Still Just a Geek, page 57
You used me, Mom. I’m not saying this in anger or making an accusation. I shouldn’t have to say that, but I spent my whole life holding your feelings in my hands, and it is still hard for me to state something that’s a simple, fact-based truth. You used me to fill something in yourself that wasn’t there. And because you were so focused on filling up your own emptiness, you either did not see or chose to ignore how much your little boy was hurting.
I think you chose to see what you wanted to see and swept everything else away, because everything else got in the way of the lie you told yourself.
And while all of this was happening, when I was begging you to let me be a kid, when you were spending my childhood chasing your dream, the man you married and created me with was bullying me. I have such clear and painful memories of so many of the times he humiliated me, or made me feel stupid, small, worthless, or afraid, and I find it so hard to believe that you didn’t see any of that. And if you did, and you didn’t do anything about it? Well, maybe you did play a role in my mental illness after all.
I know all of this is upsetting to you. I wish it were upsetting because you, like, feel regret. But the you I knew for forty-six years is working really hard on your victim narrative right now.
I needed you to be my mom because I never had a father. The man who was my father made a choice when I was very small to be my bully. He was never loving, nurturing, kind, or gentle. He was cruel, implacable, inscrutable, and terrifying. He yelled at me about everything. He humiliated me, made me feel small, and filled me with self-doubt. He hurt me at every opportunity, and I did nothing to deserve it. Through all of it, you protected him and enabled his abuse. He’s a huge guy, over six feet tall, and always carried himself with a degree of threat and menace toward me. I never knew when he was going to blow up at me, mock me, or make me a target of his cruelty. It was always a breath away, so I can count on one hand the number of times I stood up to him. And when I did, it was always the same. He’d sulk for a day or so, and you would make me apologize to him. Then we’d all pretend nothing happened, until it happened again.
This made me feel unsafe, unsupported, and confused. Mom, the lies you told yourself, and me, about the way Dad treated me totally contradicted my lived experience with him. That, plus your refusal to hear me when I begged you to let me be a kid, hurt and confused little me so much that my brain began to physically change as a result.
Dad treated me like shit my whole life. He made sure I knew how little I meant to him, in ways spoken and unspoken, all the time. And you never made him stop. You never protected me when I couldn’t protect myself. And all of that was incredibly traumatic to me, when my brain was developing, when my personality was developing. And though I don’t want you to blame yourself for my mental illness, I needed you to at least accept some responsibility for contributing to the circumstances that caused it, and I needed you to put your narrative aside so we could heal together, like the family you always said we were.
As a consequence of the trauma I experienced, I developed generalized anxiety disorder and major chronic depression. Did you just not see it, or did you choose to ignore it? This unanswered question haunts me. You didn’t help me when I was in your care, and you didn’t support me when I was struggling in my twenties. Thankfully, I did seek professional help, so I could stop suffering. I was eventually diagnosed with PTSD, and I’ve spent every day since then working it out. I have flashbacks. They are terrifying and they are awful, but they are thankfully infrequent. At almost forty-nine years old, I still feel the pain of the emotional bruises you did nothing to protect me from.
The way I understand it, you and Dad grew up in a world and in households where mental health was shameful and taboo, and perpetuating the myth of a perfect family was paramount. I wish you’d been able to set aside your own shame and your concerns about how my struggles made you look. I wish Dad had cared about me at all. I feel like you either ignored or chose not to see all of my symptoms.
I’m not excusing your inability to recognize my depression, but I am doing my best to be empathetic and compassionately understand it, because you grew up in a world where mental illness was equated with weakness and shame, and as a result of your ignorance and pride, I suffered until I was in my thirties.
Okay, I have a speech to get back to, but I have to do something real quick before I do. I’m going to open up my little hands, I’m going to shrug my little shoulders, and I’m going to scoop up all of that responsibility you made me carry for you. I give it all back. I carried that for you for a really long time, and it was never mine to carry. I just wanted to be a kid, Mom.
*No . . . the world has always been a scary place. She was just realizing I felt that way about it, and was still pinning it on me, with her patented brand of minimizing my feelings and experiences.
*Again, because I was protecting her feelings, I was not truthful here. “Blame” is such a strong word, I hesitate to use it. But she absolutely participated in many (if not all) of the events that precipitated my mental health struggles. When I came to her, I was terrified and in desperate need of comfort and guidance. I was just a kid in pain, and it was natural to expect my mother to be a source of comfort and safety. I get that she didn’t have the tools, but she also didn’t make an effort to find the tools, and that’s on her.
