Some people have followed me on Twitter for a while, noticed I haven’t been around much recently, and wondered what was up with that. This post is basically a one-word answer, plus like 5,000 more words because come on, I’m depressed, I’m not dead.

In general, I take the position that my Twitter account is a fantasy football account, my blog is a fantasy football blog, and nobody is reading either for personal stories. Which works for me, because I’m a secret misanthrope and hardly feel any need to share personal stories, anyway.

But occasionally something will come up where some aspect of my personal life intersects with something in the NFL or with my fantasy football work in a way such that personal details might become relevant for shedding further light.

This is one of those times. Basically, I’m going to be talking a lot about myself. If you’re someone who doesn’t care and doesn’t want to read it, then don’t. I promise you I don’t mind.

I’ll even provide a tl;dr summary for you: Depression, I’m working on it, hopefully business as usual soon.

I have a history of depression, though I don’t often talk about it.

I was first diagnosed with depression when I was 20 after I’d kind of spectacularly imploded in college. It started with a series of small failures that spiraled into larger and larger and larger failures in a sort of comedy of errors.

A roommate’s alarm clock broke, so he used mine to wake for an early class, but then never reset it, causing me to miss one of my early classes. I skipped the next class because there was a small quiz and I wasn’t prepared after missing the last class. Then I skipped a third because I had already missed the last two, so what was one more.

Pretty soon I’d missed so many classes that I figured that whole course was a lost cause, but that was fine because I was doing well enough in all my other courses that I could just write it off. Until I started missing a second course, but then, what was a second when I was already tanking a first.

With two failed classes that semester, my GPA dropped enough that I had to improve it or lose my scholarship. But that wasn’t a problem, I’d just take some easy summer classes. But then I missed one of those summer classes, and that spiraled, and I was left in an even worse situation.

By the time Fall rolled around and my scholarship was gone, I just took a semester off, assuming I’d be withdrawn from all of my courses once no payment was received. But that didn’t happen, and instead I was left with a Blutarsky. I stopped leaving my room beyond the bare minimum required to keep up appearances that I was a functioning human being. I slept 16 hours a day. I was a mess.

People close to me staged an intervention and I got psychiatric help. I was diagnosed with “situational depression”, which meant that I experienced depressive symptoms as a result of a bad life situation. It was something of a “chicken or egg” call— was I depressed because I was failing, or was I failing because I was depressed?— and the psychiatrist’s best guess was “chicken”. Which meant I didn’t have clinical depression, and resolving the situation should resolve the issues.

Given the information available at the time, it was an understandable call— especially given the fact that I didn’t think I was depressed and was certainly framing events in that light. Over the ensuing years, it became pretty obvious that it was also the wrong call. Situations where one setback led to another in an ever-escalating chain became so common that I began mentally referring to them as “failure spirals”, and I started trying to estimate where in a particular failure spiral I happened to find myself.

It got to be so bad that I spent most of the time from age 20 onward operating under the assumption that I wouldn’t live to see my 25th birthday. I never reached a point where I was actively suicidal, but I just assumed that suicide would be the natural outcome of the path I was on.

In fact, I had the broad outline of a suicide plan in place for years. I never planned specifics, (date, time, etc.), but I had planned when I’d begin planning the specifics. It was kind of a serious thing.

I spent a lot of time thinking about the artifacts and legacy I would leave behind. I wrote a lot of music during this time, and much of it scans in one light ordinarily, but another light entirely under the assumption that I was going to kill myself. I considered it something of a message to my loved ones, one they would only understand after I was gone.

Again, to stress this, I never reached a point where I actively wanted to die. But I was perpetually at a place where if I could have just suddenly ceased to exist, I would have been very much in favor of that. (In my experience talking about this, “I don’t want to die, I just would rather not exist” is a distinction that is at once obvious to anyone who has suffered from depression and incomprehensible to anyone who has not.)

