Nobody thought it would be one of the kids

Nobody probably thought the Boat Crew would last this long, actually.

When four young couples from the same Cedar Rapids Lutheran church rented a houseboat and sailed up and down the Mississippi River for a long weekend in the summer of 1971, nobody probably even thought it was more than a one-time vacation.

But the couples invited more couples and did it again the next summer, and the next. Over time, a few couples came and went, but the tradition lived on summer after summer. Eventually a core group of seven couples emerged, and the Boat Crew was established … and a vital extended family was born.

Unofficially (or officially, depending on your personal opinion) the group’s name was the Mississippi River Marching and Drinking Society. But “Boat Crew” was easier to say. And less complicated to explain to the couples’ children, who were all about the age of the Boat Crew tradition itself.

As lives and careers evolved, many of the couples moved away … but everyone came back summer after summer for what had become an annual gathering of Boat Crew family with bonds as strong as any biological family.

And that family bond extended beyond the relationship between the seven couples; their children often spent the Boat Crew weekends together in one couple’s house, under the probably exhausted watch of two or three weekend-long babysitters.

Naturally, the kids developed a family bond as strong as their parents’. They were unofficial siblings in an extended family network, and they felt confident in the parental love they received from every member of the Boat Crew.

As the summers passed, the Boat Crew bond continued to grow and strengthen, especially over a developing collection of in-jokes, funny stories and traditions that became almost sacred. The most prominent tradition was Joy. It started when one couple brought a large white flag emblazoned with the word Joy in bright colors and displayed it on the ship’s mast. The flag appeared every summer, and eventually it inspired the regular exchanging of Joy-festooned knickknacks, shirts, Christmas ornaments (all collectively over the years described as "Joy shit") and even one summer little bottles of Joy dishwashing soap.

Music—an integral part of the Lutheran church where they all met—was just as important to the Boat Crew. The group contained many talented singers, and as they gathered under the stars with a guitar and a couple bottles of wine each summer, they sang hymns and folk songs and show tunes and whatever else they could think of. Their unofficial anthem was “Beautiful Savior,” which they sang together—in full, glorious harmony—on every gathering.

As the kids grew over the next four decades, the Boat Crew also started convening off-season for confirmations and graduations and weddings and grandchildren and the occasional family tragedy … and the inevitable deaths of the Boat Crew couples’ elderly parents.

And through it all, the Boat Crew became a bit of a statistical anomaly: seven couples who lived into their 50s and 60s and 70s and now 80s … and stayed friends … and stayed married … and stayed alive until the first ones passed away in the last few years.

As they started to retire from their jobs and prioritize grandparent obligations over Boat Crew gatherings, the group wasn’t always able to find a summer weekend that all seven couples could attend. And the “boat” part of Boat Crew became a bit of an anachronism; the summer reunions were happening now in Bed and Breakfasts overlooking the Mississippi instead of boats on the Mississippi.

And as they started to navigate the medical infirmities and physical indignities that come with age, the Boat Crew members started to contemplate their own mortality. Never ones to face life with fear or even reverence, they were realistic that eventually they were going to start dying … and they were not above having betting pools over who would go first.

But it never occurred to anyone that the first to die might not be one of the adults.

Robbie (who as an adult called himself Robert but I’d known him since we were toddlers and I could never think of him as anyone but Robbie) was 42, pretty much right in the middle of the range of ages of the Boat Crew kids. He started getting sick 13 years ago last summer, but he didn’t think it was much to worry about: just some lower back pain, fatigue and abdominal discomfort. But then the guy behind the Chicago neighborhood deli counter where he went every day told him he looked yellow. And he became painfully constipated. And on a trip home to see his parents in Iowa, he decided to see a doctor.

And that’s where he found out.

Colon cancer.

Stage 4.

Colon cancer patients at stage 4 have an 8-15% chance of being alive five years after diagnosis. And Robbie, forever the optimist, dove right into surgery and chemotherapy while his parents took care of him in their home.

But it quickly became obvious that he was losing the battle. And as he eventually slipped into a coma, his parents—buoyed by the love and calls and texts and emails of Boat Crew members across the country—kept a vigil by his bed.

And six weeks after his diagnosis—six weeks after driving himself and his two cats seven hours from Chicago to his parents’ house, five weeks after walking into the doctor’s office with what he thought were just stomach pains, three weeks after cheering on friends in the Chicago Marathon via Facebook—Robbie drew his last breath, sending waves of shock and devastation throughout his extended Boat Crew family.

Robbie’s father had died of cancer 40 years earlier, before the Boat Crew had been officially established. His widowed mother and the man who eventually became her next husband had been regular Boat Crew members from nearly the beginning.

While she was still single, though, she and Robbie had taken vacations with our family a number of times, often to Adventureland amusement park in Des Moines, Iowa, and once on a Bicentennial road trip to Philadelphia to see the Liberty Bell and to Washington, D.C., to see pretty much everything else associated with America’s birth.

Robbie and I went to different high schools and colleges, but we eventually both found our ways to Chicago. We kept seeing each other at Boat Crew gatherings, but we’d slowly drifted apart … as had many of the Boat Crew kids as we scattered about the country and built our own families.

Robbie’s parents and mine, of course, had stayed fast Boat Crew friends. And when Robbie was facing the first weeks of his cancer treatments, my parents made a trip to Des Moines to stay with them.

Robbie died 13 years ago today. Even though I knew it was inevitable, I was more choked up than I’d expected to be when I got the call. We hadn’t seen each other in probably five years. And I knew that he was no longer suffering through an excruciating illness. But his death—especially as a Boat Crew kid and not an adult—was a shock to all of us … and an indescribable devastation to his parents. And though nobody in the extended Boat Crew family has died since Robbie did, we are all tacitly preparing ourselves for the next passing.

But for the first time in many years, the entire Boat Crew—along with a handful of Boat Crew kids—dropped everything in their lives and appeared at the funeral. Forever part of the family, we walked in with Robbie’s parents and biological family members and were seated right behind them. And when the congregation sang “Beautiful Savior,” the Boat Crew’s beautiful harmonies rose above the music as if to lift Robbie to whatever awaited him in the afterlife and remind him of the loving extended family he’d been a part of on earth.

His parents asked me to be one of his pall bearers, which I accepted as an honor. Escorting a lifelong friend to his grave is overwhelming—especially when we’re both so young—but I felt giving him a solemn, respectful final journey was the best gift I could give him.

He was family, after all.

Art: Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring, James Ensor

At first glance, James Ensor's 1891 Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring is perhaps a silly take on Halloween imagery. Or an homage to the memento mori ("remember that you [have to] die") traditions of Medieval and Renaissance art that placed skeletons, skulls and other symbols of mortality among the world and activities of the living. Or a metaphor for the last gasps of Impressionism and its emphasis on color and light at the expense of representational accuracy.

