By July 2007, it became clear because reasons that I had little control when it came to alcohol. Kate asked me to take a month off, and I agreed. However, I wasn’t particularly consistent with this.
One evening, I realized that I couldn’t be trusted, and that I was only cheating myself, and that I needed to walk away forever if I was going to change for the better. Eight years later, I’m feeling pretty good about this decision.
In August of 2014, Robin Williams committed suicide. I took it pretty hard. It’s not so much because I’m a big fan of his work; it’s because of what it said about me. I logged off of Facebook and Tumblr for a full week after this, because I didn’t want to see everybody’s assessment of the event. Regardless, I saw everybody’s assessment of the event.
As a bipolar, I have a rhythm—autumn puts me into hypomanic phases, winter and spring are pretty stable, and summer lulls me into a deep, deep depression. Therefore I was barely holding on anyway when this happened, crippling me with grief. Add this to the guilt of feeling so miserable, despite how wonderful my life is, with the cats and the spouse and the adventures and the time to write and draw as much as I want; and my own death was not far from my mind.
It’s said that suicide is the coward’s way out. I disagree with this fully. At those lowest of moments, all I could think of is the burden I put onto my spouse—we’d been married for five years before I’d gotten a proper mental-health diagnosis, and the damage done to her is incalculable. What she needed, I told myself, was to be free of me.
What this brought me back was my parents. For a long time, they’ve looked at me as the go-to guy for info on bipolar, attention-deficit disorder, and depression. I have them, I’ve learned about them, and in their mind, I’ve beaten them. My sister was not so lucky. She’d attempted suicide many times, and, and I’d been the one who was able to get through to her (this is because I’m anti-platitude).
It was me my parents turn to for comfort and reassurance. For years, I’ve been an expert in (mostly) keeping the depths of my depression to myself, especially from them. Can you imagine what it would do to them if I finally snapped? So I was able to talk myself out of it, no matter how hard it got.
In the end, I recovered, then hit my annual manic period, then cycled rapidly, and finally stabilized … for now. Summer’s starting, and I’m worried. Will it be as bad as before? Or will the thrill of returning to the States keep me afloat? I have no idea.
I haven’t been able to talk about this to anyone but my spouse and my psychiatrist (because reasons), but I really, really need to share with someone else. And my journal is locked … and now it’s out there. Keep your fingers crossed that I make it to late September in a somewhat chipper mood.
So about a year ago, I stopped sending query letters out for my novel. I had a lot of reasons for this, like, for example, LJ Idol, but mostly it was because the rejections were getting increasingly discouraging. A few months later I began to send out short stories in earnest, and have lately begun to get positive results.
Recently I have been encouraged (long story) to query a particular publishing house with the full-length book. I’ve written a killer, double-triple-quadruple-checked cover letter and included the first five thousand words in the e-mail, as per the submission guidelines.
And I got the yips, bad. The e-mail is in my drafts folder right now, waiting for me to hit the [send] button, but I physically can’t bring myself to hit the [send] button. This is such an important, personal project to me, and another rejection—particularly after all that (long story) encouragement is going to break my heart.
But if I don’t hit the [send] button, they won’t have the opportunity not to reject it …
YARGH! I am driving me nuts!
My spouse and I just returned from a cruise of the Mediterranean, and I was shocked to find out we were not the youngest couple there–not by a long shot. This was good, because it helped me stave off my midlife crisis just a little longer. This was bad because, just once, I was hoping to be the baby again, like I had been in my New York social circle so long ago. Regardless, cruisin’ and touristin’ it up were a blast*, and I was not happy to return home.
Here are just ten random thoughts from my trips ashore.
There is, frankly, too much to get into here, and that’s because Oh my God, I got, like, three acceptance letters while I was on vacation as well as an editor who wants me to slightly revise a romance story I’d submitted to her anthology (mostly I need to make the hanky-panky at the climax—Ha! “Climax”!—a little hankier-pankier). That puts me at six-and-a-half acceptances. Maybe I am on a hot streak.
Also, Venice is really weird, guys. It’s like an alien snatched up intimate corners of Europe–people from every race, buildings from every century, pillars from ancient Rome, weather from wherever—plopped these things onto a swamp, linked everything together with an inconceivable variety of bridges, applied gondolas, and opened it up to tourists. I totally want to live there.
_____
* So much food. So. Much. Regret.
So I’ve been thinking about gambling. For example, there’s craps. I’m not 100 percent certain of the rules, but I do know that it’s a game of chance: you throw a pair of dice, and they need to land with a certain series of numbers facing up.
So let’s say you’re in a ritzy casino, and you’re wearing your finest tux or gown—whichever way you swing, really. You clutch the dice in a loose fist, shake your wrist, and toss them onto the table.
It comes up exactly as you want it.
The crowd cheers, you do a little fist pump, place another bet, do another shake, and toss another toss.
Again, you get exactly what you’re shooting for.
You do another fist pump, make another bet, shake, and toss.