I’m a lot more comfortable talking about my spiral down into depression than I am my path back out again, but in case anyone reading this is suffering through something of their own, I’ll push past that a little bit. I believed that I would wind up killing myself because I assumed that if the people I cared about ever knew the depths of my failures and shortcomings, they could never understand or forgive them. I assumed that it was better to leave them with their flawed memories of the decent person they thought I was than with the harsh reality of how twisted and deceptive and manipulative and ultimately pathetic I had become.

The road out of that dark place started when I decided to stop making assumptions on others’ behalf and allowed them to make their own decisions. And against all of my expectations, they decided that they could live with the reality, flawed as it was.

I’m not going to try to talk anyone out of feeling like they’re a burden, or a disappointment, or unworthy of affection. If someone had tried that with me, I’d have told them to shut up because they didn’t know me. I wouldn’t expect someone else to be any different. I’ll just say that before doing anything drastic, it’s good to put your assumptions to the test. You really have very little to lose.

Also, because people who are suicidal find comfort in strange things, here’s something that was of great comfort to me when working my way past my depression: of people who attempt suicide and fail, over 90% will eventually die from causes other than suicide. This is true even of people who survive “serious” suicide attempts such as shooting themselves or jumping in front of a train. In short, even the people who thought suicide was a really good idea were very likely to later change their minds and realize that suicide was a really stupid idea.

Also: my wife works with people who have traumatic brain injuries, which includes several people who survived attempting suicide by shooting themselves in the head. If you think life is bad, imagine life after surviving a bullet to the head. Kids, first, don’t kill yourselves, please. Second, if you’re absolutely going to ignore that first thing, please factor the consequences of a failed attempt into your calculus.

The stuff with the highest success rate also usually has the worst downside if unsuccessful, unless you rather fancy the idea of being unable to go to the bathroom by yourself or eat solid food, and definitely not being able to attempt suicide a second time because not only is everyone on guard, but you also don’t have fine enough motor control to hold a gun anymore, and any attempts to aim it would be thwarted by your uncontrollable tremors, besides.

I mean, I feel like I’m a terrible choice to talk people out of suicide because I can’t repeat all of the stock bullshit answers like “your life is worth living” because I’ve been on the other side enough to realize how bullshit and hollow they sound. I don’t know you, and it’d be awfully presumptuous to pretend I knew your life better than you do.

But I can say that in all likelihood, given a bit of time, suicide will seem like as terrible of an idea as that time I listened to nothing but Three Doors Down for a month straight. I’ve been through it, I spent half a decade assuming suicide was a rational and inevitable endpoint, and now I look back and am kind of embarrassed about how stupid that was.

But if you’re extra-super-double sure that suicide is a good idea in your case, and nothing I can say or do will convince you otherwise (I mean, I write about cognitive bias so I know “extra-super-double sure” is typically a bad position to take, but I also know that the bias blind spot means even if we accept that in the abstract we’ll think it doesn’t apply to our situation specifically), then I at least want you to think about the critically important things that you probably wouldn’t otherwise, like what happens if your suicide attempt fails. Because most do.

This has kind of taken a turn to a pretty dark place, but the reality of depression is pretty dark. I made it through relatively unscathed. I feel like as a result, I have a bit of a karmic debt to reach back from time to time.

Anyway, that’s enough suicide talk because that was a long time ago and I have an understanding wife and two really neat kids and a house that’s 100 yards from a park and a retirement account and a great life and I’m a generally cheerful person and I definitely absolutely positively do not want to die or cease to exist or anything of that nature.

The thing about depression is that it often doesn’t travel alone. You’ve almost certainly heard someone complaining that “it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity”. This is something called a “phatic expression“, an arrangement of words that serve mostly to create social connections rather than to actually convey useful information. It’s also a lie; nobody ever says it when it’s 72 degrees outside. In truth, it’s both the heat *AND* the humidity.

In psychology, this is known as “comorbidity”, or the tendency for two or more conditions to be present at the same time. Condition A (“the heat”) can be bad, condition B (“the humidity”) can be bad, but when it’s hot and humid at the same time, that’s when things really start to suck.

