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The Monotony of Life

December 21, 2018 by Denton Leave a Comment

By the time anybody reads this, I could be a new father for the third (and FINAL) time. My wife is 37 weeks pregnant with a baby we know very little about other than we think it’s healthy. We really like the surprise of seeing what the make and model is once it enters the world. That part is exciting. And yes, we have a boy and girl name picked out and ready for whatever it is.

So that part is exciting, right? Just that first glimpse of genitalia to see what is going to hang out with us for the rest of our lives is pretty exciting. Well, for me it is. For my wife, I’m sure she’ll just be ready to finally have that little tummy beast out of her. For the first few minutes, she probably won’t even care. But the suspense of not knowing is still pretty cool.

The problem with this little surprise is that, for me, it’ll be the last one for a while. My wife knows this about me and I’m not ashamed of it, but I am NOT looking forward to the baby stage of this thing’s life. It’s not for me. Once these other two kids of mine hit about a year old and I could play and roughhouse and communicate with them, I should have been walking around with a coffee mug that said, “World’s Funnest and Gnarliest Dad.”

That mug, however, will not apply to me in the next twelve months. I will not deserve it. I will do my damnedest to be the best father I can be, but I do not like the baby stage. The monotony drives me slowly insane. I suspect this time will be worse.

I’m sober this time.

I’ve struggled the past few weeks. Like struggled to the point that I haven’t had the motivation to write. Struggled to the point that my wife has been worried about me. I don’t struggle with a desire to drink anymore. That’s actually long gone. I seldom even think about it anymore. I celebrated eighteen months sober back on November 28, and I think the only times I really think about alcohol is when I either write about it or go to AA. I do not sit at home at night, even when everybody is asleep, and crave a drink. Ever. Tobacco? Sometimes. Rarely, but more often than alcohol.

But I do struggle with depression and discontent and lack of motivation and – when it pertains to this baby – dread. Those things can settle on my mind like a cow with four broken legs. The damn thing is NOT moving no matter how much I want it to. And it weighs a freaking ton.

I’ve been thinking a lot during this low period about the monotony of life. That’s not all that has troubled me, but it’s the theme. Those questions like, “Is this all life is?” and “What is my damn purpose?” and “Why can’t I have a simple brain that just falls into happiness and contentment at the flip of switch?” are all a part of it, but all of them settle neatly inside the “monotony of life” theme.

The reasons I’ve struggled lately have been pretty obvious. Life is about to get harder, and I have no addictions to treat the monotony. Which, if you think about it, is Hypocrisy 101. What is an addiction but one of the most monotonous activities known to man? You secure your alcohol and/or tobacco daily (or whatever the vice,) you hide it daily, you partake in reclusion daily, you hate yourself daily, you walk on eggshells daily. There is nothing more monotonous than addiction. And yet it’s such a safe place when you’re in the throes of it. But it is still monotonous as hell.

I mean, at least this baby will smile pretty soon. That’ll be new and exciting for several minutes. Then it’ll make noises and crawl and walk and hug. The only thing exciting about addiction is that maybe Bud Light will find another kind of fruit to squeeze in each can.

I can joke about it all day, but the truth is that the monotony of life is a struggle for me, and it’s about to get worse. The sleepless nights, the tiredness, the diapers, the zero free time, the inability to escape it, the grumpiness of my entire family, the constant cleaning. Those things will happen every single day with no real end in sight.

And yes, I know. Poor, poor, pitiful me. Everybody has to do it. Everybody deals with it, so put on your big boy panties and grow the f**k up, right?

To that, I say this. Just because I know it’s whiny, and I know that everybody else knows it’s whiny, and my mind tells me to go in search of the big boy panties, and every fiber of my being tells me I’m too damn good a daddy to dread this so badly, those things don’t mean the depression isn’t real. And when a person with clinical depression falls into that place, telling him or her to snap out of it and suck it up does not help and is in most cases not possible. It is truly a mental malady with which a LOT of people struggle.

And there is NO immediate cure. In fact, we have no idea what a cure would look like even if it walked up and said, “Hey, I’m Cure.”

Another inhibiting factor in dealing with the monotony of life is that people like me (and I really don’t yet know how to define that person) are destined to slowly (and sometimes swiftly) go insane with monotony. It’s exactly like the saying about insanity – you know, doing the same thing over and over expecting different results – only we know the results are going to be the same and yet we still question every aspect of it as if a genie will pop out of a poopy diaper and tell us the secret to life.