For a third time, you win.
You’re on fire. You scoop up the dice, blow on them for luck, and throw.
That little gust of wind from your lips has to control the movement of your arm, the ricochet of those little cubes off of your fingers, and the angle it flies out of your hand. It has to guide the distance and number of tumbles it takes, factoring in wind resistance. Once on the table, it needs to balance the pressure of impact, followed by the amount of bounces and turns until the friction of the table brings the dice to a halt. Long story short, luck has a lot of work to do.
This occurred to me this morning as I received a third acceptance letter (yay me!) for a short story. To understand how awesome this felt, you have to be aware of the way I treat publishing. For the past year, I’ve been sending out to magazines and anthologies about a submission a week, and I’ve been getting responses a little less frequently than that. My first acceptance letter came in August of 2014. My second came six weeks ago, after dozens of rejections. And now I have a third, with only one rejection between it and the last one. So when I received the “We’re very happy to say you’ve been accepted …” email this morning, I said to myself, “I am on a hot streak, baby!”
My second thought was, “Easy there, buddy.”
I currently have eleven stories out there in the ether, and two (almost) back-to-back acceptances don’t change the odds of publication for any of them. “Well, what does change the odds?” I asked myself.
Well, assuming I’m a decent enough writer (I like to think I am), then the answer is nothing. An unsolicited piece of writing is affected by any number of factors.
My pieces tend to run humorous—but what if the editor had been looking for something more serious? I write almost exclusively female protagonists—but what if the editor is a tiny bit misogynistic? I’m not crazy about fairies—but what if fairies are cool at the moment? What if the editor is in a bad mood? What if the editor checked his or her email after a liquid lunch? How many other entries are there? What if mine gets caught in the spam filter? I have no control over any of this.
And so, when I sent out another piece today, I thought of it not as an act of talent and skill, but rather as a die-roll. And oddly enough, this makes me feel pretty good about it.
I moved to Indiana only a few short months after Newcastle was born, and a few weeks after my spouse invited him into her home. We quickly became best friends—even though he’s a cat. But we have so much in common. Like me, he is big, clumsy, and bipolar.
He’s not the only cat. Since 2000 he has had two brothers—Andrew and Magik—who have graciously allowed me to live in their home.
And so the five of us have grown older together, and unlike the people in the house, the cats have maintained perfect health, despite the fact that two of them are senior citizens. I should be bracing myself for their inevitable retirement, but I’m starting to believe they’re going to live forever.
We had moved into the Washington DC metro area the year before, and I had yet to settle in. I’d been unemployed for the most part (this is by choice, since we could afford it), and we’d not really found any friendships that had stuck. And so, while my spouse was working overseas and left me alone for a few months during the autumn and winter of 2009, I had a breakdown.
It was the cats who kept me grounded, particularly Newcastle, who follows me around like he’s my sidekick. I don’t know what I’ve done to earn his affection, but I’ll always be grateful. In fact, during my first session with a new psychiatrist, he asked me what my goal was, and I said I wanted to be as good a person my cat thinks I am. When he tells me to find my “happy place,” it’s Newcastle massaging my neck and purring, like he does every night before I fall asleep.
We’ve been living in Qatar for the past two and a half years. I won’t go into details here about how things have gone, suffice it so say that there have challenging at times, and once again, it’s been Newcastle, et al, to the rescue. We’re headed back to the States mid-June, and for some pretty logical-but-convoluted reasons, we’ve sent the cats back early—as in this past Thursday. Our schedule’s been nuts over the past few days, so I’ve barely noticed their absence. But when life returns to normal starting Wednesday, and I’m all alone in the empty house …
I’ve never been apart from them—and they me—for more than a few weeks in a row before, so six weeks is going to be particularly brutal. They’re with friends who love them and whom they love, so I’m not particularly worried about them. But man I miss these guys.
In the fall of 1994, I met someone*. We dated, but that didn’t work out in the long run. Life got in the way. Eventually, after some work and some time, we became friends again.
Six years later, we enjoyed a very long weekend together, but that didn’t work out in the long run. Life got in the way. Eventually, after some work and some time, we became friends again.
Four years after that, we enjoyed another long weekend together. Life, as it does, threatened to get in the way, but this time, we told it to go fuck itself. We became more than just friends, and we were going to keep it that way.
Less than a year later, on April 30, 2005, we said “I do.”
A full decade later, we have fought tooth and nail, through better and through worse, through sickness and through health, through thick and through thin. We have supported, excited, impressed, entertained, and loved. We’ve traveled so far, learned so much, and have come home to each other. We’ve been friends and lovers on-and-off for over twenty years, and husband and wife for ten.
It’s our anniversary, and a damned happy one.
_____
* Spoiler Alert! It’s my spouse.
When comes down to the whole Superman versus Batman debate (or Batman v. Superman if we’re talking about a legal dispute), I come down firmly Team Superman*. This puts me in the minority, I know.