While the latter probably has a grain of truth to it—Impressionism in Europe had largely been killed by the emotional distortions and manipulations of Expressionism by 1891 (think of Edvard Munch's 1893 The Scream)—the skeletons and the pickled herring in Ensor's painting were more along the lines of prescient precursors to the illogicalities of Surrealism and the unorthodox silliness of the Avant-Garde.

And they were totally about his pettiness.

Ensor actually painted Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring in response to negative reviews of his work. In his world of distortions, illogicalities and silliness, the art critics are the skeletons (one with a few wisps of hair on his otherwise balding head, the other with an ostentatious hat that's failing to make him look important) and Ensor is the pickled herring. And the whole idea is bizarre and probably lost to everyone to whom it hasn't been explained.

Today, though, Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring is a relatively obscure work of dark humor with light-hearted imagery that starts 21st Century viewers down the path toward the increasingly spooky, scary traditions of modern Halloween. So enjoy its silliness now. And be sure to lock your doors and hide your pickled herring before the end of October.

Tributes: Edward Albee

There is a moment near the end of The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?—Edward Albee's 2002 tour-de-force play exploring the outer limits of love, fidelity, morality and tolerance—where the emotional crisis at the center of the narrative boils over into such catastrophic levels of heartache and rage and such Greek-tragedy levels of destruction and retribution that the first time I saw it—and the second time and the third time and the fourth time—the audience collectively gasped to the point of almost screaming and then sat rigidly and almost palpably silent until well after the final stage light had extinguished and the last emotionally drained actor had silently moved into position for the company bow.

It's one of my two favorite—if there even exists a favorite-not favorite continuum of cataclysmic emotional destruction—moments in modern theater ... the other being the last three seconds of David Mamet's Oleanna before the stage becomes abruptly, dreadfully dark.

He's largely a genre unto himself, sit's difficult to pigeonhole Edward Albee as a playwright. He wrote or adapted about 30 works that embodied movements like Theatre of the Absurd and brought popular works of narrative fiction like The Ballad of the Sad Café and Breakfast at Tiffany's to the stage and screen.

My favorite Albee works—Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (embodied in this movie still by the incrementally calculated Richard Burton and desperately braying Elizabeth Taylor playing the American-experiment patriarch and matriarch George and Martha [the latter of whom the script deliciously describes as "large, boisterous woman, 52, looking somewhat younger"]), The Play About the Baby and The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?—all share the format of four characters on stage interacting to varying degrees with one character who may or may not exist offstage. It's an intriguing conceit, and one that keeps bringing me back to these three plays for my own contemplation. In an odd double standard, though, I can't stand reading them; the characters for me seem to be clumsy and dry with no meaningful depth on the page, but they grant a glorious latitude for actors to make fascinating choices as they flesh them out.

Today is the eighth anniversary of Edward Albee's death. I'm not one to be sad when famous people I've never met pass away—and having seen only seven of his works (that I can remember) I'm certainly no slavish Albee devotee—but I'm profoundly thankful for the emotional roller coasters he's put me on in various theaters over the years ... and for the body of work he's left that I can continue to explore in my own way in my own time.

I have a couple favorite quotes from these works that I'd love to mention here in closing, but they're all potential spoilers. So I'll just lift a glass of bergen to his memory.

#Pride101: What the hell do LGBTQ+ people have to be proud of?

We’re proud because despite decades and decades of relentless persecution everywhere we turn—when organized religion viciously attacks and censures and vilifies us in the name of selective morality, when our families disown us, when our elected officials bargain away our equality for hate votes they try to disguise as so-called “religious liberty,” when the entire Republican party perpetually enshrines a pledge to strip us of our legal equalities in its national platform, when communities and cities and entire states keep trying to codify our families into second-class citizenship, when small-importance bakers with the backing of the big-money hate industry take their unhinged loathing of us all the way to the Supreme Court, when our employers fire us, when our landlords evict us, when our police harass us, when our neighbors and colleagues and fellow citizens openly insult and condemn and mock and berate and even beat and kill us—we continue to survive.

We’re proud because pride is the opposite of shame—and despite what systemic bigotry and the ugliest sides of organized religion work so hard to make the world believe, there is nothing shameful about being gay.

We’re proud because—thanks to the incredible bravery shown by gay people who lived their lives openly sometimes to the point of being defiantly in the decades before us—we can live our lives more and more openly at home, at work, with our families, on social media … and even on national television.

We're proud because we've worked tirelessly to achieve legal equality in marriage, adoption, parental rights and many other ways that make our families recognized as Families in our states and across our country. And though we have much more to accomplish—and though bigotry disguised as morality and religion and the supposed mandates of constituents work and sometimes succeed at eroding our newfound equalities—we have the momentum and intelligence and motivation and humanity and ability to keep driving back the hate as we continue to drive forward with both our newfound and future equalities.

We’re proud because in just the last few years an openly gay married man was a long-viable, highly qualified, unquestionably respected candidate in the Democratic presidential primaries and who’s now our country’s secretary of transportation—something most of us never even considered would EVER happen—and not only does he enjoy enthusiastic support across the Democratic party, but leading Republicans seem to have learned that while they can attack him for reasons they’d attack any other candidate, attacking him for being gay is completely unacceptable.

We’re proud because through our tireless work and the prevailing powers of common sense and compassion, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and Proposition Hate and the so-called Defense of Marriage Act long ago collapsed onto their illogical, immoral, meritless foundations … and new legislative attempts to dehumanize us—especially during election cycles—gain little to no traction or visibility and soon die on the trash heap as well.

We’re proud because we are smart enough to overcome the self-loathing that our venomous, mindlessly theocratic society forces on us, and we have the power to stop its destructive cycle by fighting back and by making intelligent choices involving sex and drugs and money and careers and relationships and the way we live our lives—and by using our lives as examples of success and humanity and love that other gay people can see and respect and emulate and achieve more and more easily.

We’re proud because after all we’ve been through, the world increasingly continues to notice and respect us and enthusiastically appropriate the often fabulous culture we’ve assembled from the common struggles and glorious diversity of our disparate lives.

We’re proud because more and more often and in more and more contexts our country and our culture see the fact that we’re gay as unthreatening and commonplace and frankly boring.

We’re proud because our tireless efforts to be seen have engendered (which is the perfect verb in this context) massive visible support for us with rainbows and Pride messages on everything from clothing to flags to television commercials—and while we can legitimately be worried that companies are merely riding the Pride wave for profit, we can also celebrate that the explosions of these rainbows on our apparel and flags and televisions overwhelmingly normalizes the understanding that we have a place at the table and a presence in our communities.