In other words, there is still hope in our insanity, and it would be so much easier if there wasn’t.

So how do we go about attempting to find a cure for this monotony of life? How do we grow to accept it and embrace it and live out every cliche about happiness and contentment and never ask questions like, “So this is it?” Even better, how do I spice this shit up so that monotony becomes a mythical creature from my past?

I have not one damn clue. But I figured it was a good enough idea to just spell it all out and figure out what exactly are the things that fall under the category of monotonous in my life. Maybe it’ll convince me it just ain’t that damn bad. Doubtful, but it’s worth a shot.

The Monotony of Work

I put this one first because it’s actually the least monotonous. I’m a high school math teacher, so there are near daily surprises. The high school set is getting lazier (yet somehow crazier,) they’re getting less respectful towards everything, and they leave high school far less prepared for college or career than generations past (and yes, I’m stereotyping all of this, but when it’s true, you’re allowed to type on stereos.) They are the generation of participation trophies and educational leaders that do their damnedest to succumb to pressure and just “push” kids on to the next grade, mastery be damned.

But even still, there are literally no two days alike.

So in that regard, the monotony is not in the daily planning and teaching, since there is a curriculum that must be completed, and it is not in the humdrum nature of “clock in, work, clock out,” since teenagers are insane and there is that little perk of not working during fall break, Christmas break, Spring break, and summer, and the monotony mostly shows up year-to-year, not day-to-day, which is preferable.

That said, however, all of those things I said about students and leadership in the previous paragraph gets REALLY tedious. There is daily monotony in the inability to alter the course of this generation, daily monotony of speaking to children so poorly raised that they do not understand the necessity of education (or of listening and respecting their teachers,) and monotony in watching our educational leaders not stand up to it. And because of those three things, the monotony of losing credibility and authority in the classroom is getting REALLY frustrating. It’s getting old.

Which is why I often remind myself about those damn summers. They’re nice.

The Monotony of Cooking

I am the cook in my house. My wife is a perfectly capable cook, I just don’t like eating leaves and guac and tabouli salad and crap like that. I cook some kind of vegetable for every meal, but I cook a meat and a carb every time, too. As it should be, dammit.

But I spend at least two hours in the kitchen every single day. We go out to eat more than we should, but when I cook, I have to go ahead and pencil in two to three hours of the same exact shit day after day. Cook, eat, clean. Cook, eat, clean. Every damn day. Mix in the counters that just seem to grow stuff like mail, cups, medicine, flowers, computers, various bags, used Q-Tips, snot rags, dirty underwear, and entire wardrobes (okay, so the last few are a slight exaggeration, but not much,) and these counters become the constant, daily bane of my existence.

I despise dirty counters and I despise the daily monotony of cooking. Yet I love to cook and I love my kitchen. I make no damn sense whatsoever.

The Monotony of Marriage

My wife and I have been married four years now, and I tend to enjoy every single aspect of my marriage, so if you think I am going to say anything remotely negative about her or my marriage, you must be out of your damn mind.

The Monotony of Fatherhood

There is very little monotony when it pertains to my thirteen year old daughter. I’ve moved past the fact that she eats terribly and is starting to act, well, like a teenager. What’s monotonous is the lack of listening. It drives me insane. I do not know how many times two people can repeat “When it’s your turn to clean the kitchen, the dining room table and all counters are included in that.” We’ve said it a minimum of seventeen thousand times. How has it not been obeyed yet? I just do not get it. What in the hell goes through her mind when she finishes washing dishes?

“Hmmm, what was it they told me to do again? Vacuum? No, that’s not it. There’s no ceiling fan in here, so I can’t dust it. Wait, I remember!! They told me to eat dessert and check Instagram. In my room. Where no food is allowed. I never heard them say it wasn’t allowed the four thousand times they said it, so it’ll be fine. Kitchen’s done!!”

The monotony of a two year old is worse. When I get home from work, I must “play animals.” I cannot have a break, I cannot go pee, I cannot get a glass of tea, I cannot kiss my wife, I cannot start dinner. I must play animals. And if I do any of the other things first, the request to play with animals will be repeated ad nauseam, unless we somehow end up in another room, whereas the request can change to “play puzzles” or “play stickers” or “play bed.” This is daily, and it does not simply happen when I get home from work. It can happen on a Saturday morning, even before I lift him out of his damn crib.

