you can't go forcing something if it's just not right
"when i come around" by greenday & mental health awareness month
Since May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and since all of my books end up touching on topics of mental health in some way — and The Art of Catching Feelings possibly most of all — I wanted to write about a few things I’ve been thinking about lately re mental health. This is the perfect place to mention upfront that I’m going to be talking about depression and anxiety, as well as suicide, in case those are tough topics for you.
I love to call “When I Come Around” the “fuckboi song of my depression” because that’s what it’s always been for me since I was a kid. I love this song — I could listen to it over and over. And boy DID I, especially this live version which I had on my “25 Years of SNL” double-disc soundtrack because I was obsessed with SNL in high school. Picture me, 14 years old or so, slouched against the closed door to my bedroom, letting the song play and then immediately pressing the back arrow on my stereo to hear it again. To this day, this song makes me ache in a very specific way, but it doesn’t feel bad. It feels melancholic, tender, a little cathartic. I think about that 14yo, uptight and lonely and feeling sorry for herself, while that fuckboi (happiness?) is like, “Stop crying, I’ll come around when I feel like it.”
I was so depressed for most of high school, in a way that at the time felt all-encompassing and never-ending. And when I got out of it — not really through any one thing in particular, just some mixture of hormones and chemicals and life events and who knows what else — I used to look back and go phew. Okay. Well, that sucked! But of COURSE I was depressed, I was a a teenager! It was part of my punk aesthetic! I had practically nothing better to do with myself!
Which of course was a very naive way to think, because that’s not how depression works. I’ve basically dealt with depression and anxiety my whole life — they come and go in waves, they’re triggered by different things, they’re exacerbated by different things, but they’re a song that’s ready to come onto the playlist at any time and they demand to be played over and over when they do.
I did a lot of reading around mental health in baseball as I was crafting Chris’ story in The Art of Catching Feelings. Two years ago, the Rays lost their bullpen catcher Jean Ramirez, who died by suicide, and his family have started a foundation in his name to bring more awareness around mental health issues. I’ve followed (former Ray) Austin Meadows’ story as he struggled with anxiety and ended up taking a step back from baseball because of it. This Sports Illustrated story about the MLB’s mental health reckoning opens with a story about another Ray, pitcher Ryan Sherriff, who suddenly felt “nothing” and asked himself why he was even out there. This Athletic article described what the Rays have been doing to increase mental health resources for players at every level. I read about lots of other players and teams, of course, but I always end up interested in my own hometown team in particular!
In baseball, there’s a distinction between mental health resources and mental skills resources. The latter is something that’s easier for organizations to grapple with because it’s like, can we help this pitcher focus? Can we help a rookie calm his nerves when he finds himself in a big moment, having to make snap judgment calls? Can we help players be more resilient, have the mental toughness to get through a 162-game grind?
Do I have mental toughness? I mused one day while watching a baseball game on the back porch, listening to the broadcasters talking about that quality in a player. It seemed like a silly thing to ask myself — I’m not the one out there on such a national stage, with all that pressure! — but the more I thought about it, the more I was like, fuck it, life is taxing! There are times when I can almost feel myself trying to physically manhandle my brain back into a certain headspace, away from dwelling on a certain thing, back up into a place where I can feel excitement or joy, whatever.
And this is where it gets into mental health, and not just mental skills. Because at some point you can’t do any drills to “whip” your brain into shape. I wrote a whole book about a man white-knuckling his way through grief and panic attacks, while I white-knuckled it through stuff in my own life with seemingly zero sense of irony. (Sometimes our books tell on ourselves in ways we just can’t see right away.)
I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the last week, funnily enough, because of that line in the new Taylor Swift song: “I cry a lot but I am so productive.” And I get it, I feel the line in my bones as many of us do, but also fuck. You know? That we have to worry about being productive. That we have to worry about being tough.
Despite all the movement that has been made in mental health awareness, all the language we now have around diagnoses, how common we know a lot of these issues really are . . . there is still a stigma around it. There’s concern for how it will affect the way other people see you. In baseball, for example, several players mentioned specifically that they worried that openness around mental health would hurt them in arbitration, where a team is assessing their value in the most cut-and-dried way possible. One former catcher said he was afraid to use the resources his team did offer because he had a chance to go from making league-minimum to money that could change his family’s life, and “would they want to give me that money if they thought I was ‘damaged goods’ and having panic attacks? No, probably, so I kept quiet about it.’”
I remember when I first heard that an author had pushed a book back, citing depression and that she hadn’t been able to finish it in time. This was over a decade ago, and I read the news as an excited reader who’d been really anticipating this book, not even an author with more of a mind to how the business works. I didn’t know you could do that! I remember thinking. It was a revelation to me. I think all the time about how brave I thought that post was, just openly saying, yup, here’s why you didn’t get that book this year!