We’re proud because especially during this past Pride month and always all year we’re celebrating with parties and street fairs and parades—all mostly virtual in 2020 and 2021—that are overflowing with drag queens, leather queens, muscle queens, dad-bod queens, glitter queens, nonbinary queens, you’d-never-know-they-were-queens queens, people who prefer not to be called queens and even straight-but-honorary-queens-for-a-day queens, and together we can see beyond the pride in the parades of our lives and together celebrate the underlying Pride in the parades of our lives.

We’re proud because 55 years ago a small crowd in a bar in New York City reached the tipping point in putting up with endless harassment and oppression and instigated a violent retaliation to a police raid that escalated to a week of riots and then to a march for equality that grew unstoppably to a national movement for equality and respect that continues proudly to this day.

Quite simply, we’re proud that we have so incredibly much to be proud of.

Floating through Chicago Pride

I didn’t really know anybody by the time the first pride parade happened soon after I moved to Chicago. So I went by myself to watch it. And, standing among thousands and thousands of cheering, smiling, happy, proud people who were watching with groups of friends and waving at other friends who squeezed by on the crowded sidewalks, I never felt more alone.

 
It was actually so devastating in my mind that pride weekend literally filled me with dread for the next 15 years I lived in Chicago.

I did notice that first year that the people dancing and waving on the floats looked very happy—and they didn’t have to be surrounded by friends or even anybody as they enjoyed the parade from their glorified perches. So I made up my mind that I needed to make the connections to get myself on a float by the next pride parade.

 
As I slowly—finally!—made Chicago friends and watched the next few parades with them, I still harbored an irrational, unshakable dread that I’d lose them—or they’d actually leave me—and I’d be alone all over again in the crowds. So I kept trying to figure out how to get myself on a float.

 

Then I joined the Chicago Gay Men’s Chorus. And we marched in the parade! But not on a float. And I very very stupidly decided to wear my rollerblades and they hurt and I was bad at stopping so I kept running into people and I was so miserable I had to hobble home the moment it was over so I couldn’t hang out and celebrate with anyone afterward so as far as I’m concerned the whole experience didn’t count and I don’t want to talk about it.

 
Then! Finally! I got on a float! And let me tell you: Though standing in a Speedo sucking in your abs and holding on for dear life on a lurching, frequently stopping vehicle technically sucks all the fun out of it, having hundreds of millions (in my fantasies my math says I have hundreds of millions of adoring fans so shut up) of people screaming and cheering for you is ALMOST as awesome as dancing and waving high on a moving platform where the cooling breezes are plenty, the jostling crowds are penned up on the sidewalks below you and the scenery changes by the second to keep everything interesting.
Plus you get to dance to your favorite disco hits.

 
I got myself onto many more floats for the rest of my years in Chicago. The weather was always perfect, my cheering, adoring fans swelled into the billions (shut up), and the joy and pride were always plenty. And my irrational dread—though never gone—was always in check.

 
This weekend is Chicago’s Pride parade. My Facebook and Instagram feeds are already filled with joyful, excited, rainbow-colored pictures of my Chicago friends and acquaintances already celebrating, and while I’m thrilled and proud to have (eventually) been a part of those traditions, our dramatically more subdued Cedar Rapids Pride festivals are now WAY more my speed. And not my Speedo.

 
So I wish all of you celebrating Pride in Chicago and everywhere else—whether on the sidewalks or on a float—an awesome day and an awesome experience both personally and with everyone around you. I’ll be folding laundry and digging in my garden and tackling DIY projects and running whatever miles my knees will allow in a vain attempt to not stray too far from my underwear-on-a-float body.

So happy Pride to all of us!

#Pride101: The Stonewall Uprising

Fifty-five years ago today, the New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn—a mob-controlled gay bar in Greenwich Village that catered mostly to drag queens—in an ongoing campaign of harassment and intimidation specifically targeted at people wearing clothing that didn’t conform to the conventions of what the laws called their “assigned gender.” These arrests usually led to people’s names, photographs and home addresses being published in the newspapers … which carried the high risk of further targeting, job loss, eviction, and family ostracism.

Usually the bar patrons submissively complied as they were being arrested. But this night—clearly fed up past their breaking points—they fought back. When an officer clubbed a Black lesbian named Stormé DeLarverie over the head for complaining that her handcuffs were too tight, the crowd that had gathered outside the club had had enough. Marsha P. Johnson, a Black drag queen and beloved heart of the community, and Sylvia Rivera, a popular Latinx queen, were two of the first to actively resist the police that night, and their fellow queens joined them in throwing bricks, bottles and shot glasses at officers and effectively shutting down the raid. I’m including these people’s ethnicities and orientations here to give credit to the non-white, non-cis-presenting people who showed the courage and gumption to initiate the fight back and start what ended up being six days of riots in the neighborhood surrounding the Stonewall Inn that finally ignited a national fight for the rights and equalities that *everyone* under the LGBTQ+ rainbow enjoys today.

Stonewall wasn’t the first riot in defiance of police raids and harassments; in 1959 angry gays fought police after a raid of Cooper’s Do-Nuts—a gay-friendly diner—in Los Angeles, and in 1966 a trans woman threw a cup of hot coffee in a police officer’s face in a raid at Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco, sparking a riot that inspired the city to acknowledge the trans community and develop a network of trans-specific social, mental-health and medical services.

But Stonewall was the emotional—and ultimately cultural—turning point. The police raid there quickly drew a large mob whose collective lifetimes of oppression and discrimination boiled over into a violent revolt that trapped police in the bar until the NYC Tactical Patrol Force was dispatched to rescue them. Riots erupted the next night and through the week in the Christopher Street and other nearby gay neighborhoods, including one mob that threatened to burn down the offices of The Village Voice for mocking the gay rioters and describing the riots as "forces of faggotry" and "Sunday fag follies." The next year, an organization called Chicago Gay Liberation organized a parade on the anniversary of the Stonewall riot, and the city has staged a parade on the last Sunday in June ever since—with the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic causing the first exception.

Now, every major metropolis and many smaller cities have Pride parades and events—though in 2020 and 2021 they were mostly held virtually—and many of them usually spill beyond the last week of June to pop up in celebrations all month and all year.

But June is officially Pride month in the hearts and minds of LGBTQ+ people—and an exploding population of straight people and businesses large and small—and we owe it all to the brave LGBTQ+ people—more specifically, the extremely marginalized drag queens and people of color—who had had enough and fought back at great risk to themselves and even to our community and started our slow march toward equality fifty-five years ago today.

THIS IS WHY WE CELEBRATE PRIDE.

