see? What if there’s an earthquake? What if what if what if what if…

When I look back on most of my life, it breaks my heart that when my brain was unloading an endless pile of what ifs on me, it never asked, “What if I go do this thing that I want to do, and it’s … fun? What if I enjoy myself, and I’m really glad I went?”

I have to tell you a painful truth: I missed out on a lot of things, during what are supposed to be the best years of my life, because I was paralyzed by What If-ing anxiety.

All the things that people do when they are living their lives … all those experiences that make up a life, my anxiety got in between me and doing them. So I wasn’t living. I was just existing.

And through it all, I never stopped to ask myself if this was normal, or healthy, or even if it was my fault. I just knew that I was nervous about stuff, and I worried a lot. For my entire childhood, my mom told me that I was a worry wart, and my dad said I was overly dramatic about everything, and that’s just the way it was.

Except it didn’t have to be that way, and it took me having a full blown panic attack and a complete meltdown at Los Angeles International Airport for my wife to suggest to me that I get help.

Like I said, I had suspected for years that I was clinically depressed, but I was afraid to admit it, until the most important person in my life told me without shame or judgment that she could see that I was suffering. So I went to see a doctor, and I will never forget what he said, when I told him how afraid I was: “Please let me help you.”

I think it was then, at about 34 years-old, that I realized that Mental Illness is not weakness. It’s just an illness. I mean, it’s right there in the name “Mental ILLNESS” so it shouldn’t have been the revelation that it was, but when the part of our bodies that is responsible for how we perceive the world and ourselves is the same part of our body that is sick, it can be difficult to find objectivity or perspective.

So I let my doctor help me. I started a low dose of an antidepressant, and I waited to see if anything was going to change.

And boy did it.

My wife and I were having a walk in our neighborhood and I realized that it was just a really beautiful day – it was warm with just a little bit of a breeze, the birds sounded really beautiful, the flowers smelled really great and my wife’s hand felt really good in mine.

And as we were walking I just started to cry and she asked me, “what’s wrong?”

I said “I just realized that I don’t feel bad and I just realized that I’m not existing, I’m living.”

At that moment, I realized that I had lived my life in a room that was so loud, all I could do every day was deal with how loud it was. But with the help of my wife, my doctor, and medical science, I found a doorway out of that room.

I had taken that walk with my wife almost every day for nearly ten years, before I ever noticed the birds or the flowers, or how loved I felt when I noticed that her hand was holding mine. Ten years – all of my twenties – that I can never get back. Ten years of suffering and feeling weak and worthless and afraid all the time, because of the stigma that surrounds mental illness.

I’m not religious, but I can still say Thank God for Anne Wheaton. Thank God for her love and support. Thank God that my wife saw that I was hurting, and thank God she didn’t believe the lie that Depression is weakness, or something to be ashamed of. Thank God for Anne, because if she hadn’t had the strength to encourage me to seek professional help, I don’t know how much longer I would have been able to even exist, to say nothing of truly living.

I started talking in public about my mental illness in 2012, and ever since then, people reach out to me online every day, and they ask me about living with depression and anxiety. They share their stories, and ask me how I get through a bad day, or a bad week.

Here’s one of the things I tell them:

One of the many delightful things about having Depression and Anxiety is occasionally and unexpectedly feeling like the whole goddamn world is a heavy lead blanket, like that thing they put on your chest at the dentist when you get x-rays, and it’s been dropped around your entire existence without your consent.

Physically, it weighs heavier on me in some places than it does in others. I feel it tugging at the corners of my eyes, and pressing down on the center of my chest. When it’s really bad, it can feel like one of those dreams where you try to move, but every step and every motion feels like you’re struggling to move through something heavy and viscous. Emotionally, it covers me completely, separating me from my motivation, my focus, and everything that brings me joy in my life.

When it drops that lead apron over us, we have to remind ourselves that one of the things Depression does, to keep itself strong and in charge, is tell us lies, like: I am the worst at everything. Nobody really likes me. I don’t deserve to be happy. This will never end. And so on and so on. We can know, in our rational minds, that this is a giant bunch of bullshit (and we can look at all these times in our lives when were WERE good at a thing, when we genuinely felt happy, when we felt awful but got through it, etc.) but in the moment, it can be a serious challenge to wait for Depression to lift the roadblock that’s keeping us from moving those facts from our rational mind to our emotional selves.