And what is “play animals?” There are about a hundred little plastic farm animals and dinosaurs, and they must all come out of their bin, and then they must be lined up or they must gather around and eat plastic vegetables or they must come in and out of the plastic barns. And if any of his ideas for how we must play with the animals are not followed, he pitches a fit, at which point I intentionally piss him off further rather than giving in to him because I’m not raising a pansy ass bitch. (And I’m not about to apologize for saying that since nobody knows whether I’m joking or not.)

And then there is the monotony of him NEVER eating anything healthy, the monotony of the devil’s gift to parents: the toddler car seat, the monotony of diapers, the monotony of picking shit up, the monotony of f**king nursery rhymes, the monotony of the same book over and over again until I want to rip the front cover off and send it like a frisbee out the back door with such force that I dislocate my shoulder.

I love those two so damn much, though.

The Monotony of Church

It’s not just the act and process of Sunday morning church. That bores me to tears, but the monotony of church is more than that.

I just don’t get it, okay? I never will. It doesn’t mean my mind will not constantly try to DEMAND that I get it, only to have the rational side put up a winning debate, thus beginning the monotonous process all over again, but I do NOT understand most people’s views of the Christian Religion, Jesus, God, and a book written by humans. And the very aspect of its unchanging yet forceful message / rhetoric gets REALLY monotonous, especially when FAR too many “Christians” are some of the most hypocritical people on the planet.

I physically cringe when I hear somebody say, “I owe it all to God” or “God was with them in that accident” or “Put it in God’s hands.” Those verbal bouquets of religious feel-goodery are perfectly reserved for those times when something or somebody was blessed with positivity, luck, or good fortune. But when a kid dies of a gunshot wound to the head at Sandy Hook Elementary School or a mother buries her young son who was eat up with cancer or an icy patch sends a family of four down an embankment into an icy pond or a tornado levels a retirement village in Boca Raton, do we then say, “They owe it all to God” or “God was with them in that accident” or “God gave him that cancer for a reason?” Was it in God’s hands then?

Then people tell other people to “Pray about it.” Okay, that’s a nifty idea, but I guarantee I can research and give you equal examples of most prayerful scenarios ending in both positive and negative outcomes, no matter if prayer was used or not.

I’ve suffered forty-one years not understanding it. Or, I’ve spent forty-one years understanding it so rationally that I have no ability to conjure the reality of what might be the most elaborate fairy tale ever penned.

Do I believe in God? Yes, I do. I believe that nothing around me makes one bit of sense unless somebody is responsible. I believe it is possible to have a relationship with my creator that is not like others. Do I believe in prayer and “putting it into God’s hands?” I might, if it was anything better than a 50-50 proposition. Will I ever be “religious” to such an extent that I can disciple to a non-believer? No, I can assure you of that. That will never be me. But I can guarantee you this much. I will struggle with this topic the rest of my life. And I already know my feelings on it won’t change. So not only is it monotonous and wearisome in my present, I get to look forward to that weariness never leaving. Goodie.

The Monotony of Politics

This one is starting to irk me FAR too much. And this is becoming like monotony squared. Since 9-11, and exponentially through three presidents, we have become the most monotonous, predictable, hateful, partisan-to-the-death bunch of citizens the country has ever known. And that includes the Civil War.

The basic anatomy of a far-left Democrat when talking about a Republican: “He’s a racist fascist nationalist white supremacist who tries to cram God into our laws and wants every criminal to have a gun and would rather a mother die than the unborn baby, and I will make up incriminating shit about him to make him and his party look worse than it actually is. And none of them are middle-of-the-road right-leaning independents either. They’re all irrational, delusional, hypocritical Bible thumpers.”

The basic anatomy of a far-right Republican when talking about a Democrat: “He’s a baby-murdering socialist satanist treasonist traitor that wants to take all the rich people’s money and give it to lazy people and immigrants because he hates his country, hates God, and I will make up incriminating shit about him to make him and his party look worse than it actually is. And none of them are middle-of-the-road left-leaning independents either. They’re all irrational, delusional, hypocritical atheists.”