#Pride101: Marriage equality

Nine years ago today, the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that same-sex couples are guaranteed the right to marry under both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Marriage inequality had been enshrined for decades in a “one man and one woman” state-by-state propaganda crusade—which cycled up to fever pitch in every election cycle—led without irony or shame by “sanctity of marriage” charlatans and adulterous divorce junkies like Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani and Rush Limbaugh.

The Republicans’ desperate “states’ rights” argument also subjected couples to being married then being not married then being married ad infinitum every time they crossed state lines as they traveled—which is not only ridiculous and cruel, but also engendered very real concerns about the couples’ rights regarding hospital visits and property ownership if they had accidents in marriage-hostile states.

The fight against our equality made us perpetual punching bags and political props by the Republican party and the religious right, who positioned themselves as the only moral authority on the issue as they tore apart families, turned citizens into pariahs, and incited both verbal and physical violence against gay people who wanted nothing more than basic equality that posed no plausible threat or danger to anyone.

Republicans’ longstanding argument that same-sex marriage would undermine and destroy heterosexual marriage was desperately ridiculous and honestly called into question the stability of the heterosexual marriages of everyone who parroted this talking point.

The LGBTQ+ community was forced to organize and fight our way through endless battles and setbacks in the lower courts and then wait on pins and needles when our equality finally reached the purview of the Supreme Court, which in the height of the 2015 Pride month finally issued its 5-4 party-line verdict that our relationships are, in fact, equal and legally valid. And despite this, we’re still forced to combat hostile anti-equality eruptions that pop up every election cycle in red and swing states that need to sway voters by manipulating their baser instincts.

But for the last nine years, those of us who want it and all of us who’ve fought for it have finally been able to enjoy the stabilities and joys and ups and downs and contentments of legal and social marriage equality.

THIS IS WHY WE CALL IT PRIDE.

Pride 101: Protester hate

Virtually every pride parade and public LGBTQ event draws a crowd of hate-filled, mouth-frothing religious bigots carrying massive-lettered, professionally printed signs (that always use the playground word “homos,” always say we deserve AIDS and ALWAYS obsess about gay sex) and screaming at us with bullhorns, trying to goad us into physical fights so they can videotape them and whimper to the police and public about the cruel persecution they endure just for violently perverting their First Amendment rights.

At bigger events like the Chicago Pride Parade, they're walled off in pens like the rabid swine they are at the end of the routes where they're more of a nuisance than a violence-inciting threat—and so they can ruin the joys and kill the highs that people in the parades have experienced and inspired along the routes. But at smaller events like the Cedar Rapids Pride Fest, they wander freely in much smaller numbers at the perimeters, hauling massive signs as if they were crosses, yelling into bullhorns and goading us from afar so they can run like the cowards they are if they feel outnumbered and/or want to stoke their wannabe persecution complexes.

 
(Cisgender straight people: Raise your hands if you’ve ever endured any of this for being affectionate in public, having wedding photos taken outdoors, being seen with your kids or just basically existing.)

But despite these relentless, organized, violence-inciting attacks, LGBTQ people and our allies keep showing up to our Pride events, not letting the bigots’ cruel, puerile, relentless harassment undermine our celebration of who we are and how far we've come.

THIS IS WHY WE CALL IT PRIDE.

Pride 101: Supreme Court Employment Protection

Four years ago today, the Supreme Court ruling protecting gay and transgender workers from job discrimination and outright firings kicked the right-wing propaganda machine into high gear as it blustered predictably on and on about about “activist judges,” “religious liberty” (note: “liberty” is a right-wing dogwhistle that translates to “legal protection for hating LGBTQ+ people”) and the especially-laughable-in-the-context-of-its-adultrous-presidential-administration chestnut “family values.”

Right on cue, people like the homosexuality-obsessed Franklin Graham called the ruling “a very sad day” because he’d be “forced to hire” filthy gay and transgender people—and he cloaked his lust for hatred and discrimination as “a traditional Christian ethic” with the clear subtext that he and his brand of Christian cover story hold the monopoly on ethics and morality in this or any other discussion that fires up his mouth-frothing base.

But the fight is far from over. The May 2022 leaked draft of a Supreme Court ruling that would overturn Roe v. Wade left room for the conservative-majority Supreme Court to overturn its 2015 ruling in favor of marriage equality. And when Roe v. Wade was (as predicted) overturned in June 2022, Democrats in Congress had to pre-emptively write and negotiate to pass with Republicans the Respect for Marriage Act, which codified protection of same-sex marriages into law so the Supreme Court couldn't touch it.

Imagine being such a shitty Supreme Court that the President and Congress had to make laws to protect its citizens from you.

Cisgender heterosexuals: Have you ever needed a Supreme Court ruling to protect you from being fired just for going to work? Have you ever felt threatened enough that you had to lie about yourself and your relationships just to keep your job? That’s how bad things still were for gay and transgender people in 2020, more than half a century after the Stonewall Riots that sparked our collective demands for equality, justice and our right to live in peace.

It’s why we still have to carry the campaign and continue the fight and rely on your support and advocacy in our struggle TO THIS DAY to achieve basic, foundational equality so we can hopefully just exist without fear from repercussions incited by so-called moral leaders like Franklin Graham. He and his ilk are stubbornly not going away, but as the 2020 ruling shows, we keep making incremental progress toward maybe one day being able to live our lives free from their manufactured hatred and fear—and the destruction it causes in our lives.


THIS IS WHY WE CALL IT PRIDE.

CedaRound: The Drowning

Though I was living in Chicago at the time, I was in Cedar Rapids 16 years ago today to visit my folks for their June 14 anniversary. My boyfriend at the time and I had heard stories of looming flooding, and even though the rains and the swollen rivers diverted us north from highway 30 at Mt. Vernon and sent us into Cedar Rapids on Mt. Vernon Road, we still never believed Cedar Rapids could have serious flooding. I mean, it's CEDAR RAPIDS. I grew up here. How could anything bad happen?

By the time we finally got to my folks' house late on the 13th though, the flooding had become serious enough that the city's last intact water pumping station was in such danger of being breached that the urgent call went out on the news for volunteers to sandbag it. Though we'd had a 5-hour drive, we wanted to go out and help, but by the time we had a quick bathroom break before heading for the door, the news announced that they'd already gotten all the sandbaggers they needed. Which was a clear harbinger of the resilience our city would soon show. But at the time it was dark and late and we were 32 blocks from the river so all we could do was go to bed and wait.

The next morning, the footage on the news was devastating. The river had crested at 31.12 feet—19 feet over flood stage—and our entire downtown was drowning, as were 1,300 blocks of the city on either side of the river. Office buildings and banks and stores and my beloved theaters were almost up to the tops of their doors in water. All three bridges that cross May's Island to connect the east and west sides of the city were completely submerged. The Time Check and Czech Village neighborhoods were annihilated, with many houses underwater to their roof lines. The highly elevated I-380 was the only way to get across town, though all of the entrance and exit ramps in the flood zone were submerged. We—like seemingly everyone else in the city—drove slowly along the highway and peered out our windows to survey the devastation as the flood waters rippled mere feet beneath us.

