Irony

Little known fact:  there is an entire website based around the actual definition of the word “ironic.”  The site argues that “Judging by its constant, and sometimes baffling, misuse, it is clear that irony is a very misunderstood concept.”  I would wholeheartedly agree.

The website is actually pretty entertaining.  It is even interactive.  You can submit a scenario and the users of the website will vote on whether or not the scenario is ironic.  For instance, the users of the website are 63% in favor of the following being ironic:

A tree dedicated to George Harrison has been killed by beetles. 

They are 83% in favor of the following being ironic:

There is a song about the phobia of music.

However, 58% find the following to NOT be ironic:

I fell in love with my worst enemy’s sister.

The word ironic is, of course, synonymous with Alanis Morissette, and the website isitironic.com dedicates an entire section of the site to address the argument that her song “Ironic” contains no actual irony.  For the most part, this assessment is accurate (it’s mostly coincidence and luck,) but the website also proves that irony can be subjective.  Just like with the percentages above, something I find ironic might only come across to someone else as merely a coincidence or a fluke.  The creators of the website give absolutely zero credit to Alanis for creating a single piece of irony in her song.  That’s ironic, huh?

As an aside, I was once in love with Alanis Morissette.  She was my bad girl crush in college.  I always wanted to go to a theater with her (insert mischievous emoji.)

Anyway, I seem to have been overtaken by irony lately, and the first example is hard to argue.  I think I could submit it to isitironic.com and I would get close to 100% in favor of it being ironic.

What happened was that I paused recently to perform a two month reflection of my blog.  It has been exactly two months since the day it went public, and I decided I had to make some changes to the aesthetics and language and features and take my wife’s advice and stop cursing in my blog posts.  She said she didn’t have any control over what I said, but she didn’t have to like it.  She presumed others would agree with her.  I’m guessing she’s probably right about that.

No, I don’t really believe curse words are real things because damn near anything can be deemed a curse word nowadays and curse words were defined by stupid people, but I like the way they add a certain amount of emotion and passion to my writing (especially when it’s a passionate subject like addiction.)  And there is no denying that people stop and pay attention when somebody is cursing at them, but is that really the voice I want to see on here in a year or ten years?  She was right.  I haven’t changed the presence of them in everything I’ve written to this point, but I have added symbols where letters used to be and I’ll do better moving forward.  I should be a talented enough writer to be able to add emotion and passion without them.

The other big change I needed to make early on was the branding.  Up to this point, I’m well aware that I was branded as an “addiction blog.”  I wanted to make that much broader, and with an early reflection, I am able to do that.  It’s foundation will always be in addiction and how to live in sobriety, but there are a lot of subjects to tackle in life as a non-drunk.  

For instance, most people who see anything about my blog posted on my Facebook wall are non-drunks (as far as I know.)  But might one of them be interested in my take on education in a high poverty high school with very poor parental involvement after nearly a decade of experience working there?  If I was simply an “Addiction blog,” non-drunks wouldn’t click on that.  But I can guarantee you I have some insight on that topic that might be valuable to a lot of people.  Or how about being a forty-something father of a newborn?  There is an audience for that.  If I’m simply an “addiction blog,” I’m alienating audiences in any and every subject matter I write about.

So if you are reading this, I hope you will allow me to reflect, as we all need to do in our careers, our marriages, and anything else that matters to us, and make some necessary changes that will make my blog better and more appealing and hopefully make me a better, more well-rounded, less vulgar person in the long run.  

Ultimately I decided to brand myself an “Owner of an Unsettled Mind” because it describes me almost too well.  If you saw the desktop version of my site previously, you saw that it said, “A Blog about Addiction, But Mostly Sobriety.”  Now it says, “Owner of an Unsettled Mind, Clueless as to What to do With It.”  I literally could not describe myself any better, and now I am not handcuffed to topics solely about addiction and sobriety.  Besides, I hope one day I still love to write and I barely remember addiction.  That’s the dream anyway.

So what about this is ironic?  Nothing so far.  But it needed the backstory.

A couple of weeks ago, I had this light bulb, oh-my-god-this-is-genius idea for a blog post.  It fell in line with my re-branding because it related to both those people struggling with addiction and scores of people who have never taken a single sip of alcohol.  It was more mainstream.

The topic was depression.  I had a not-too-severe episode a couple of weeks ago and I immediately started writing so I would not forget the feelings and thoughts and lethargy associated with a depressive episode.  I got a couple of pages of good notes while in the throes of depression.  It has happened sporadically for my entire adult life – sometimes minor and lasting a day or two, sometimes major and leaving me wondering how best to leave this world – I’ve just never talked about it or written about it. 

I really wanted this post to be that post.  And it will be one day.  Just not this week.

Anyway, I handled my depressive episode much better than I ever used to (when alcohol and tobacco fixed EVERYTHING) and I talked to my wife about it.  What I discovered was that the talking helped, but she still didn’t really understand depression. She probably never would.  So from that moment, I couldn’t stop thinking about how I could explain depression in a way that she could understand.  It was as if I owed her that.  If she has to live with – and love – a man that would struggle with depression the rest of his life, the least I could do was help her understand it.

Well finally an idea came to me, and I had 2500 words written in a single night.  It just flowed and made such perfect sense to me that I just knew it was going to be one of those viral posts everybody dreams might happen to them for all the right reasons.  I mean, this thing was GOOD.  Everybody was going to see depression in a new way.  People who had never suffered would suddenly understand it in such a way that empathy was effortless.

That’s the way it sounded in MY head.  Every word was perfect in MY head.  It was amazing.

Right up until I asked her to read it and she said she didn’t understand it.  And then, because I needed a second opinion (because she was clearly WRONG,) I sent it to somebody else who described it using the word “convoluted.”

And now the irony.  That was three or four days ago.  I spent every minute Sunday and Monday rewriting and editing and changing and deleting and adding and cursing and can I tell you the only thing that happened?  I was writing a blog post about depression, and it was depressing me.  And not half-heartedly so.  I was getting seriously depressed.  I just couldn’t get it right.  I rewrote it ten different times in ten different ways and still couldn’t get it right.  I had to write this article about the irony of it all because I had to step away from it.  

And when I drove to work today, all I could think was, “Holy crap, my entire life has been ironic for the past two months.”  Here’s how:

• I started a blog to help fight addiction, and now I’m addicted to my blog.
• I was physically healthier when I was an active addict.
• There have been scores of times that I have mentioned how reclusive I was during my days of active addiction.  Well guess what I am when I’m sitting at my computer writing alone?
• Writing was supposed to be the release I needed, and most of the time it is, but sometimes it makes me feel even more stressed and insecure than I did when I was drinking.  That’s a minor one, but it has happened several times.

Anyway, that’s all I have for this week.  I’ve written ten thousand words in the past week and this is my shortest blog post yet.  Isn’t it ironic?  Don’t you think?

Yeah, I really do think.