Yeah, it’s getting old. Work together, for f**k’s sake. Quit bad-mouthing and blaming every damn president that came before today, grow the f**k up, and do what’s right for the majority of Americans. It’s just not that freaking hard. Come to the table wondering how you can compromise, not how you can ram a brick up the other’s ass. It’s getting REALLY monotonous and predictable.

I discovered yesterday, however, that it isn’t all monotonous. It’s actually the worst kind of anti-monotony we could imagine. I saw a post on Facebook yesterday with almost a thousand comments made by “adults,” and they were all making fun of Michelle Obama for purportedly having a penis. This is now representative of the class we have in this country.

The Monotony of My Damn Brain

My brain can be a dangerous place. It is no more dangerous than when monotony has it screaming from the inside. Monotony causes it to go places in search of relief from that monotony that sometimes the places it goes are not healthy places for the mind of a recovering addict to go.

My mind is also dangerous because of the stubbornness that is often borne from that monotony. I am so stubborn about some things that I would debate a more stubborn man about who is most stubborn and not give in even after he beat me. I’m too stubborn to lose in a battle of stubbornness. And then I wouldn’t admit that I lost. I’d just try to figure out how to beat him.

And this monotony and stubbornness go both ways. Each can be borne from the other. Unless you are afflicted, you cannot understand the relentless monotony of innate stubbornness. And stubbornness affects everything that dances, crashes, glides, or tiptoes through your mind. And then that “thing” that wound up there will not leave, monotonously torturing you as it repeats itself over and over until mild insanity kicks in and you have mini breakdowns or short, almost necessary, bouts of anger.

All of the ways that monotony affects me will NOT change. I have to come to terms with that. I will ALWAYS view those things as monotonous. They will ALWAYS affect my ability to maintain a happy, content persona. I accept that begrudgingly knowing I don’t really have a choice. I will quite simply always struggle with monotony. My brain does not work differently than that.

All of this was easy when I was drinking. I could deal with damn near anything because I could drink that night. It would all wash away in beer. I don’t have that anymore. I don’t WANT that anymore. So how do I defeat this brain and the monotony and stubbornness that controls it?

I know part of the answer. I’m just procrastinating. Per usual.

A few days ago, I watched one of the most powerful videos I’ve probably ever seen. It was a guy standing on stage speaking to a group of people about his life. He talked about his upbringing and how music had transformed his life and gave it purpose and how monumental the influences of his parents and wife had been. Sounds ho-hum so far, right?

What made it captivating was that Alvin Law was born without arms. And watching him on that stage – the confidence, the contentment, the complete absence of self-pity – made me feel both inspired and pathetic. Here was a man that couldn’t even pick his damn nose, and he appeared far happier and contented than a relatively healthy forty-one year old man with a good job, beautiful wife, two and a half perfectly healthy kids, a gorgeous house, and an overall sublime existence. (P.S. Click on his name above in this paragraph for the video I saw. I promise it’ll inspire you.)

Can you imagine HIS monotony?

Alvin Law has been a motivational speaker since 1981. And why not, you know? Is there a man more perfect for it? He was born with no arms and has a better attitude about life than 99% of the population. He cannot hold his wife’s hand, but he can play the piano, the drums, and the trombone. He looks like a circus freak, but watch him on stage and he oozes badass cool.

I’ve only just discovered Mr. Law, and I plan to watch as many videos as I can find about him (and read his book) because he makes me want to be a better me, but I wanted to focus in on a just a couple of things that I’ve seen so far in speeches or quotes by him that I really think can help me when monotony has me settled under that legless cow.

His big mantra is that everybody has a label. It is affixed to your forehead, he says, for all to see. But he argues that there is not a darn soul who can stop you from changing your label.

I have a few little labels that speak well of me: Husband, father, teacher, newly self-appointed addiction activist. I have more labels that do not speak well of me, however. And as I got to listening to some stuff Alvin Law said, it occurred to me that we actually have TWO labels. One is the label that others see. One is our own label; the one WE see that is hidden from the outside world. Which one do you think has more bright lights shining on it?

Our own label affects us far more intimately than the label others see. Our lives literally revolve around the way we view ourselves. My label has some hard-to-digest words on it. Addict, loser, failure, recluse, friendless, unworthy. Looking back over the past twenty years, my label has become as monotonous as my life. It hasn’t changed in twenty years. That’s pretty monotonous, don’t you think?