As the water slowly receded, the city reeled over the destruction of homes, the closing of businesses, the undermining of infrastructure ... but never the loss of spirit. The city leaped almost immediately into action to tear down what was unsalvageable, repair what was repairable, clean up what was messy and dangerous, reimagine new life and purpose for what was destroyed, and start to recover and relocate and rebuild ourselves into a newer and better and more thoughtfully redesigned shining city on the river. We now have our vibrant and ever-expanding NewBo district and its neighboring Czech Village restoration, we've literally picked up and moved an entire museum to higher ground, we've creatively and beautifully incorporated new levees and berms into inviting public spaces, we've used the opportunity to upgrade and restore historic buildings, we've turned our once-desolate-after-5:00 downtown into a destination area bustling with restaurants and entertainment (well, before covid hit—but it bounced back as soon as returning was safe) ... and we've salvaged and restored and improved and polished up my beloved Paramount and Iowa (home of Theatre Cedar Rapids) theaters.

The flood was awful and heartwrenching and devastating. Many businesses never recovered. Many homes and families and lives have been forever changed. And our renaissance is perpetually ongoing and far from complete; in the last decade-plus, we've brought to life a towering modern addition to the stately Chicago-school American Building, built an expanding Habitrail of downtown skywalks, converted all the downtown one-way streets into two-way to feel more like friendly streets than impersonal expressways, incorporated towering, visually referential berms into the natural features along the river lowlands, and built many massive, architecturally interesting mixed-use buildings in the vibrantly revitalized Kingston Village neighborhood.

There was one sliver lining linking the 2008 flood that destroyed the center of the city to the 2020 land-hurricane derecho that destroyed enormous amounts of the entire city: The blocks and blocks of still-empty land in what was left of the flood-destroyed Time Check neighborhood became the primary dumping ground for the thousands and thousands of derecho-felled trees that the city slowly hauled away from everyone's property. It was centrally located, it offered a LOT of land and it made a mighty monument to the destruction the city endured. Driving by it was both breathtaking and heartbreaking. But also reassuring in that it provided a useful place for the city to dump the trees it collected and get back out to collect more as efficiently as possible.

Aside from the before-and-after photos of my dad's office, where he thought two levels of concrete blocks would protect his antique roll-top desk from the floodwaters that eventually submerged his entire office past its ceiling, the pictures I'm posting here aren't mine. But they show the depth and breadth of the destruction we all faced and make a great reminder of how amazingly far we have come in the last ten years.

So happy floodiversary, Cedar Rapids! May we keep our recovery and flood-protection development speeding along forevermore. (And don't forget to wish my folks a happy 60th anniversary tomorrow.)

Third Street looking south from First Avenue. You can see the old Theatre Cedar Rapids marquee on the left.

Theatre Cedar Rapids. All the First Avenue storefronts on the left were shut down after the flood, and the space became the awesome new Linge Lounge.

Dad’s office—and beautiful oak roll-top desk—before and after the flood. The desk was unsalvageable, and everything in it got ripped out and carried away by the floodwaters.

1,300 blocks on both sides of the river were submerged—some under more than 10 feet of water.

Those ghostly lines in the water are the totally submerged bridges that cross May’s Island as they connect the east and west sides of the city.

That’s normally-high-in-the-sky I-380 snaking through downtown with floodwater submerging its ramps and lapping at its floors.

The massive crown-jewel National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library building on the lower right was actually lifted and relocated to higher ground after the flood.


We parked this string of train cars on this essential train bridge before the flood to weigh it down so the floodwaters wouldn’t wash it away.


We parked this string of train cars on this essential train bridge before the flood to weigh it down so the floodwaters wouldn’t wash it away.


Entire neighborhoods. Families’ lives. Wiped out. No words.


The floodwaters floated the Mighty Wurlitzer organ console two stories from the bottom of the Paramount Theater orchestra pit to above the stage, where they dumped it like a dirty carcass.

Pride 101: Straight Pride

The right-wing privileged majority loves to claim oppression when any minority inches toward achieving any level of equality.

Read any right-wing social-media feed (or don’t—not reading right-wing social media is truly self-care) and you’ll see manufactured outrage claiming that [these are all things I’ve repeatedly seen and no doubt there’s a lot more]: 1) white people have completely disappeared from advertising, 2) it’s soon going to be illegal to be straight, 3) the Left claims to be tolerant but it’s sure not tolerant of oppressive, discriminatory beliefs, 4) when is it going to be White History Month? 5) there’s an entire Pride month but we don’t have any days or months celebrating our soldiers [you’d think people who pretend to respect the military would know that November 11 is Veterans’ Day, May is Military Appreciation Month and Memorial Day honors fallen soldiers], and this perennial flavor of the month: 6) why isn’t there a Straight Pride month/day/parade?

Here’s my short, all-purpose response to people demanding some sort of Straight Pride nonsense (and feel free to copy, edit and paste it everywhere you deem necessary): “If it’s so important to you, make it happen instead of whining about it deep in the comments under an obscure Facebook post. The gays figured it out. Why can’t you?”

And if someone responds with more whining about a fear of woke backlash, say this: “You sure don’t sound very proud.”

This has never not shut down the discussion. Because their manufactured-oppression arguments are laughably inane.

Pride month celebrates the LGBTQ+ community’s incremental victories over legal and physical oppression. It was literally illegal to be or even seem gay in America for centuries. We were hunted, arrested, evicted, disowned, beaten and murdered for just being ourselves. But as early as the 1950s we started fighting back, changing perceptions, changing minds, changing laws and taking control of our narrative.

The battle will clearly never end, but we as a still-in-many-ways-oppressed minority have created a robust Pride movement that’s celebrated across many different months in many different cities and countries around the globe. The straight majority can’t even achieve an hour-long Straight Pride celebration. They’d rather appropriate our oppression than acknowledge their own privilege. And we will always have the moral, logical, humane, loving high ground.

THIS IS WHY WE CALL IT PRIDE.

Pride 101: Blood donation bans

In 1983—at the height of the HIV and AIDS epidemic in the United States—the U.S. Food and Drug Administration instituted a lifetime ban on blood donations from gay men (specifically “men who have sex with men” or MSM, a distinction necessitated by a sizable population of MSM who refuse for any number of reasons to be identified as gay or bisexual).