The reason I’ve avoided a clinical depression diagnosis over the years is that I also have ADHD, and many of the symptoms of depression are also symptoms of that. A loss of interest in activities I love? Classic ADHD. Unusual sleeping patterns? Feelings of hopelessness? Again, explainable by ADHD alone.

When talking about maladaptive behaviors with people who know me, it’s generally been easy enough for me to blame them on my ADHD, which has the fortunate benefit of not calling to mind the half-decade of my life when I rather seriously considered the relative merits of nonexistence.

When talking with people who don’t know my history, I still tend to blame everything on my ADHD, because among people who haven’t dealt with depression, that word typically scans as “sadness”. Sadness is (fortunately) the closest analogy most people will ever experience to clinical depression. But in truth, depression and sadness are at best kissing cousins.

For instance, in general, the two things I love most in the world are spending time at home with my children and writing. And I’m unbelievably fortunate to be in a position where I get to do those two things all the time. I consider myself stupid-lucky, and my life satisfaction is very high.

There’s pretty much never been a point in my life where I’d describe myself as “sad”, even when things were dark. I may have been borderline-suicidal, but I was borderline-suicidal and happy. (Or more accurately: borderline-suicidal and whatever is the closest analog to happy available to someone whose feelings have all died.)

Even at its worst, depression manifests for me not as feelings of sadness, but as a complete lack of feelings at all. I’ve joked in the past that I’d wonder whether I was a sociopath if I didn’t believe that wondering whether one was a sociopath was a solid sign that one wasn’t a sociopath.

I don’t make that joke anymore because it has the unfortunate side-effect of making people wonder if I’m maybe a sociopath. But there are enough situations where I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to feel feelings, and I’m also pretty sure that I don’t, that it sometimes makes me wonder.

And if there’s something underlying all of that emptiness, it’s not sadness, it is despair. Despair is the absence of hope. In some senses, despair is a feeling. You can feel despair that you’ll ever finish a difficult project, say.

That kind of despair is transient. It can be overcome with enough optimism. Barring all else, it evaporates into thin air the moment you actually finish that project.

Depression despair, in contrast, is not something I feel. It’s something I am. It’s like a bone-deep fatigue. With regular sadness, throwing happiness at it hard enough and long enough can eventually smother it into oblivion. But with fatigue, you can’t throw peppiness at it and magically not be fatigued anymore.  You’re chained to the altar of biochemistry.

Similarly, you can manufacture hope all day long and dump it into the chasm of despair that comes with depression, but despair will swallow it all and remain an unfillable pit. It is who you are, and without it there is nothing at all left.

And this is the problem with telling people I am depressed. It tells them I feel sad feelings and the solution is to bury me with happy feelings until something sticks. The problem instead is that I seem to have misplaced my feelings altogether, which calls for an entirely different solution.

Or that I’m a void in space and time and everything that gets poured into me simply disappears into nothingness, and one shouldn’t give me anything they wouldn’t be content to never see again.

So I’ve tended to avoid mentioning depression just to avoid the baggage that comes with the term. But I think avoiding that has been doing myself a disservice, so it’s time to call a spade a spade. I’m most definitely depressed, a space/time void utterly destroying any glimmer of positivity in defiance of the laws of conservation of mass and energy.

But otherwise a pretty nice guy.

If you want to know what depression looks like, here’s part 1 and part 2 of Allie Brosh’s treatment of it. If you know someone who has dealt with depression and you want to try to know what it’s like, read that. If you have dealt with depression and want someone to better understand what you went through, send that to them.

(Depression is something that someone with a healthy brain can’t really understand because they’re never going to experience the thought patterns for themselves. It’s like explaining color to a blind person using sound-based analogies. But Brosh can probably get people the closest to true understanding.)

Anyway, here’s what depression looks like for me. This is a snapshot of my Twitter archive.

I started on Twitter in August of 2010 when I was writing for DynastyRankings.net. Between then and February of 2013, I tweeted 289 times.

By February, my first son had been born, I had quit my job to stay at home and take care of him, and I had started sending out my resume to various fantasy football sites hoping to start up writing again as a hobby that let me interact with other adult-adjacent people. From then until April 2014, I composed 5425 tweets, or about 360 a month.