Why do people love Batman so much? They typically give three reasons for this: 1) He is way cool; 2) He’s the serious hero; 3) He has no superpowers, and that makes him relatable.
To that, I say: 1) He is totally cool. Most of his comics, movies, and even the 1966 show are hip and slick and often compelling; 2) He’s the serious hero. As serious and hardcore as someone who wears pajamas and throws expensive toys at clowns and drives a car that goes vroom can be, I guess; 3) No powers? More relatable? This is where I get off the boat, laughing.
Bruce Wayne is obscenely wealthy, and he’s spent most of his life traveling the world, learning the way of the ninja, which are kind of superpowers in themselves. In the end, though, he wants the best for his ailing city, so he invests in local businesses to drive up employment, funds infrastructure projects, donates his time and money into charities, and supports politicians who are socially conscious.
Ha! Just kidding! He buys pajamas and toys he can throw at clowns and a car that goes vroom, because he’s a serious hero, and uses these things to go beat up on the other 99 percent.
Clark Kent, by contrast, was raised in middle-class, small-town America by loving parents, and he uses the talents he was born with to rescue people from disasters, save kittens from trees, beat up bullies, and overall to look out for the little guy.
“But … but …” detractors often say. “Superman has godlike powers! Where’s the challenge? How are you supposed to defeat a guy with godlike powers?” To me, this speaks to the level of imagination in these detractors. Is this all Superman is? The hardest puncher in the world? What about his morality? His honesty (not counting that whole secret-identity thing, of course)? His loyalty? His friendships? His sense of hope? A villain doesn’t have to be strong to oppose these. Hell, his greatest foe is a regular human being with an intellect and some cash, and that guy has Superman on the ropes all the time.
Therefore, if I want a story where Superman battles an unmarried, genius, obsessive billionaire with lots of gadgets and suits of armor and an iron will, I think I’ll stick with Lex Luthor.
But, to quote a pre-bonkers Dennis Miller, that’s just my personal opinion, and I could be wrong.
* But not the one from Man of Steel. I hated that movie.
I’ve talked about my mental health before.
But it’s been a while.
I haven’t really used my journal lately, so it hasn’t come up that the age of thirty-eight has been Mental Health Awareness year for me. I’ve been reading and studying the topic and all of its treatments, mostly because late summer of 2014 was one of the darkest periods of my life.
I’m going to go more into this later, but the short version is that I went into a deep depression that took months to shake. It left me suicidal for the first time in about five years. This was different, though. Back in 2009, I was ambivalent about living and dying—an emotional state sometimes called “passively suicidal.” Last summer, though, I was ready to actually do the work. I didn’t, because reasons.
But it passed, and I haven’t thought about killing myself since … until three days ago. It came out of nowhere, and it’s really rattled my shit.
I’m not depressed. To be honest, I’m feeling a little ennui, which is really not that bad. But one afternoon, while cleaning the dishes, I considered my future, and at the time, it looked pretty bleak. I thought about my miniscule contributions to society. I thought about all the crap I’ve accumulated through my life, whether they be toys or notebooks full of drawings and writings I can’t get published—or even acknowledged by my family or Facebook friends. I thought about retirement and all the work that was going to take. The logical solution, my brain said for a split second, would be to die, and to do it soon. Just get it over with. Let someone else sort it out.
And then it was gone. I was startled and upset, but I noted my overall okay mood, and I put it behind me as a weird little fluke.
Until it happened again yesterday. Again, only for a moment. So now I’m worried. I should probably talk to my doctor about this …
As an aside, I had a buddy in college … he had a man crush on me, and I thought he was pretty awesome too. My two favorite memories are when we each bought a flask of Wild Turkey and drank ourselves sick, just because we were trying to impress one another; and how he found me wallowing after my girlfriend dumped me (he raced over as soon as the rumor got to him), and he took me on a long drive through town, playing my favorite artist on his tape deck (PJ Harvey), which was cute because he only had one song by her on his mix tape.
His only flaw was his girlfriends, who were all pretty not-with-it, and sometimes positively unhinged. Years after we graduated, a good friend dated him for a long time, and I thought, Finally, someone cool worth his attention.
And when she finally extracted herself from that relationship, she reported that this guy was physically and verbally abusive, and utterly, totally controlling. And it explained everything. Now, upon this revelation, there was no conflict in my mind about my loyalty. To me, he seemed like bromance material. To women, he was a piece of shit, and that made him a piece of shit to the core. I don’t care how much I liked him.
But what makes me cringe is this: Am I allowed to have good memories of him? How could I just not see the common thread with these women he dated? How could I miss this about him? How could I be so fucking stupid?
This is the first time I’ve shared this, so it’s a little rambly. But a similar feeling came to me about Bill Cosby’s rape allegations. The man was an idol and a major inspiration to me, storytelling-wise. How can he continue to occupy such a happy place in my memories. How am I allowed to chuckle to myself when I think of his material?
This has really rattled me.
Jeremiah Murphy 