Alvin Law simply says, “Change your label.” I’d like that. That is definitely something I want to do. But how?

I think it’s clear that I do not put much stock into “signs from God,” but everything – and I mean EVERYTHING – the past few weeks has been screaming at me the same message. I look on Facebook and it’s there. I read an article online and it’s there. I see a commercial and it’s there. I’ve read two random blogs this week and it’s been there. I even heard a kid in the hallway at school saying it. And it is almost exactly the same message. Every. Single. Time. For weeks this has happened. Same message every time.

We live once. No regrets from this day forward. Go do something that will inspire you that everybody else thinks is crazy. Who gives a royal damn what they think?

Sounds like a great way to break out of the monotony of life, doesn’t it? Terrifies the shit out of me, but I WILL regret it if I don’t. So do I have an idea of what that might be? Yeah, I do. All it is is an idea right now, but it both excites me and terrifies me beyond words. I don’t know if I’ll ever muster the courage to do it, but I know my future will continue being monotonous if I don’t start taking some chances. I did it once, in the past few months, right? I started writing again.

We live once. No regrets from this day forward. Go do something that will inspire you that everybody else thinks is crazy. Who gives a royal damn what they think?

I’m getting there. Maybe this baby will make me finally punch the grip of monotony square in the freaking face. It’s my only chance to REALLY live outside the unrelenting grasp of addiction, self-loathing, depression, and the insanity-inducing monotony of life.

When Giving Thanks is Hard

November 20, 2018 by Denton Leave a Comment

At some point on Thursday, you or somebody in your general vicinity will utter the question, “What are you thankful for this year?” Sure, it might be worded differently, but it will nevertheless be some form of that cliched question. And for most of us, it’s pretty easy to answer.

When I say easy, what I mean to say is that your answer will be as cliched as the question. You will say that you are thankful for your spouse, your kids, your job, your health, your house, blah, blah, blah. If you already know the answer, why even ask the question, you know? If you want to be interesting – or ask interesting questions – you should just go up to your dad, punch him in the stomach, and say, “Aren’t you thankful I didn’t punch you in the nuts?” It would be a much more interesting question to ask this Thanksgiving.

I’m admittedly not a big holiday fan. Most holidays are nothing more than stocking stuffers for Hallmark in my opinion. They just don’t mean much to me (but they mean a hell of a lot to Hallmark.) Think about a few of these before we get to the reason for this season.

Valentines Day – I shouldn’t need to be told or made to feel obligated to treat my wife like a queen. I should do it regardless. She puts up with me EVERY day. (Of course, I put up with HER every day, too. Ha!)
Easter – Finding eggs inside candy should be something we all do weekly. This is just amazing fun. That’s the reason we celebrate Easter, right?
Independence Day – I’m pretty proud to be an American the other 364 days, too. I don’t really need a specific day to focus on it.
My birthday. Yeah, that’s just so stinking special I share the day with about thirty million people in the world. Yippee!!

As for Christmas? I hate it so badly that I physically detest the antiquated, totally impersonal, increasingly banal act of the family gift exchange. Here’s an idea, family. Why don’t we all just bring thirty dollars for each person and spend an hour trading money for other money that is exactly like it?

“How thoughtful and nonconformist of you, Maw-Maw. Two fives and two tens? I’ll cherish it always.”

And yes, I have been told to shut up and just smile through the gift exchange and try to not damage any teeth when, after the fifth family get-together and the fifth gift exchange, we can hardly close the back gate of the van and I can’t stand that I’m participating in enabling the materialistic reality of Christmas yet another year. So I will grit my teeth as softly as I can and do as I am told.

On to Thanksgiving!! This is not so much a Hallmark holiday, but it is certainly becoming more and more of a forgotten holiday, isn’t it? (See the above two paragraphs on Christmas for the reasoning behind that.) It has gotten so bad now that retailers have started Black Friday deals the weekend BEFORE Thanksgiving because thirty days isn’t enough time to plan and buy gifts for your baby mama’s third cousin Pookie’s nephew who really wants that Xbox game that you saw on page eight of his Christmas wish list. He could give a rat’s ass who actually gives him the gift, he just wants the damn game. Greedy little craphead. And you fall for it!! We ALL fall for it!!