And that’s the thing about Depression: we can’t force it to go away. As I’ve said, if I could just “stop feeling sad” I WOULD. (And, also, Depression isn’t just feeling sad, right? It’s a lot of things together than can manifest themselves into something that is most easily simplified into “I feel sad.”)

So another step in our self care is to be gentle with ourselves. Depression is beating up on us already, and we don’t need to help it out. Give yourself permission to acknowledge that you’re feeling terrible (or bad, or whatever it is you are feeling), and then do a little thing, just one single thing, that you probably don’t feel like doing, and I PROMISE you it will help. Some of those things are:

Take a shower.

Eat a nutritious meal.

Take a walk outside (even if it’s literally to the corner and back).

Do something – throw a ball, play tug of war, give belly rubs – with a dog. Just about any activity with my dogs, even if it’s just a snuggle on the couch for a few minutes, helps me.

Do five minutes of yoga stretching.

Listen to a guided meditation and follow along as best as you can.

Finally, please trust me and know that this shitty, awful, overwhelming, terrible way you feel IS NOT FOREVER. It will get better. It always gets better. You are not alone in this fight, and you are OK.

Right now, there is a child somewhere who has the same panic attacks I had, and their parents aren’t getting them help, because they believe it reflects poorly on their parenting to have a child with mental illness. Right now, there is a teenager who is contemplating self harm, because they don’t know how to reach out and ask for help. Right now, there are too many people struggling just to get to the end of the day, because they can’t afford the help that a lot of us can’t live without. But there are also people everywhere who are picking up the phone and making an appointment. There are parents who have learned that mental illness is no different than physical illness, and they’re helping their children get better. There are adults who, like me, were terrified that antidepressant medication would make them a different person, and they’re hearing the birds sing for the first time, because they have finally found their way out of the dark room.

I spent the first thirty years of my life trapped in that dark, loud room, and I know how hopeless and suffocating it feels to be in there, so I do everything I can to help others find their way out. I do that by telling my story, so that my privilege and success does more than enrich my own life. I can live by example for someone else the way Jenny Lawson lives by example for me.

But I want to leave you today with some suggestions for things that we can all do, even if you’re not Internet Famous like I am, to help end the stigma of mental illness, so that nobody has to merely exist, when they could be living.

We can start by demanding that our elected officials fully fund mental health programs. No person anywhere, especially here in the richest country in the world, should live in the shadows or suffer alone, because they can’t afford treatment. We have all the money in the world for weapons and corporate tax cuts, so I know that we can afford to prioritize not just health care in general, but mental health care, specifically.

And until our elected officials get their acts together, we can support organizations like NAMI, that offer low and no-cost assistance to anyone who asks for it. We can support organizations like Project UROK, that work tirelessly to end stigmatization and remind us that we are sick, not weak.

We can remember, and we can remind each other, that there is no finish line when it comes to mental illness. It’s a journey, and sometimes we can see the path we’re on all the way to the horizon, while other times we can’t even see five feet in front of us because the fog is so thick. But the path is always there, and if we can’t locate it on our own, we have loved ones and doctors and medications to help us find it again, as long as we don’t give up trying to see it.

Finally, we who live with mental illness need to talk about it, because our friends and neighbors know us and trust us. It’s one thing for me to stand here and tell you that you’re not alone in this fight, but it’s something else entirely for you to prove it. We need to share our experiences, so someone who is suffering the way I was won’t feel weird or broken or ashamed or afraid to seek treatment. So that parents don’t feel like they have failed or somehow screwed up when they see symptoms in their kids.

People tell me that I’m brave for speaking out the way I do, and while I appreciate that, I don’t necessarily agree. Firefighters are brave. Single parents who work multiple jobs to take care of their kids are brave. The Parkland students are brave. People who reach out to get help for their mental illness are brave. I’m not brave. I’m just a writer and occasional actor who wants to share his privilege and good fortune with the world, who hopes to speak out about mental health so much that one day, it will be wholly unremarkable to stand up and say fifteen words:

My name is Wil Wheaton, I live with chronic depression, and I am not ashamed.