And then in May 2014, I decided that fantasy football writing was something I wanted to take a bit more seriously. I tweeted 1272 times that May, and 1434 times in February of 2016. In the 20 months in between, I topped 1500 tweets every month and averaged more than 80 tweets per day.

I tweeted a lot, basically. I read my entire timeline every day, I made friends, I used Twitter as an incubator for article ideas, and I worked on developing a following. I probably spent 10-20 hours a week on Twitter. And most importantly, that was both something I enjoyed doing and something I viewed as an important step along the path to where I wanted to be.

And then in March 2016 that slowed dramatically. For those who don’t know the story, my wife was pregnant with our second child, but bloodwork was showing abnormal hormone levels. Late one afternoon she started feeling serious abdominal cramps, and, assuming she was miscarrying, we decided to sleep on it and see how she felt in the morning.

In the morning she felt worse. She called in sick to work and scheduled an OB appointment for when the office opened several hours later. Then she passed out while walking to the bathroom and we quickly upgraded our level of concern. We dropped our child off at the neighbor’s and went to the emergency room.

In the emergency room, abdominal ultrasounds found internal hemorrhaging and she was quickly scheduled for surgery. It turns out she’d had a heterotopic pregnancy, which is when a normal pregnancy is paired with a second ectopic pregnancy, and the ectopic pregnancy had ruptured.

Heterotopic pregnancies are stupid-rare, especially in cases of natural conception. I know this because, for the next two months, every health-care provider we saw said “Oh, you’re the woman who had the heterotopic pregnancy? You know those are stupid-rare, especially in cases of natural conception.”

We had people telling us they’d been working obstetrics for 20 years and had never seen one. After Googling, Emily found something comparing them to various other events, suggesting you were several times more likely to win an Academy Award than suffer a heterotopic pregnancy.

(My first reaction was to research the underlying numbers and go into great detail about how that last “fact” was actually a serious abuse of statistics, most notably a major neglect of base rates. Her first reaction to that was *not* to leave me; further proof that this is a love match is deemed unnecessary.)

Because of the delay in going to the hospital, Emily lost three pints of blood. Had we delayed several more hours, had I had a more traditional job and been on my way to work, there’s a very real possibility she would have died.

I suppose this technically counts as a near-death experience for her, but it’s one where we didn’t realize what kind of danger she was in until she was no longer in danger anymore, and near-death-in-retrospect isn’t nearly as fun or interesting.

“Let me tell you about that time that I realized I’d almost died a few hours before” is a boring story. It goes like this: “I found out that I’d nearly died a few hours before, but by that point I was fine so it didn’t evoke any real emotional response.”

(Also, as a quick aside: Texas has since passed a fetal remains bill that says if a woman miscarries or has an abortion in a medical facility, the facility must bury or cremate the remains. This bill is perhaps the most fucking disgusting, upsetting thing I have ever come across.

Consider: had this bill been in effect in our case, we might have been hesitant to go to the hospital knowing that if it really was a miscarriage, we would be charged thousands of dollars to “bury” the “remains”. (The “remains” at this stage is a bundle of cells barely visible to the naked eye. It’s basically a heavy period.) We’re heavily incentivized to miscarry at home if at all possible.

And remember that hesitance in this case *COULD HAVE LITERALLY KILLED MY WIFE*. 


How does a bullshit law like this get written? Well, you start by trying to make abortion as inconvenient as possible. Then you have a court strike that down as clearly discriminatory. So you respond by making abortion *AND MISCARRIAGE* as inconvenient as possible. See, now you’re not discriminating, you’re screwing over everyone who is losing a pregnancy equally!

This isn’t legislating, this is political grandstanding, and fuck the real-world consequences. Miscarrying a wanted pregnancy is a tragedy, sometimes a life-defining one. Regardless of your politics, if the only path you see to getting what you want is willfully fucking over families who, through no fault of their own, are undergoing one of the worst tragedies they’ll ever face, well then… fuck you.