The ban was actually even broader than that; it also included women who have sex with MSM and—irrelevantly in this specific context—transgender people. At the time, HIV was—and was perceived by the broader population to be exclusively—a “gay disease” and was gleefully used by religious hate groups to perpetuate their vilification of—and mock and exploit the deaths of—gay people. The ban was an extreme measure, but as 1980s technologies in HIV detection weren’t very effective it was seen as prudent—with no resistance from leading gay organizations—and it no doubt prevented an even larger American HIV epidemic.

As HIV spread beyond the gay-male population, the infection demographics leveled out and HIV-detection technologies advanced, in 2015 the FDA guidelines regarding blood donations from MSM were reduced from a lifetime ban to a one-year-of-celibacy requirement.

But these requirements served no purpose beyond discrimination; the Insti HIV test—which had been introduced nine years earlier and was considered to be the most accurate and convenient of all technologies, requiring just a small finger prick—had a 99.96% accuracy rate, with results provided in one minute. There was literally no medical or ethical reason to single out MSM for this ongoing ban.

Then in April 2020—as blood supplies dwindled to crisis levels at the dawn of the COVID-19 pandemic—the one-year celibacy requirement was reduced to three months.

Still, the institutionalized discrimination was not eliminated; a man who had protected sex with one other man in the previous three months was not allowed to give blood, but—for instance—a woman who had unprotected sex with multiple men in the previous week faced no such restriction. (For the record, the relatively small populations of people with certain medical conditions, people on certain medications and people who have had blood transfusions have always been subject to other restrictions and bans.)

With often desperately low stockpiles of donated blood in the United States and with advanced testing and medical knowledge, there was literally no reason at the time to keep specifically restricting blood donations from MSM based on outdated demographic medical information and stigmas regarding HIV.

But after decades of discrimination, medical progress, lobbying, and a slow dawning of equality and common sense, we’ve finally eliminated the MSM-only restrictions. In May 2023, the FDA overhauled its screening process for all donors by simply asking a series of preliminary questions about recent sexual activity, drug use and HIV exposure and imposing reasonable restrictions for everyone based on the responses.

After literally four decades, the march to erase unreasonable homophobic stigmas and embrace 21st Century medical knowledge finally achieved its goals, and MSM without legitimate risks are proudly—despite the humiliation and discrimination of the historic bans—stepping up and doing our part as blood donors.

THIS IS WHY WE CALL IT PRIDE.

Pride 101: LGBTQ+ survival

Cisgender heterosexuals—how many times have you:

• Gathered with other straight cisgender friends while people with bullhorns held giant signs and screamed at you that they hope you die of AIDS
• Gotten egged and insulted by people screaming out of a car as you waited in line to enter a straight bar
• Pretended to be someone you’re not out of fear that your mechanic or doctor or waiter or accountant or employer or family would do something bad to you, yell at you to leave or eject you from their lives
• Walked down the street holding hands with your spouse or partner and been accosted by a stranger calling you filthy and disgusting and declaring that he or she shouldn’t be “forced” to see your affection
• Been told that other people's manufactured discomfort about who your are is more important than you being authentically who you are
• Been silenced about even casually mentioning who you and your family are by a "don't say straight" law
• Watched your rights being used as a bargaining chip in national political machinations
• Had your inequality dismissed as a "social issue" and cemented into law by a public vote over a state propositionHad your inequality cemented into law by a public vote over a state proposition
• Watched people fight so hard to discriminate against you that they take their hatred all the way to the Supreme Court
• Joined a church that condemns you to hell
• Been consumed by your own white-hot hatred that you don’t want and you don’t need and you don’t deserve because the above hostilities constantly bombard you while you have almost no recourse

Probably every LGBTQ+ person you know has been called a faggot. Or worse. I have. More times than I can remember.

Probably every LGBTQ+ person you know has had something thrown at them with the intention to hurt or humiliate them. I have. It was a barrage of eggs thrown from a car as some friends and I stood on a sidewalk in Chicago's Boystown … where we'd assumed we were safe from such bullshit. The cowards who threw the eggs missed all of us and raced away cackling like they were big men who somehow mattered.

Many LGBTQ+ people you know have been physically, violently assaulted. I never have, but I have friends who've been assaulted so violently that they've been hospitalized.

It's 2024. The homophobic violence that our forebears endured may have lessened, but it hasn't stopped. And while straight cisgender people probably barely even think about what we endure, we all still get up, walk out the door every day, and live our lives as openly as we dare and as comfortably as we can.

THIS IS WHY WE CALL IT PRIDE.

Pride 101: Pride Month begins

Before the 1969 Stonewall riots, virtually every aspect of the lives of gay people was illegal to varying degrees in America: being openly gay, showing public affection, having sex, marriage, adoption, assembly in public, assembly in private, going to gay bars … even owning bars with any form of gay designation.

The only gay bars that existed were owned by crime syndicates, who definitely weren’t at the vanguard of fighting for gay liberation; they saw in the gay population a steady and highly dependent form of revenue that the mobs could protect via their considerable influence over law enforcement. Gay people were exploited for our desperate need to find each other and for the money we were willing to pay to feel like we weren’t alone. We paid exorbitant prices for watered-down, bottom-shelf liquor. We gathered in buildings that were unclean, unsafe and unimportant to society. We entered those bars carrying cash for bail with the clear expectation that we might need it.

The subtexts were shame, risk, secrecy, and arrest and public humiliation—and the very likely loss of our families, jobs and homes—if we were caught entering or exiting these bars.

But in the gathering momentum of our achievements in equality over the last half century, our forebears demanded—and slowly, surely got—our growing equality and our freedom to live our lives openly and safely and without imposed shame and exploitation.

THIS IS WHY WE CALL IT PRIDE.

Mental Health Awareness Month: My TMIpolar Blog

My 2008 bipolar diagnosis suddenly made sense of all the weirdnesses floating around in my head: plunging depressions, paranoias, social anxieties, impulsive behaviors, suicidal ideation, big ideas without consequences alarms, racing thoughts, abject terror in social situations (I once had a full-on panic attack when I opened a party invitation that came in the mail) (remember getting party invitations in the mail?) …

Newly armed with a name for the collective demons I faced, I started fighting back (or at least trying to manage my world) with everything I had at my disposal—which at the beginning wasn't much because my doctor didn’t think I needed medication. So I launched into a homemade cocktail of deep breaths, internal pep talks, more-informed behaviors and decisions, reading everything I could find, looking for a new doctor who might have more powerful (i.e., pharmaceutical) tools for me to use … and the expectation that I might at any moment need to just retreat to the safety of my condo in the sky to regroup and start again the next day.

I also became self-aware enough to start being embarrassed by things I did in public … mostly bouncing around as though I were on fire, being so down I’d no-show at events I promised to attend, and in more than one instance literally running away when someone tried to introduce me to a friend.
So I did what any self-respecting writer would do: I turned to social media to start explaining myself and apologizing for being so damn weird. And to my surprise, I almost immediately started getting understanding, support … and thanks from people in similar situations for being so open about my mental illness and the challenges it brought me.