Anyway, I’m still pissed off about Christmas and it isn’t even here yet. But let’s focus on Thanksgiving for a moment, specifically that question that you or somebody you know will ask and/or answer come Thursday. You know, that question that sums up the entire reason for the holiday?

What are you thankful for this year?

Seems like an easy question to answer, right? For most people, it absolutely is. They can and should list their spouse, their kids, their job, having all their basic needs met, whatever.

But what if somebody is asked that question Thursday and they don’t know the answer? What if they have no idea what they should be thankful for this year? What if they hate Thanksgiving because of this inability to be grateful? What if it’s just been a crappy year and they just can’t do gratefulness right now?

If you have no ability to empathize with how this scenario is even possible, please add that to the list of things you are thankful for this year. This is most definitely a real thing for a lot of people. Sometimes it’s depressingly hard to find even a single thing for which you are thankful.

I’ve been there. This year, luckily, I’m not, but if you’re struggling with giving thanks this year, I hope this article helps. You’ll soon see that pretty much everything you can ever be thankful for falls under a very small number of categories. This is a good thing. If you’re struggling with giving thanks, you need to dial in your focus a little. Start simple. Find one or two. Allow those to light a little positivity fire. Fan that flame with a few others. By the time Thanksgiving is here, you will be one of the most unique people in the world.

You will be in a very select group of people who actually respect the intent of the holiday by giving proper, heartfelt thanks. And remember this: Blessings appear where needs or wants exist. Sometimes you need to sit down and focus on exactly what those needs and wants are so that you can determine if there is already a blessing there that you’ve somehow missed.

As mentioned earlier, there are very few categories we need to address to find all of the areas where you might be able to find blessings for which you are able to give thanks. There are only five. No matter how difficult you want to be with respect to an argument that there are more than five, I would argue that “simple” is the goal here. Five is more than enough. If you’re struggling to give thanks this year, simple is good. So here are the five simple categories that most of your blessings (or their opposite, trials and tribulations) fall under:

Physical Blessings
Mental Blessings
Emotional Blessings
Spiritual Blessings
Social Blessings

Let’s break each one down a little. I’m willing to bet you can find something to be thankful for under each one.

Physical Blessings

This one is the most obvious. This is your physical health. How is it? If you have no complaints, you are one of the luckiest people on Earth. If you don’t have an ache or pain or crink or boo boo or a weight problem or a heart problem or a tummy problem or whatever, you are damn lucky. Be immensely thankful for that. If you have four limbs and twenty digits, and they all work, be thankful for that. If you are struggling to find thankfulness, you absolutely must start with the mundane and obvious. At the very least, get them out of the way so you can find something deep and transformative for which to be thankful.

So what happens when you can’t be thankful for perfect health? What are you thankful for if you have a bum knee or chronic back pain or gluten is giving you hell or god forbid you have cancer or multiple organ failure or dementia? How in the world can you be thankful for that?

You can’t. Don’t try to find the sugar-coating because typically that means you’re scratching and clawing for answers to why it happened to you. So don’t do that. Say it sucks and move on. Yeah, you can say, “Well it could be worse,” but can’t everybody on the planet say that about something? Whether it is depression that has led you to this place or you’re on the tracks heading there, you can’t build a case for thankfulness of your physical condition if you are lying to the jury. And guess who sits on the jury? You and you alone (and your doctor to some extent.)

The other aspect of being thankful for your physical health is the question of whether or not you can fix it. If you are overweight because you eat terribly, you are nothing more than a victim of your own manufactured misery. Be honest with yourself. If you have a thyroid problem and that is the cause of the weight issues, then you do not fit in that example. Otherwise, you might. Take an inventory of your entire physical health. Find something good. Find something else about which you need to set some goals.

Most people can fix a good many things associated with their physical health. If you can’t, and you’re so hung up on it that you will NEVER be thankful for your physical health, skip this one and move on. If you CAN fix it, be thankful that you have the ability to do so. However, recognizing that you have control over certain aspects of your physical health can be a severe depressant if you aren’t particularly strong on the mental side of this blessing pentagon. It takes some mental fortitude to change your physical hardships. Trust me on that one. I’ve been living in that Groundhog Day for years. And that is exactly why that one comes next.

Mental Blessings

How tough are you mentally? How WELL are you mentally? That second one is the bigger question.