Thank you for listening to me, and please be kind to each other.

so this happened (one in an ongoing series)

Since last week, I’ve been working on the season finale of The Big Bang Theory, and today we shot Amy and Sheldon’s wedding.

It was an incredible day, and I am still in disbelief that I got to be in multiple scenes with Kathy Bates, Laurie Matcalf, Jerry O’Connell, Brian Posehn, Lauren Lapkus, Teller, Courtney Henggeler, and this guy, who is not only one of the kindest people I’ve ever worked with, but is also from a science fiction franchise, just like me!

All of my dumb jokes aside, Mark Hamill is exactly as awesome and professional and funny as I had always hoped he would be, and he will go down in my Life Book as one of my childhood heroes who I was delighted and honored to meet (and work with OMG I GOT TO ACT WITH MARK HAMILL).

perspective and clarity, clarity and perspective.

I did a hell of a lot of work over a few days to finish the first draft of All We Ever Wanted Was Everything. I did three or four days in a row right around 2500 words, and then on the last night before Anne and I left for vacation, I did about 6900, so I could finish the draft. It comes in just over 61000 words, and once I’m done with cuts and rewrites, I think it’ll end up right around 60000.

I started the rewrite yesterday, mostly going over the first part of the story, seeing where I was clearing my throat, figuring out how I can smooth it out and lay the foundation that the rest of the story will build upon, and discovering that a lot of it holds up better than I expected it would, a year after I wrote it.

I made a few small cuts, added some stuff here and there and smoothed out a few places where I was clear in my head but not on the page. I decided this morning that I’m going to completely rewrite the first chapter, to better and more clearly define the geography of the story, and to better introduce all the characters. I’m glad I have the perspective on it that I do, now, because I can see the places where things make sense to me, but will be unclear to a reader unless I change them. I’ve spent so much time in the back third of the manuscript, this early part I’m working through now almost feels like a different book, which makes sense, because I didn’t know I was writing a novel when I started writing this novel.

So yesterday, I did twenty-one pages before I ran out of gas. Twenty-one pages doesn’t feel like a lot, but we all have to start somewhere, and I feel good about my progress.

I know I have a lot of work to do, and I’m looking forward to it. It’s going to be fun and challenging and stressful and cathartic to go back into this manuscript and polish up the parts that need it. The last bit is going to need more work than the rest, because it was all done in such a short amount of time, but I’m doing so much work on the beginning, getting so submerged in the natural current of the narrative, by the time I get to the end and do that work, it may not feel as clunky as it does right now. Does that make sense? I feel like I’m reading and rewriting someone else’s work right now, making it my own for the first time.

I look back on the last three weeks, the focus and discipline that I needed to stay on target and finish telling the story. I keep thinking that I should have just stuck with it back in 2017 when I gave up on doing anything, because of Shitler and my Depression being the worst it’s ever been since I got treatment and started taking better care of my mental health. I keep thinking that this book would be with readers right now, if I’d just kept working on it and finished it a year ago. But Anne pointed out that I needed that time away from it, so I could do the work I needed to do on myself, to be in the place I am now, so I could finish it.

She was right, and I probably (definitely) spent more time beating myself up about not writing than I actually spent writing. It seems so obvious when I look back on a year of little productivity now, with all this perspective and all this work actually done, that even when I was frustrated and not as productive as I wanted to be, I did the best that I could at that moment. I’m always telling kids to do the best they can do, and to be gentle with themselves about it, to acknowledge that what their best is will vary from day to day. I forgot to be awesome to myself, to give myself permission to accept that my best may not have been what I wanted it to be, but it was the best that I could do at that moment. For almost a year, I did the best I could do, and it wasn’t very much, because I hadn’t yet done the emotional and personal work that I needed to do so I could be more creatively productive. But once I did the work I needed to do, including some painful introspection and emotional therapy, I was able to do the work I wanted to do. And now that work is done (well, the first step is done, anyway). And I am proud of it.

Anne is away for a few days at C2E2. I had planned to spend this time I am home with just the dogs in Skyrim, but I feel so good and so excited about working on this rewrite, that instead of goofing off with my NPC friends and looking for power converters, I’m spending this time in a world that I created, in my own head, working on my own story, and then rewarding myself with some Skyrim at night when I’m done for the day.