Eventually someone suggested that I start a blog to document my thoughts, feelings, experiences, and the highs and lows of my journey. So I launched TMIpolar (get it? It’s BI polar but I overshare so it’s TMI polar, which I will go to my grave thinking is one of my most clever linguistic inventions) and backfilled it with everything I’d posted and started filling it with my new adventures.

There is also a book in the works, but the prospect of organizing my thoughts into something approaching legitimate book form is so overwhelming that you shouldn’t start looking for it in bookstores until 2095.

In a weird way to think this is unfortunate, I unfortunately have been so stable in the last few years that I haven’t had much to post about any noteworthy ups and downs of my personal journey. But I’ve aggregated all my Mental Health Awareness Month essays along with other essays/thoughts/reviews/etc on the blog for my own—along with anyone else’s—reference.

 
So check it out and even bookmark it if you want. I’ve spent ridiculous amounts of time organizing things by keywords for your perusing convenience. And I hope it helps (or at the very least entertains) you if you find you need it.

 
Here’s the link for your clicking convenience: TMIpolar.blogspot.com 

Mental Health Awareness Month: NAMI

The National Alliance On Mental Illness (NAMI) is a nationwide organization that provides informational and emotional support for the caregivers who work to keep people with mental illnesses on track and stable—or at the very least it lets the caregivers know they're not alone.

The organization has 1,000 state and local affiliates across all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. To keep it accessible to everyone who needs it, NAMI is funded through pharmaceutical company donations, individual donors, sponsorships and grants.

My parents found a lifeline in NAMI when I was diagnosed as bipolar over a decade ago. Now my mom—a retired teacher, so this is totally in her wheelhouse—has taught classes to help NAMI members better manage the situations they face and has undergone formal training to be a group meeting leader. I'm so thankful for everything my parents and my sister's family have done to support me in my bipolar adventures. NAMI has helped them help me manage my life with a considerable degree of success and relative normalcy.

If you’re interested in learning more or finding a NAMI group to attend, please visit nami.org.

Mental Health Awareness Month: Tardive Dyskenesia

As if mental illness itself weren’t embarrassing and exhausting enough—and as if the spectrum of side effects from psych meds weren’t even more embarrassing and exhausting—along comes tardive dyskenesia. 

Aside from sounding like an antebellum flowering vine, tardive dyskenesia is also a range of involuntary, repetitive neuromuscular movements of the tongue, lips, face, torso and extremities that occur in people treated with long-term antipsychotics and other dopamine-receptor-blocking medications. If you’ve ever stood or sat near me for an extended period of time, you’ve no doubt seen the full compendium of symptoms: grimacing, lip chewing and pursing, heavy blinking, face touching (and I deserve seven gold medals for fighting back the compulsion to touch my face 75 times a minute in the Coronavirus Olympics), arm swinging, leg hitting, rocking, fidgeting, shaking, and—oddest of all—being on tiptoe whenever I’m sitting down. I continue to cringe every time I see video footage of me talking or singing with my lower jaw weirdly askew. My foot also pulses on the gas pedal when I drive, and a number of people have told me it almost makes them carsick when they ride with me.

I’m rather lucky in that my flailing and wiggling are more embarrassing than physically problematic, but about 20% of the population living with the disorder literally can’t function; it can prevent them from walking, eating and even breathing.

And as a point of clarification, these symptoms are the opposite of those from Parkinson’s Disease. People with Parkinson's have difficulty moving, whereas people with tardive dyskenesia have difficulty not moving.

Tardive dyskenesia symptoms can lessen, change or even go away over time after a person stops taking neuroleptic medications, though more often than not they’re permanent. My symptoms have noticeably changed over the last decade, but I’ve traded making alarming sucking sounds on my lips for making an entire room tremble from my violently shaking legs.

There are many medications that can be used to manage the symptoms to varying degrees. After five-plus years of needless misery, I successfully weaned myself off the anticonvulsant Gabapentin, which did or didn't work depending on the way the wind blew and the leg trembled. It also tended to make me drowsy and sometimes even confused, which makes me especially surprised that it’s used recreationally—under the totally lame street name Gabbies—for its supposed euphoric effects that I absolutely NEVER experienced.

One more thing: You may have seen the commercials for the prohibitively expensive tardive dyskenesia medications Ingrezza and Austedo … the commercials where they call tardive dyskenesia “TD” like it’s some cool brand of earphones or energy drink. Dear Ingrezza-makers Neurocrine Biosciences and Austedo-makers Teva Pharmaceuticals: I’ve had tardive dyskenesia for over a decade. I’ve been seeing psychiatrists and neurologists about it for over a decade. I’ve read everything I could read about it for over a decade. I’ve been on medications for it for over a decade. And NOBODY outside of medical publications and pharmacy websites calls it TD. STOP TRYING TO MAKE TD HAPPEN.

Mental Health Awareness Month: Psychotropics

Aside from being an objectively cool band name for people with mental illnesses, psychotropics is an umbrella term for the classes of drugs used to treat mental disorders and control moods, behaviors, thoughts or perceptions.

There are five categories (and multiple subcategories) of psychotropic medications: antidepressants, anti-anxiety medications, stimulants, antipsychotics and mood stabilizers. And like many of my fellow mental-illness travelers, I’ve tried damn near all of them.

Here’s a brief rundown:

ANTIDEPRESSANTS, as you might surmise, are used to treat a range of depression symptoms. They include:

• Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), which steadily increase the amount of serotonin in your brain. Serotonin is a powerful neurotransmitter that regulates things like mood, sleep, blood clotting and even bowel movements. (Aren’t you glad you know that last part?)
• Selective norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs), which gradually increase the amount of norepinephrine in your brain. Norepinephrine makes you feel awake and alert. After over a decade of trial and error, my doctor finally landed on the SNRI Fetzima as my magic bullet, and aside from a blackout-go-boom-get-concussion on the tile floor a few days after I started it, it’s been a complete game-changer for me.
• Bupropion, which promotes important brain activity and can be used to treat seasonal affective disorder (SAD) or to help people quit smoking.

Antidepressants come with a range of frustrating side effects, including drowsiness, insomnia (how fun to have both!), constipation (more poop stuff!), weight gain, sexual issues, tremors and dry mouth.


ANTI-ANXIETY MEDICATIONS are used to treat panic attacks, phobias, generalized anxiety, and various anxiety-related symptoms.

This class of psychotropics includes beta blockers that help treat the physical symptoms of anxiety, including increased heartbeat, nausea, sweating and trembling.