What is addressed repeatedly every time you hear about a mass shooting or a father that kills his children or a teenager that commits suicide? You hear everybody questioning their mental health, right? This is a completely viable question. And it probably has a perfectly concrete answer. The problem is that nobody will ever know that answer, even if the killer is still alive. And do you know why? Because the only person that will ever be able to understand the human mental condition of every sick (or healthy) person is God. The person on Earth that is a close second? The mentally ill person himself. He is the only one intimately familiar with his own mind, no matter how twisted and sick it is.

I have this belief about mental illness that is probably not too far-fetched and it is probably shared by a lot of actual professionals. Most people with mental illness have fully functioning cognitive abilities, right? They know what’s going on, they know what they’re doing, they have no trouble conversing with people, they are fully capable of driving a car or cooking a meal, etc. Whatever their illness affects, it does not effect their daily functionality. Think depression, anxiety, mild personality disorders, eating disorders, addiction, etc. These are still functional humans, even if they have some major issues.

What that means is that they have the capacity to “let people in” only to the point where anything incriminating is deemed harmless or treatable. That means that they are the ONLY person on Earth who can fully diagnose their problem. And that means they are still – to the outside world anyway – completely normal.

And WHY are they completely normal? Because the experts say that one in five people suffer from mental illness ranging from mild to severe. That’s more common than left-handed people. Are THEY not normal?

All of that is to suggest that there is quite literally only one person who can diagnose your level of thankfulness over your mental condition. That person is you. If your mental health feels pretty healthy, if you are able to force yourself to do stuff you dislike via the willpower of your own mind, if you can rationalize good and bad and right and wrong, if your focus is sustained and your thoughts mostly positive and your self-esteem average, and if you have an innate desire to better yourself every day, you should be damn thankful.

Emotional Blessings

Depending on what link you want to click on or what study you want to peruse, different people will tell you there are anywhere from four basic emotions to as many as twenty-seven. I knew I couldn’t write this article and talk about how to find thankfulness in dozens of different emotions, especially when we’re focusing on chiseling even the most minute thankfulness out of a stone unwilling to allow it, so I chose the one that had no author. Seriously, nobody is taking credit for this, but it’s concise and inclusive (and pretty obvious, honestly.) Let’s look at each one briefly.

Anger – Pretty simple question with this one. How much anger do you live with daily? I’m willing to bet that most of those things that make you angry are either not worthy of your anger or, in the case of anger towards another person, can be fixed with a simple, open, honest conversation. Be thankful that the cure for most anger is actually pretty easy.
Sadness – What makes you sad? If it is something that required you to complete the stages of grief, did you chicken out on them? Was sadness just easier than saying goodbye? If you can let something or somebody go whose loss saddened you, that is a blessing. Be thankful you have the mental health to say goodbye and then look back with happiness, not sadness. If your sadness is more in the form of a general daily malaise, that’s one you’ll have to tackle yourself. But it goes back to that first question. What makes you sad?
Fear – I’ve written a lot about this one. Fear has consumed me since the day I got sober (and all the years before.) I’m thankful for it because it has taught me that those things which scare me are the things I know I absolutely must do. If you can smile at fear and just say, “Bring it,” that’s a blessing. It’s a second blessing if you are able to follow through on squashing the fear.
Joy – Every person on Earth knows what joy feels like. If you don’t, you sure as hell wouldn’t be reading this article. So you know what joy feels like. Are you joyous? If not, what is standing in the way? You have to discover it before you can fix it.
Interest – If you like your family, your job, your house, etc, and those things interest you enough that you do not show apathy towards them, you know the feeling of interest. It is those people that know nothing but apathy who cannot claim a blessing here. In addition, do you have a hobby you enjoy? That means you have interest in something. That’s a blessing.
Surprise – This is not only the blessing of FEELING surprise, it is also the blessing of wanting to deliver it. If you’re married and have no interest in surprising your spouse, your heart is beginning to decay. But if you love to surprise your significant other, your children, or even your coworker, you have some emotional health. That’s a blessing.
Disgust – Pretend you’re watching the news tonight and the first story is about genocide in a third world country. The next story is about the guy that killed his two little girls and his pregnant wife. The third story is about maggots crawling out of a fast food hamburger. Do these disgust you? If so, you’re in tune with your emotional side. That’s good. Now think about yourself. Have you done something that still, maybe even years later, disgusts you? That’s bad. Work towards forgiving yourself.
Shame – Same basic scenario as the second half of disgust, only shame is a more hollow, painful emotion. It’s much quieter than disgust. It rests on your spirit like a thousand pound weight. But you don’t talk about shame the way you may other emotions. Shame is deep-rooted and VERY difficult to strip away. Even if you still have shame, if you can leave this article feeling like you can ask for help in cleansing you of that shame, that’s a blessing. You should be thankful for your willingness to seek help.

