Are You Nuts?

I live through depression and anxiety. This admission is not meant to elicit sympathy or to excuse any of my behavior past, present, and future, it is meant to explain my understanding of the topic of mental health. I have sometimes acute social anxiety; sometimes having to go up to strangers and talk to them is unbearable. When I need to go into a shop and ask for something, I will be outside for a few minutes rehearsing what to say so the ordeal will be over quickly.

And a lot of people live with these issues, with what could be called “compromised mental health.”

Just force a big smile until it feels natural.

We’re told this, even if you’re raw and hurting you are expected to put on a show, be upbeat. To negate the strain we numb ourselves with drugs, prescribed and unprescribed including alcohol and other indulgances.

And you can keep it up for awhile on top of all the other pressure in your life like the career and the family and your long term goals, but at some point things break—

Or your so zonked out on meds that life is just drifting from one fugue state to another.

I should just kill myself. It’s going to be like this for days, months, years, decades….it’s never going to get better...

That voice, it comes on from time to time. And it takes famous people we admire like Chris Cornell or Anthony Bourdain, it erases many names the world will never know.

I hear it sometimes, maybe you do as well. You get older, you have more perspective, that mental states—both good and bad—eventually pass and you just have to ride it out like that bus ride across town next to the malodorous hobo that keeps muttering darkly to his imaginary foes. Eventually you will reach your stop and the ordeal will be over.

This is a problem I have with our culture, with the United States: We don’t allow people to be weak, we look down on it.

Why are you moping? There’s no time, where is your 401k? Are you working towards an uptick in your career? Hey, we need you to work on your days off…

And we just play along with little thought. We learn to mask our weaknesses, numb our pain with the beforementioned drugs and indulgences—I know I did until three years ago. When I left the “real world” behind to live out of my van, a story covered in my book No Signal, I saw our society from the outside. I saw how frentic and unsustainable our pace of life is. We have the boss emailing us about the project at eleven o’ clock at night, on our “vacation.” Our kids have this impossible load of school work they need our help with. The bills…okay, we were nearly thirty days late on that bill so which one can we let slide this paycheck?

There’s no space in our life for self-help, real self-help, so we take those pills or have an extra glass of wine at night.

I get it, I had a shitty night last night so I drank five glasses of wine just to bring myself down: Wine. Zoloft. Weed. Whatever gets you through, right?

And that is genuinely fucked up, my friend.

That’s great, Izaak, you’ve just outlined how shitty and stressful my life is and not offered a solution.

The solution exists, but it is not simple.

The first step in solving any personal problem is acknowledging that you have a problem. The article is about acknowleding that we, as a society, have a problem. We put all this pressure and expectations on people—and we allow them to be put on us—and don’t allow people to decompress, to recover, to just go to the beach or go to the woods and stare at trees and birds for a couple of days.

Are you crazy? I have all this work to do and my kids have all these projects at school and—

Like I said, the solution exists, but it is not simple.

Like I said, the first step in solving a personal problem is admitting there is a problem.

My solution is leaving the United States, either literally or simply leaving the “norms” of our culture. Three years ago I moved out of the house I shared with my ex-wife. I live in a company supplied trailer, but technically I am houseless aside from my van. I have pared down my belongings so that all of them fit in the beforementioned van and a closet—and I mean to pare them down more. I trained myself—and, believe me, trained is the right word—to survive out in public spaces in the van, finding safe places to go to the bathroom and spend the night. That was leaving the “norms” of our culture. I may take it a step further, move to a country like Mexico or Vietnam where the standards of living are “below” ours, but the pace of life is more sustainable.

You’re single, Izaak, and you have no kids; it’s easy for you.

It’s not easy for anyone, it is a complicated process both technically and emotionally, but—

Do you want to keep doing this? Do we want to keep doing this?

I have spoken in the past about “visualizing your future,” writing down the life you would like to be leading in five years. Be honest with yourself, be open to what you really want….you can do that and still be realistic.

Does it look anything like the life you are currently leading?

It’s not too late to change as long as you are still breathing.