I’m proud of myself, and I feel good about who I am, where I am right now in my life, and what I’m doing. It feels so good to be doing creative work that matters to me because I want to share it with the world

i just finished the first draft of my first novel

It’s a fictional coming of age story, told in a memoir style. I ‘ve done about 12K words in the last few days, and wrote 6900 words on it today, so I could finish it before Anne and I go on a little vacation tomorrow. I’m going to let it sit and give myself some distance from it, so I can be clear-eyed and objective when I start the rewriting process next week.

i tried turning it off and back on again.

A few months ago, the hardware in my iMac shit the bed one final time. Rather than replace it (Apple hardware is not that great, and certainly not designed to last), I decided to convert this epic Xidax gaming rig I have into my primary production machine.

It worked like a dream for a long time, and Windows 10 began to feel like a pretty decent OS, even if I missed some Mac OS UI features (hitting space to preview files, and easy keyboard screen shots were the two I missed the most.)

But about a week ago, something went wrong. Everything started slowing down like crazy, Chrome just quit working entirely, and even Firefox ran so slow, I felt like I was using a 386. So I used every bit of computer learning and troubleshooting I’ve picked up in thirty-five years of computer use, and I turned it off and back on again.

It wouldn’t start up.

So I booted from the DVD, and told it to repair the problem. That didn’t work.

So I attempted to reinstall Windows. That didn’t work.

So I formatted the drive that C: lived on, and tried to reinstall Windows. That didn’t work, and I lost a ton of media by mistake as a bonus (I have it backed up on a Seagate drive, but it’s still a pain in the ass to lose it).

I went to the Internet, and I downloaded a few Linux utility distros to check the hardware integrity on the machine. I booted from those CDs, ran their tools, and confirmed that everything was working correctly.

At this point, my lungs were aching for air.

I got super frustrated, because all the diagnostics I ran appeared to work, and every test told me that there wasn’t anything wrong. It just turns out that Windows won’t install, and it gives me the super helpful advice to check the install logs that I can’t read because when I boot from the Windows DVD, it won’t let me write to any of the mounted file systems.

So I’m moving my opinion dial from “Windows isn’t that bad” back to “Windows is awful garbage that is an affront to all good people in the world.”

Also, one kid seems to really love the Speedo Guy.

Spinning the dial was satisfying, but it didn’t give me a working OS that I could use to get my work done, so I grabbed the latest release of Debian Linux, and booted from the resulting live DVD. It felt familiar, and unlike my Windows nightmare, it Just Worked(tm). For longtime *nix users, especially the subset of us who started using Red Hat or Debian or Mandrake or whatever back in the late 90s, this reality — that Linux worked effortlessly and without any configuration hassles — will likely prove to be quite pleasing.

I wondered if there was a hardware problem that I hadn’t uncovered, maybe a failing HDD or something, and I decided that the best way to test it would be to attempt a Debian install.

About seventeen minutes later, I booted my machine from GRUB, and like a magical leprechaun, Debian just worked. I had to install a couple of drivers to get the most out of the graphics card, to get Flash and Java to go, and to update Chromium, but that was it.

I’m still annoyed with Windows and its lack of useful error messages, and I am confident that I’m not getting the most computing/processing/graphics/awesome power out of this epic machine, but I have an OS that is solid and stable, that is making it possible for me to do my work, browse the Internet, and read and send Email. There are some idiosyncrasies that I’m not crazy about, and there are a few mild frustrations (I can’t easily watch Netflix or Hulu because of stupid DRM issues, and some websites like Twitter are painfully slow), but I’m definitely turning my dial toward “Linux is awesome.”

the focus is sharp in the city

I needed new headshots and publicity shots, so I asked my friend, Kaelen, to come over to Castle Wheaton and help me out. We took a few dozen pictures in a few different locations, and I’m super happy with what we got. Here’s one of them:

When we finished shooting for the day, I had a realization that probably means more to me than it will to anyone else, but since that’s never stopped me from writing about something before…

I hate having my picture taken. I feel like I have ugly teeth, my forehead is too big, and my eyes always reveal how deeply sad I am inside. If you wonder why I’m usually pulling a face in pictures, now you know why. It’s like my armor, I guess.