Because they typically cause drowsiness, some tranquilizers and sleep medications are also used to treat anxiety and insomnia. These tend to be prescribed for only a short time to prevent dependency.

These drugs’ side effects can include nausea, blurry vision, headaches, confusion, fatigue and graphic nightmares. And oh, have I had some doozy graphic nightmares on my find-the-right-psychotropics journey.


STIMULANTS help manage unorganized behavior by improving concentration and providing a general sense of calm. They’re often prescribed for people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Their most notable side effects include insomnia, decreased appetite and weight loss.


ANTIPSYCHOTICS help manage psychosis, which separates people’s perceptions from reality and drowns them in delusions or hallucinations.

Antipsychotics can help people with psychosis think more clearly, feel calmer, sleep better and communicate more effectively. They’re also used to treat ADHD, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder and eating disorders.

Their side effects are primarily drowsiness, upset stomach, increased appetite and weight gain.


MOOD STABILIZERS help regulate extreme emotions. They may rob you of feeling the extreme excitement or extreme sadness that everyone experiences—which is my case—but they help manage massive bipolar swings and extreme mood swings, which is a tradeoff I’m happy to live with.

I regularly experience all their usual side effects: drowsiness, weight gain, dizziness, tremors, blurry vision and occasional confusion. I’m especially unhappy with the weight gain, but thanks to an effective mood stabilizer (in my case, the relatively common drug Lamotrigine) I can consistently and reliably participate in everyday living. Even though I have to have a damn Santa tummy to do it.


THE SIDE EFFECTS OF THESE MEDICATIONS can be powerful and overwhelming. There’s one set of side effects that present when you’re ramping up a dosage, there’s another set of side effects that come with daily use of a drug, and there’s another (often excruciating) set of side effects that come with weaning off a drug. Which is why I’ll never understand the mindset that some people get where they decide they feel fine and they’re just gonna stop taking their meds.

Mental Health Awareness Month: Mania

Mania (or being manic) is the opposite of depression in the up-and-down swings of bipolar disorder. It’s also the other half of the no-longer-used term manic depression, which was changed to bipolar disorder in the 1980 third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (or DSM) in the interest of reducing stigmas related to the words manic and depression.

Bipolar disorder is subdivided into bipolar I (which has more extreme swings in each direction) and bipolar II (which manifests with lower levels of mania—clinically called hypomania—and deeper depressions). I’m bipolar II.

Like depression, mania can manifest itself over different lengths of time in any number or combination of symptoms, including these:

• High, uncontrollable energy
• Extreme, rapid talkativeness
• Racing thoughts or flights of ideas
• Feelings of elation or euphoria
• Feelings of irritation or agitation
• High distractibility and inability to focus
• Decreased need for sleep while still feeling rested
• Inflated self-esteem or grandiosity
• Feeling full of great new ideas, important plans or exciting activities
• Involvement in risky activities—like extravagant shopping, improbable commercial schemes, recreational drugs, hypersexuality—with a high likelihood of negative consequences

Some bipolar people claim they like or actually love their manic episodes. I can understand that sentiment from the perspective of having a little more energy or euphoria, but I find that anything more than that can be terrifying. And exhausting.

It’s terrifying because I know from experience I’m prone to do impulsive things with no consequences alarms going off in my head. After more than a decade on the bipolar coaster, I’m finally self-aware enough that I know I’m doing (or at least reminding myself not to do) those impulsive things and I need to summon the alarms myself because they won’t go off on their own. Thankfully my impulsive behaviors tend to be rather benign and fixable, like buying shoes and clothing online. But there’s always the possibility I might escalate, and who knows what my impulsive brain could be capable of.

It’s also terrifying because my manic episodes often plummet directly into the deepest of my depressive episodes. Again: I’m finally self-aware enough to know that the depressive episodes are coming and I can do what little I’m able to do to prepare for them, like canceling plans and setting out Tylenol PM to help me hopefully sleep through the worst of them.

Everyone experiences mania and depression differently—to different degrees, for different lengths of time, at different intervals and even in different environmental conditions. Neither is better or easier than the other, and both in their own way can control or disrupt your life.

You’ll probably never encounter me in a depressive state because I become immediately reclusive. But if I’m talking rapidly and visibly distracted by everything and more jittery than normal, please do your best to keep me away from the Nordstrom website.

Mental Health Awareness Month: Depression

Everyone can feel occasionally sad, lonely or unmotivated as a result of anything from grief to just having an off day. But when these feelings become exponential and overwhelming and prevent you from functioning, you could be suffering from clinical depression.

And there isn’t a single kind of depression. It’s diagnosed when you present any long-term combination of symptoms including feelings of worthlessness and hopelessness, trouble concentrating, insomnia, fatigue, loss of interest in pleasurable things, restlessness, suicidal ideation—and even physical symptoms including body aches, digestive problems and appetite loss. Depression symptoms also vary widely based on age, gender and personal circumstances.

There isn’t a single kind of treatment either; depression can be managed with any combination of psychotherapy, antidepressants, exercise, certain supplements (vitamin D and fish oil have noticeably increased the efficacy of my meds) and in extreme cases electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)—with focused attention paid to people expressing suicidal thoughts and reckless behaviors.

Depression can also present itself along with other clinical disorders including psychosis, bipolar disorder and seasonal affective disorder. In my case, I have both bipolar II disorder and major depressive disorder—which means my shutdowns are almost always epic: I collapse into a deep, deep hole of despondency, exhaustion, physical pain, dull panic, slurred speech, a metallic taste on my tongue, and a fog that feels like a hot, wet, suffocating blanket I can’t find a way out of. All I can do is sleep in a drenching sweat, lose all track of time and frequently wake up with the pain of an oncoming migraine that thankfully never fully manifests itself.

Plus I’m totally no fun at parties. :-)

On a personal note, I have serious issues with the word “depression” in itself. I know it’s impossible to find a word that succinctly encompasses all these symptoms, but colloquial English has appropriated depression to mean feeling kinda blah, and people also associate the word with low spots in the ground, dips in the road and economic slumps, so they tend to think that clinical depression is just sadness. And if we depressed people had a nickel for every time someone told us to cheer up or decide to be happy, we just might be rich enough to actually BE happy. I know people who say these things are often coming from a place of not understanding and of just trying to be helpful, but the word depression is exactly the reason they’re confused and ultimately unhelpful.

And on that note, if you know someone who’s depressed or struggling through a depressive episode and you want to help, just ask what you can do. Some of us want to be left alone, but some people may want you to sit quietly with them so they don’t feel alone … or bring them some ice water … or call 911 … or some people may genuinely want you to try to cheer them up.

This is way off-topic and completely unhelpful given most of what I’ve just said, but if the latter request is the case, I recommend you start with my all-time favorite joke:

What’s brown and sticky?

A stick.