And if you really want to be an asshole, couch the whole thing in the language of “respecting fetal remains”. Because that’s a big problem, women miscarrying and not respecting that unborn life that they spend months or even years mourning afterwards.

Nevermind that “fetal remains” in the case of a 6-week miscarriage basically amounts to a puddle of coagulated blood. No, the only proper, legally-acceptable way to show your respect is to throw it a fucking funeral. At your own expense.


Nevermind, too, that I’m not all that inclined to show respect for the life of the blastocyst that decided to go rogue and attempt to murder my wife by blowing up one of her fallopian tubes. Cancer is human tissue, too, but my general rule is once something tries to kill you you’re allowed to not particularly care for it anymore.


So fuck that murdering blastocyst. And a special fuck you to the legislature of the great state of Texas, who doesn’t actually give a shit about actual people when there are rhetorical points to be scored and re-election campaigns to be funded. A hearty “fuck you” and a friendly “retire in disgrace, you fucking assholes” all around.)

But Emily was ultimately fine, albeit consigned to extended bed rest as her body attempted to rebuild her blood supply. The bed rest was, in one way, kind of fun; I really enjoyed having her around the house more, getting the chance to watch shitty daytime television like we had when we were young.

But it was also rather disruptive of my general routines. And that’s a big problem when you have underlying ADHD and depression and the only thing keeping them at bay is a bulwark of coping mechanisms that heavily rely on routine.

After a short disruption in March, it took me until around July and August to rebuild those routines and return to my usual ways, (including resuming all of that Twitter interaction I found so enjoyable and useful). And then in November, my second child was born, (despite the best efforts of his evil twin to murder my wife). And while my wife was home on maternity leave I was able to maintain some semblance of normalcy.

And then in February my wife returned to work. Newborns are a lot of things, but “respecters of routine” is rarely found on that list. And… well, you see the chart. 212 tweets in five months since.

It’s not that I was busy doing something else and so I didn’t have time for this thing that I used to always have time for. I mean, at first, my baby refused to take a bottle and I had to feed him from a syringe, which took forever. But newborns sleep like 18 hours a day, and I’m a proficient at one-handed twittering.

Beyond that, “I have to spend more time doing X leaving me less time for Y” is how time works for a normally-functioning mind. You have multiple things you want to do, and there’s a negative correlation between time devoted to one and time devoted to the other.

For someone in the midst of a depressive episode, the basic laws of time and space no longer apply. Suddenly there’s a *positive* correlation between time spent on activity A and activity B, in that at the same time you’re spending less time on one you’re also spending less time on the other.

For instance, I’ve never had a very healthy lifestyle, but since the birth of my first son I have discovered the simple pleasure of taking care of my body. I like the feeling of lifting heavy things, then coming back later and lifting them again but finding them not heavy. I like running distances and paces that used to leave me out of breath and finding myself not out of breath.

At the time I quit my job to take care of my son, I weighed 194.6 pounds. I lost 40 pounds in that first year and have kept them off ever since. (I don’t really view this as a point of pride; I think losing weight would be a lot easier for everyone if they, like me, had the luxury of being able to quit their jobs.)

So with 10-20 extra hours a week not spent on Twitter and a newborn who slept 18 hours a day, does this mean I had more time to go to the gym, (which has childcare and was always a great break when I needed one)? Quite the opposite; the fewer times I tweeted in a month, the fewer trips I made to the gym or times I laced up my running shoes and went for a jog.

And it’s not just these two activities that were linked. I enjoy self-guided learning opportunities; I haven’t taken advantage of any in the past six months. I love writing; a quick glance at my links page shows how much of that I’ve done recently. I derived a lot of satisfaction from producing a fledgeling podcast before the football season left me too busy to keep it up, but have I taken recent opportunities to revive it? I have not.

This loss of interest is a classic hallmark of depression, (and also of ADHD). But it’s not a normal loss of interest. There are a lot of things that I used to like a lot more than I currently like, like Three Doors Down, and that’s totally normal. Value drift is a thing. Hobbies come and go. That’s normal.