This started early one morning when I was seven or eight years-old. I had to have headshots taken for commercial casting agents, and my mom took me out of school one day to meet with a photographer she knew. I remember feeling like I was getting a free day off, because I didn’t have to go to school (I don’t know why we didn’t do this on a weekend. Or maybe we did and I don’t remember that part of the day correctly. It’s not the important part, which I’m getting to, anyway). On the way to wherever we were going, my mom drove us through a McDonald’s, and let me get an Egg McMuffin. This was a big deal for me, because my parents never got us fast food. So I remember getting that, a greasy hashbrown, and that concentrated orange juice that came in the plastic cup with a foil seal. I wasn’t allowed to eat in the car, so I kept my bag of fancy McDonald’s breakfast in my lap until we got to the park and met the photographer.

He made me uncomfortable right away. He was just too wound up, too excited, had way too much energy. I was so little, I didn’t know how to vocalize any of these feelings, and my parents were very much into me and my sister following rules, so I just behaved myself and sat down at a picnic table to eat. I can see and feel it now: it’s cool and a little damp, probably late Spring. The picnic table is made of wood, and someone has scratched their initials into the bench. I have carefully stabbed the straw through the foil top of my orange juice, and my hash brown is still in its little cardboard holder, sitting on the carefully unfolded bag that I’m using as a placemat. I have my Egg McMuffin in my hand, ready to eat it. The photographer grabs it out of my hand, takes a bite, spits the food out on the grass, and hands it back to me. “Okay!” He says, with terrifying enthusiasm, “act like you just took a big bite of this and you love it!” He begins taking photos.

I don’t remember anything else with any clarity. It was almost forty years ago, but I can still feel — right now I feel — how upset that made me. One of my overwhelming memories from being a kid actor is that I didn’t have a voice in my own life, and that I had to do what the adults around me wanted me to do. That guy, who I’m positive didn’t mean anything cruel and was just excited to get to work, snatching my breakfast away from me and turning it into a prop for a photo shoot I didn’t even want to be part of, perfectly encapsulated everything I ever felt about being a kid actor. For the next few hours, I had  to pose like an idiot, doing exaggerated expressions and changing my clothes a dozen times, because that’s how it worked in the late 70s.

Flash forward about four or five years. (My god I can’t believe it was only four or five years later, but that’s how fast the childhood that was stolen from me went by.) I’m in a studio with the other kids from Stand By Me. We’re posing for some publicity shots that will eventually make their way into teen magazines. I feel so awkward and uncomfortable. I am not cool like River, I am not famous like Corey, and I am not funny like Jerry. I am just sad and weird and self conscious and I want to be anywhere else.

Flash forward another year or so. I’m trying to figure out who I am and what I’m doing in my life. I’m at some party at Paramount, where I work every day on TNG. I’m only fourteen or maybe fifteen. There are no other kids my age there, and I feel sad and weird. I can’t relate to kids my own age because I never get to be around them, and I can’t relate to the adults I am always around, because I am a kid. I’m trying to figure out what I’m going to do at this party where nobody is paying attention to me, when a photographer comes up and takes my picture. He doesn’t ask, he doesn’t give me a chance to get ready. He just calls my name and when I look up, he takes this shot, which of course goes into a teen magazine:

Maybe you don’t see it, but I can see how sad I am, even though I’m trying to do this smile thing I’ve settled upon where I don’t show my ugly teeth that I hate.

They say that the camera doesn’t lie, that the camera reveals what’s going on inside a person, and I think that’s accurate. In all these pictures of me from the 80s and 90s, you can see how weird and awkward I am, and I can see how much I wanted to be anywhere else. Maybe I didn’t like pictures because they made me feel so vulnerable, since I was forced to just be me, instead of putting on the mask of a character I was playing. Maybe I just didn’t want to pose for pictures because it was yet another thing that normal kids didn’t do, and I wanted to be a normal kid (for values of “normal” that I didn’t really understand, but heavily romanticized. Thanks, John Hughes).

Anyway. This is all context that, like I said, probably doesn’t matter to anyone who isn’t me. It is context that matters to me because the photos we took are only the second time in my life that I have asked someone to take my picture, because I wanted it taken. I realized that when we were finishing up, and it made me feel happy.

I love the pictures that we got, and I love that I’m at a place in my life, finally, that has allowed me to feel a little more comfortable in the camera’s eye.