*It’s been years, and this remains true. I am so grateful I seem to have worked all this behavior out of my system. Thanks, science and therapy!
*It’s fascinating to me when I read this, and other passages where I speak of “what if” with wonder and reverence.
That’s how intricate our minds are—you can think the exact same words, but with totally different meanings depending on the context.
These days, I really try to focus on the creative “what if,” but when the noxious “what if” tries to invade my mind, at least I have tools to push back.
*Wort?
I think it’s wort. But what the hell is a wort?
Or maybe she actually did say “wart,” but meant “wort.”
Either way, she wasn’t helping. She was minimizing me and my feelings.
*And what I found wasn’t silence, but conversation. Meaningful noises that added to the fabric of the world I was in.
There’s a difference between a cacophony and language, and opening that door let me hear what the world was saying, and with enough time between the sounds so I could get out what was inside of me.
*And something you’ve already probably heard me say a few times in this book.
It’s always apt.
*How many of you have heard that?
“Have you just tried being happy?”
“Maybe if you don’t think about the sad things?”
“Have you tried turning it off and back on again?”
Wait. You mean I can just choose to stop feeling terrible? My goodness, incredibly unhelpful person, I NEVER TRIED THAT.
Shout-out to my fellow travelers who have endured this exchange, as I have, too many times.
Believe me, we are trying. And those questions aren’t helpful.
*Obviously mentally, but physically as well. The chemicals that course through our bodies are powerful, and the after-effects (not exercising, not eating, eating poorly, et cetera) take their toll.
*And when you just can’t be okay? That’s okay, too. It’s okay to not be okay.
*This might be the hardest thing for me to swallow—I explain why, below.
*We could prioritize everything—health care (both mental and physical), infrastructure, education, social assistance, hunger, homelessness, the environment—and still let all the billionaires be billionaires.
Chances are, most of them would actually end up richer if they did it right.
*National Alliance on Mental Illness.
*You can learn more about them here: https://projecturok.org/who-we-are
And yes, they do rock.
*Or wrong. That’s part of the stigma: that mental illness makes us different from other people in a way that can’t be overcome.
The thing is, the change that needs to come is from those without mental illness, especially the ones who have the power to make such changes lasting.
*Trust might be one of the single biggest tools necessary to dealing with mental illness. You need to trust yourself and what you’re feeling, you need to trust the person you’re telling will listen to you with empathy, and you need to trust things like therapy and medication will actually help.
That’s a LOT. But if you can start with even one person you trust (yourself, a partner, a friend, a doctor) the door to that dark room IS going to open.
* Because I brought it up, good time to note that mental illness doesn’t cause mass shootings.
Access to guns with no checks does.
It’s easier (and cheaper) to buy a gun in America than it is to see a psychiatrist and get medication.
Which you probably already know, but it bears repeating until we actually do something about it.
*Adding these five words is the goal. If we can get here as a society, I’d be prouder of that than anything else in my professional life.
*This sounds like a company in a dystopian movie, but there’s nothing nefarious here—I promise.
*Editor: Nauseated.
Me: Common usage.
*This did not, and still does not, come easily. It takes hard work to think about Future You. But it’s ALWAYS worth it.
*“There’s nothing tricky about it! It’s just a little trick!”—The Brad Jacobs . . . something or other.
*Again, I think this is the kind of list you’ll need to put together on your own, but having something tangible to refer to can make it a lot easier when you’re not giving a shit about Future You because Present You is dealing with depression or anxiety or whatever it is you’re feeling.
*Future You will also appreciate having a spoon so they can eat cereal later.
* Future Future You will also appreciate you made the green choice.
*I write this casually, and sitting here knowing that this might not be on the same level as “make your bed” or “do your dishes.”
But it actually can be. Breaking off a relationship isn’t easy, but we do it all the time, and it can be one of the most important parts of getting Future You better.
If said person is truly abusive, and you’re afraid, know there are people and organizations that can help.
*I noted that I quit Twitter entirely years ago, and here’s why:
I learned how its algorithms are specifically designed to surface and promote material that will upset you, in order to drive engagement. That, and the unchecked spread of conspiracists and fascists made leaving Twitter behind forever pretty easy. I walked away from three million followers and never looked back.
If I can do that, I know you can take a day or two off from Twitter, or maybe all social media.
*I know not all of you can afford that. But there are lots of free things you can reward yourself with. Books from the library. A visit to a public museum. A playlist of songs that make you happy on Spotify.
