TODD HANSON—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR
I often say if you’re not at least a little bit depressed you’re just not fucking paying attention. I don’t mean just about some political injustice, I mean just about the human condition in general. Just what goes on every day in the world. Man’s inhumanity to man, or more likely women, it’s just horrifying. If you pay attention to what’s happening, it’s pretty bad. But there’s beautiful things too, like this moment between you and me, so there’s some things to make up for it.
A friend of mine was going through a hard time, she calls me up, she’s like, “I need a friend right now. Can I come over?” She comes over and we’re talking about one of the worst things that I’ve personally gone through and at the time somebody came up to me and said, “Todd, you’re looking at the world so negatively. Look at the positive things in the world. Listen to the birds in the trees. Can you hear the birds in the trees? The birds are singing. Listen to the birds singing.” And I said to the guy, “I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but when I hear those birds singing, I’m not hearing the happy twittering of happy little creatures. I’m hearing the screams of territorial animals that are either competing for mates or competing for some sort of feeding territory against other competitors which will starve them out if they don’t win, and in the kill-or-be-killed, eat-or-be-eaten caldron of murder that constitutes the natural world, that’s what I hear when I hear the birds in the trees.”
So I started relating this to my friend and my friend said, “Yeah, but you were in a really bad space at that time so you were hallucinating, you were hearing something that wasn’t there, you were hearing these frightening cries of the birds instead of happy songs.” And I said, “Well, I was definitely in a depressed state, but I wasn’t hearing sounds that weren’t there. I was hearing the real sounds of the birds.” And she’s like, “But you were wrong because when birds sing they’re happy.” And I said, “Well, technically they’re singing because of territorial—” And she just cuts me off and she says, “Todd. Don’t ruin birds for me.” And I said, “You’re right, fair enough. I’m not going to ruin birds for you. Go ahead and think they’re happy.”
PATRICK STICKLES—MUSICIAN
I have moments of incredible joy. The fact of the matter is you just make the decision to be an openhearted person in general. You decide to be openhearted and you say, “I will be sensitive and I will accept all the stimuli of life and I will allow my emotions to be triggered accordingly.” When you do that, you open yourself up to very great pain and people can hurt you very, very badly if you make yourself vulnerable before them like that.
At the same time that openheartedness will also allow you to have the greatest joys in life and feel the most love and the most real transcendent happiness. You have to accept that. You can’t let in just the good stuff. If you want to really, really love the world you have to accept the things about the world that you hate. Not accept them like “just the way it is and it’s fine,” but don’t shut yourself off to those experiences, because in so doing, you’re going to also shut yourself off to all the wonderful things in life.
Yes, I’m able to be very, very hurt. Psychologically damaged by certain things that other people would just shrug off, but I think that that gives me a greater ability to stop and smell the roses sometimes.
ROB DELANEY—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR
I’ve dealt with depression, and it became very serious after I stopped drinking and doing drugs. About a year into sobriety I had my first experience with super unipolar suicidal depression.
Marc
Unipolar? What the fuck is unipolar?
Rob
Not bipolar. Bipolar would be like manic depression. When you’re unipolar you’re like, “Please let me be bipolar. I’d do anything.” You’d kill for another pole.
Marc
Another pole, except for the one you want to hang yourself from.
Rob
Exactly. That was my experience. Those things can go hand in hand, but I found even though I was going to therapy, talk therapy, I was exercising, I had started to get a job, I was just really trying to truly be responsible, but it’s just like the bottom fell out and I very much wanted to die. Fantasized exclusively about suicide, so people who cared about me said, “Maybe you should try medication,” and I thought, “No, I would never do that. Only a weakling would do that.” You know, you fix it, you can get out of it yourself.
What I tried to do is take myself out of myself. Like you, for example, if you were like, “Hey, Rob, I’m feeling XYZ and I’d like to blow my brains out,” I would do anything within my power to help you, whereas I wouldn’t do that for myself, which is crazy. I really tried to think of myself like, “All right, don’t be you.” I tried to be as objective as possible and I tried to understand that the things that my brain was telling me were crazy, so I did get on medication and the fact of the matter is, it made me able to feel every emotion rather than just one nightmare, the “blow your brains out” one. Now I can still feel sad or upset, but I can also get happy, proud, horny, hungry. Those are the other poles. The horny pole.
The thing is I think people might not understand is that real super-clinical depression isn’t just a mood, it’s like a feeling. Your penis shuts off. I mean, I didn’t use it for a month. Before, I was like, “What’s the problem?” A beautiful woman could be like, “What do you think of these?” And these are her naked breasts she’s shoving in my face. I’d be like, “Get them out of my face.”
Didn’t eat at all, had diarrhea all the time, and couldn’t sleep at all. The physical symptoms were bananas.
Since then I’ve had jobs, great big corporate jobs, relationships, been physically healthy. You’d be like, “Hey, Rob, I could hire him to do this thing or accomplish this task or talk to him in a cogent fashion about an issue.” As opposed to, say, “He could fill that corner with diarrhea and tears.”
PATRICK STICKLES
I lived a certain way throughout my entire life and kind of just had the vaguest of feelings that I was a weird freak. I knew I was a freak in some way and somehow other from society. I didn’t really understand how. I knew it had made trouble for me and would continue to make trouble for me throughout my life. When I got to be about twenty-six years old, I came to understand that I was a manic-depressive.