But these are things I used to like *and know that I should still like*, but don’t. There’s a major disconnect between how I know I feel, (I enjoy writing), and how I feel I feel, (I don’t want to write). It sometimes seems like I’m inhabiting a stranger’s mind, consuming his memories and experiences as a dispassionate observer and offering critiques.

But, like, time still passed right? I had to be doing *something* with it. Childcare only takes up so many hours a day. So what was I doing with myself when I wasn’t doing what I wanted to want to do, but didn’t?

Allow me to introduce you to the concept of avoidance coping.

Avoidance coping is a really nasty set of behaviors where, rather than dealing with something uncomfortable, you choose to just ignore it. Ignoring it usually makes it more uncomfortable, which leaves you more determined to ignore it, which makes it more uncomfortable, and so on until everything collapses in on itself.

Here’s an example. When I was 19, I got a parking ticket. I found this generally embarrassing enough that I avoided thinking about it. Eventually I received a notice that my ticket was delinquent enough that if I didn’t pay it immediately, my license would be suspended.

Now, this was doubly embarrassing, so I did the only obvious thing: I ignored it even harder. And then I knowingly drove for two years on a suspended license until, one weekend while driving home late at night, I got pulled over for driving with a burned-out headlight.

The officer mostly intended to give me a warning. Instead, I had my (suspended) license physically taken from me, my car impounded, and had to call my parents at midnight to drive an hour and a half and pick me up in the middle of nowhere. As one does.

The original ticket was probably $50. By ignoring it, I wound up paying that, plus penalties, plus a fee to get my license restored, plus an impound fee. Plus having to deal with the social shame, and having to go through the DMV to get my license back. In terms of “levels of suck”, it was hundreds of times worse than the original ticket, (which I wound up having to pay anyway).

I wish I could say that this was somehow an exceptional case, but in truth, it’s a pretty common part of my history and I could provide much, much more embarrassing examples if I were of a mind.

And these failure spirals have a way of triggering other secondary spirals. I miss a doctor’s bill for $61, so I avoid getting the mail for weeks because I don’t want to physically see the reminder that I missed the payment, (along with the attached $10 delinquency fee– again, have I mentioned how stupid and self-defeating these patterns really are?), and then maybe I miss a water bill.

Then, once I’ve missed the payment window, really the only logical thing to do is sit around pretending nothing is wrong until the city shuts off my water, then scramble to get it restored by paying a fee twice as large as the original bill.

The thing is I know this is the inevitable outcome of my behavior. It’s not a surprise to me. I know when I’m avoiding getting the mail that the end result is going to be getting my water shut off and paying double to get it restored. But the beauty of avoidance behaviors is that knowing how horrible they are doesn’t matter, because you just avoid thinking about that, too.

These patterns of behavior are a big reason why routines are so important to maintaining my ability to function. If small failures will routinely spiral into catastrophic meltdowns, the goal is avoiding those small failures in the first place or dealing with them when they’re still easily manageable.

The key feature of avoidance behaviors is it literally does not matter what you’re doing, as long as it’s not related to the thing you’re trying to avoid. For instance, there’s a cool web serial called “Worm” that’s achieved a bit of a cult status.

It’s a dark epic about a world where superpowers are commonplace, but not generic superpowers like we’re used to, weird ones like “can create and control 60-foot-tall stuffed animals” or “can take existing technology and make it fit into a more compact space” or “becomes proportionately better at problem solving the more complicated a problem becomes”. The heroine of the tale controls bugs.

The author wrote a chapter every Tuesday and Thursday for years until it was finished. It’s really cool, and I’d recommend it. There are even several fan podcasts, including one fan-made audiobook version. The whole thing is free, (though by all means donate to the author if you enjoy it).

It’s also about 1.7 million words from start to finish, or roughly the same length as every combined Game of Thrones book published to date. It’s a really long read, unless of course you have other things you really ought to be doing but are aggressively avoiding because #mentalhealth. In which case it’ll last you a few weeks.