Spiritual Blessings

I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this one. Spiritual health is a personal feeling of closeness with whatever higher power you choose to believe in, even if it is the absence of one. If you have an intimate relationship with your creator, that is a blessing. It means you realize your own insignificance, but it also means you know how significant you can be to others. It means you have allowed the power of the spirit inside you to empower you to become a self-reliant, self-validated machine. Spiritual blessings equate to a spiritual confidence. If you possess that, you are indeed blessed. You should be thankful for that.

You will also notice that there is a theme in this article. Only you can determine your own blessings. You already know if you possess spiritual blessings, even before reading the words I used to try to describe it. Be thankful for that knowledge.

Social Blessings

This one is mainly going to focus on a series of questions that only you can answer. And if you can’t answer them positively, you either have to decide whether you have the power to change them or the power to never let them bother you again. The reason that last option is there is because you have never – and will never – have the ability to control other people. Stop trying. It is simply not worth your effort or mental health to worry about idiots you can’t control.

So here’s the questions. Answer them honestly. Then ask if you can do anything about it.

Do you have at least one friend? (And no, this does NOT mean a social media friend.) Do you have a friend who would go to jail with you, for you, because of you, or in protection of you?
Do you have a family that loves you? (Notice this does not say that you have to love them in return. Remember, we’re trying to go simple. You can worry about your family issues Friday.)
Are you proud of the effort you put in at your job? (Notice I did not say, “Do you love your job?” Most people who are searching for thankfulness do not have a positive view of their job. But you can be proud of your effort even when you hate the job.)
Is your education sufficient to change jobs if you so desired? If not, is that door still open?
Are you embarrassed to be around people, whether those people are known to you or unknown to you? If so, why?
Do you have access to everything you need to survive?
Do you have access to things that entertain you or otherwise make you happy or fulfilled? (Notice again that it does not say you take advantage of these things. We are only asking about having access to them. Think simple. Really, really simple.)

Here’s an addendum to the last two questions. Are the ways in which your needs are met a source of pride, comfort, contentment, or embarrassment for you? In other words, are you proud of where you live or the condition of your house? Are you embarrassed at your monthly grocery budget? If yes to either of these, why? And if you can honestly say that you are content with your place on this Earth, that is an extreme source of pride.

In the realm of social thankfulness, most of the time there is (or was) an element of control that you either have or once had. Money, whether the situation is good or bad, can usually be traced back to how well you performed in school, what job you chose, what financial decisions you made, etc. Not always, but often. Where you live can either be familial in nature or what was at one time borne out of necessity. Your ability to make, keep, or increase the number and quality of friends is often based on social skills learned and developed long ago, but there is a definitive mental health side to friends, especially in that of making friends. If you have no confidence in social settings, making friends is nearly impossible.

Once again, though, go simple if you are struggling to give thanks this year. Be thankful for that one friend, that house that will never be much bigger but at least it has a good roof and electricity, that family member that still sends five dollars in your birthday card like you’re still eight years old.

It is completely trite and commonplace to say, “Look at what you have that other people don’t,” and while it pains me to write something so pedestrian and finish with it, if that is not one of the most accurate statements in the Cliche Hall of Fame, I’m really not sure what surpasses it. It’s just so true. Find those little things, and I’m betting a bigger truth will emerge.

In Conclusion

I sincerely wish you a happy Thanksgiving. If you read this article because giving thanks is difficult for you, I especially hope you celebrate the hell out of it. The holiday itself can mean nothing. It doesn’t really matter if you love Thanksgiving or hate it. It doesn’t matter at all. But if you can learn to be thankful even when you hate everything around you, including yourself at times, and you can do it in November or May or August, you’ll never dread the holiday season again. And that is definitely something to be thankful for.

Irony

November 14, 2018 by Denton 2 Comments

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.