*For me, I see Future Wil writing Yes, I’m Still Just a Geek and annotating all these annotations.
Or maybe I’m going to put on my list that I’m never going to do that.
*Me: I can hear you rolling your eyes at this from across the country, editor.
Editor: Who? Me?
*Seriously, I’m trying to be poignant here, and my editor points out “You know, you’re repeating the word ‘best’ here. But maybe that perfectly proves you’re not writing well in this passage?”
This guy . . .
*This is a euphemism, if you didn’t already get that.
*And, in the case of the family that raised me, more wonderful . . . yet still as complicated.
* It was weird at the time. I really struggled about whether or not I wanted to do this—if it was my place. But I had hundreds of thousands of followers by this point, and knew enough about fandom (and grief) to know this might help some people.
Fandom is often dismissed (we’ve all seen the SNL sketch with Shatner, which is both hilarious and—as it is intended—over the top), but it isn’t about knowing all the details; it’s about the connections between other people. Yes, neither I nor my followers knew Leonard Nimoy.
And yet, we did.
*The idea of a TV show about a bunch of men riding around in a windowless van . . . probably doesn’t play quite the same today.
*Also, we’re both incredibly handsome. Like I said: perfect fit.
*I cannot fully wrap my head around this because it just seems so unreal that anyone would feel this way. But it happens so often, I have to accept that it’s true, and I’m doing my best to embrace and accept it.
*Is this a bold claim? Yes. Did others help contribute? Of course (the rest of the cast clearly played invaluable roles in forming the sci-fi minds of today). But Spock was something different and new, showing the world you didn’t need to be the Alpha—the Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers (or, if you’re my age, Duck Dodgers)—in order to be a hero. And that truly changed science fiction going forward.
*I LOVED Land of the Lost when I was a kid. It scared me just enough to be fun, and it was about this family working together in extreme circumstances to be a family. It’s such a great show, and it totally holds up for me.
If you remember watching Land of the Lost while you ate your Cookie Crisp cereal on Saturday morning, are you sure you’re getting enough calcium in your diet? We gotta fight osteoporosis before it starts, y’all.
*By now you’re thinking: What does any of this have to do with Star Trek?
Well, it does. So keep reading.
*This show is called Titansgrave: The Ashes of Valkana. It’s ten episodes of me running some friends through an RPG campaign I designed with my son Ryan and a team of outstanding RPG writers.
The idea was to tell an episodic story for the audience, while we let the players drive the details with their choices.
Think Critical Role, but not live, and edited to feel more like a scripted series.
*If Ryan got his sense of humor from me, then that might be the coolest thing I’ve ever done as a father. So yeah, this is terrible, and I love every bit of it.
*I’ve now written Mr. Do! four times here, but that’s okay. If I say them aloud, though . . .
I just realized I’m reading this for the audiobook . . .
CLOWN ON THE LOOSE!!! MR. DO!
*This is hilarious to me, now. I can’t believe I thought this was good, at all. It isn’t even average. I’ve played so much Mr. Do! this last year (while Chris Hardwick taught himself classical piano during the pandemic, I got kinda good at a video game from 1982) I have to score at least 437,000 to make the tenth spot on my high score list. An average game for me now is around 250,000 points. I looked on Twin Galaxies, and saw that the record set in the eighties is over eight million, and I can’t even comprehend how to get a score that high.
*You might be asking yourself:
Wasn’t he going to come over to play Dragon Age?
Then you might be asking yourself:
How did this transition into him coming over to play Mr. Do!?
Then you might be asking yourself:
And how does this connect to Star Trek? Where is that large automobile?
To which I say: Stop asking questions and just read the story!
* I have no idea why this detail is here.
For all the writers out there, this is probably a good reminder that detail ≠ story.
But man, it was a good sandwich.
* This was just a few days before we started principal photography on Titansgrave.
*This was said with all the sympathy one can muster when you’ve been waiting impatiently for a chance to play.
*I have since figured out that a high score game really needs to average about 13,000 per level, and the real secret is to always go for the extra man, even when it means you’re leaving points on the screen, because the points eventually take care of themselves.
I think maybe I’ve spent a little too much time playing this game.
*Now wife. I love you, Claudette. You are the daughter I always wanted, and I am so grateful you are part of my family. Our family.
*See my note about the chicken sandwich.
It all pertains (including the review).
*He didn’t beat my high score that day.
*See! It was relevant! Kind of.