Avoidance behaviors have a very simple solution. Just stop avoiding the thing you’re avoiding. Paying outstanding bills takes like 10 minutes. Getting the mail takes 30 seconds. Writing stuff takes time, but a hell of a lot less of it than reading Worm.

Unfortunately, “stop avoiding it” is the *only* solution to avoidance behaviors. This is unfortunate because, while that’s such an easy solution, it’s also basically impossible. It’s like saying if you can’t breathe, the solution is to breathe. It is simultaneously true, simple, obvious, and unhelpful. One cannot reason himself out of anything he didn’t reason himself into.

But it’s not obviously unhelpful, and there’s a special kind of perniciousness to that, too. Obviously unhelpful stuff can be ignored. But the non-obviously unhelpful stuff? That has to be tried. And then usually tried again, and again, and again after that, until it finally sinks in that it’s not the slightest bit helpful.

In early February, I noticed that I was having a few motivational issues, but didn’t really think much of it. Motivation ebbs and flows, and I was at home with a brand new baby after all.

By March or April, it started occurring to me that I was maybe a little bit depressed. With that in mind, I started to notice and pay attention to my avoidance behaviors. But after years of dealing with ADHD, I figured noticing it would be enough and gave myself the stock prescription: stop avoiding things.

And when that prescription failed, I started making plans. But those plans ultimately were more of the same. “Well, I didn’t manage to stop avoiding things today, so tomorrow I’m going to try to stop avoiding things. Hmm, it’s been a week and I’m still avoiding things, so I’m going to put a reminder in my schedule that I should stop avoiding things.”

And as March and April became May and June and I wasn’t making any headway, I started dipping into my toolkit. Over the years of dealing with my ADHD, I’d developed some coping skills.

For instance, if it’s hard to motivate yourself to start something, committing to a deadline can provide a nice kick in the ass. Telling someone you’ll have something to them by next Friday creates a sense of urgency. If all else fails, by next Thursday you’ll be super-motivated to finally get it done. The work will be rushed and shoddy, but you’ll start working again.

Unless you don’t.

I exhausted all of the tools at my disposal, and some of them worked. For a little bit. And then they stopped working. And when I found myself trying every trick and none of them worked, it dawned on me that I had a serious problem. I wasn’t “a little bit depressed”. I was in the middle of a major depressive episode.

I’ve long been used to dealing with my shit on my own. But when I can no longer deal with it, the only logical conclusion available is that I need help. I may be dealing with a condition that resists all logic and reason, but that doesn’t mean *I* am incapable of logic and reason.

So I’ve taken the first steps. I’ve arranged for help. Thankfully, thanks to the ACA’s 10 Essential Benefits, in order to be considered insurance a policy must cover mental health. (As someone who has gone through this before, I can attest that this was not always the case.) Side note: have you heard they’re trying to repeal the ACA? Not a fan.

Anyway, getting professional help is step 1. And because I’m not ready to give up on all of the tools I’ve developed over my years of going it alone, I’m writing this post. I’m laying out where I’m at and publicly committing myself to a new course. Because public shame is a powerful motivator.

I’m not “better” by any stretch of the imagination. I mean, this entire post? Avoidance Behavior 101, if hopefully more productive than my usual choices. But I’m working on it. And hopefully this means you’ll start seeing more of me popping back up on your Twitter feeds, seeing more bylines popping up on Footballguys.

I feel like there’s this person that I am, and there are maybe 8 facets to that person, and those facets all press against each other and hold each other up like the stones in an arch. I’m a father, I’m a husband, I’m a fantasy football enthusiast, I’m a writer, etc.

And those pieces kind of all fell apart, and now I’m left trying to hold them up by might and main alone. Only it’s hard, it requires constant effort, and my arms are only big enough to wrap around two or three things at a time. But I’m working on it. I’m putting the pieces back together, I’m leaning them against each other so that each piece can help carry the weight of the pieces adjacent.

And in the meantime, I appreciate the patience. And I appreciate the concern. And sometimes I just appreciate being noticed. So thank you all for that.

And now we return you to your regularly scheduled programming. Hopefully.