Everyone’s journey with mental health is different. But I do think it’s important, even acknowledging that these things are realities for a LOT of people. I think it’s powerful, seeing athletes in particular speak out about mental health when there’s so much toxic masculinity and “no pain no gain” type of rhetoric wrapped up in sports that they have not always felt like a safe place to talk about those issues. I’m grateful when I see writers being open about the ways that their mental health affects or is affected by their job. It all does help me to feel less alone, and to feel like if the urge to listen to “When I Come Around” over and over again hits me, I can get through it. (Metaphorically! In the literal sense, if you catch me listening to that song in 2024 know that it’s not a cry for help it’s just a cry to listen to a nostalgic banger!)
I could write a ton more words on this topic and I’m feeling a little vulnerable about the ones I’ve already written, so I’ll leave it there! But just know that sometimes it’s okay to cry and not be productive at all. To admit to someone the ways that you’re struggling. To push back a project or triage your To Do List or cut out something that doesn’t feel good to you anymore or whatever else. I’d be happy to be the broadcaster narrating the ways that you’re incredibly mentally tough for getting through your days, but I also think that “toughness” as a word is kind of a trap. I’m talking to you but I’m also talking to myself, because we’re often harder on ourselves than on anybody else, aren’t we? Maybe we can start there?
Currently reading . . . I’m in the middle of The Court-Martial of Jackie Robinson by Michael Lee Lanning. Everyone knows about Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in baseball but I really had no idea about this history that predated that, in 1944 when Jackie was an officer in the U.S. Army. He was on an army bus when the driver asked him to move to the back, and Jackie knew full well that there had JUST been a whole thing where the army said drivers were not to discriminate and ask anyone to move, so he was like, nope, I’m staying where I am. And then it escalated to the point where, surprise, Jackie found himself court-martialed for conduct unbefitting an officer. All the same dynamics that STILL PLAY OUT TODAY, where a Black person suffers the original wrong and is then punished for reacting to it. Anyway, it was a real turning point because if the incident had never happened, Jackie would’ve shipped out overseas to fight in the war; if he’d ultimately been found guilty, he wouldn’t have gone on to have the career he did. Wild to think about. And wild to me that back in those times dudes were just like, living full non-baseball lives before playing a professional game?
watching . . . I finished Crazy Ex-Girlfriend! I watched the final episode with the live performances of songs from the show and everything. I enjoyed *that* episode so much that for a minute I forgot how much during that last season I kept saying I was trapped in a prison of my own making aka my sunk-cost-fallacy compulsive need to finish a show I started when I was so close to the end. I’ve now moved on to the last season of Dead to Me, which somehow I never got around to watching despite loving the first two seasons.
listening to . . . Lately I have been reading friends’ work and pairing them with IMPECCABLE musical selections. I read Anita Kelly’s Heartwaves (out June 11!! such a beautiful book, you should preorder!) with Radiohead’s The Bends1 on loop, for example. This was partially because Hayley Williams recently posted very rare personal IG stories to talk about albums she’d been listening to and she put The Bends back on my radar.
preordering . . . I got sent an early copy of Collide by Bal Khabra and the synopsis gives me vibes of The Deal by Elle Kennedy which is one of my all-time favorites so I’m excited to dive in!
Okay, first the subject of this newsletter and then Radiohead’s The Bends?!?!! I can see how this paints a concerning picture lolol. I promise you that I’m actually feeling good right now, never forget that I tied my mental health to baseball and right now the Rays are 5-0 in their new City Connects uniforms, so!
I love the discourse about health versus skills. Years ago, I did communications consulting for a psychiatrist in Southwest Florida who was on a number of "mental health task forces," and it was such a struggle to get the message to the non-clinicians that people in acute mental health crises have to be TREATED and STABILIZED before they can get skills. Like you can't self-care or meditate or even journal your way into mental health if you are ill. (Yes, cognitive behavior therapy can work, but that's not the same thing as just telling yourself to feel better.) Especially for stakeholders who were business owners or government leaders, it was so much easier for them to send employees an email reminding them to walk away from their computer for a few minutes, talk to a friend... (I'm soap boxy on this topic!)
"Sometimes our books tell on ourselves in ways we just can’t see right away" - stop calling me out like that lol. But yeah the balance between transparency and fear of stigma is so real! I appreciate your vulnerability - I spent much of high school being depressed as well and it truly did suck. Toughness as a concept gives me such ambivalent feelings. It can feel good to push through and accomplish something but sometimes you just need to rest and be soft. (I know there's a baseball-related overuse injury metaphor in there somewhere.)