Didn't know where else to put something this long...

This will be long. 

Yesterday I wrote some dark and upsetting thoughts and posted them in public. It was also apparently posted to Facebook, as well. Even I am aware of the inadvisability of this, many people are upset and scared for me. As I write this, I have literally hundreds of messages from people in response, ranging from comments to the posting, to direct messages, to direct outreach via text message. Also, as of this writing, I have yet to read most of them at all. 

The first thing I want to say is that I don’t really remember the actions of either writing or posting yesterday. On Halloween of 2020, I had my first dissociative mental breakdown. My memory is a jump cut from sitting on my porch to the top of a boulder at the Cowles Mountain apex looking down into the valley and wanting so desperately to jump. Another major one happened in late 2021 around Thanksgiving, and when I realized that my film festival (and in effect the entirety of my identity for well over a decade) was dead. My programmers tried over the next half year to resuscitate it, including a move from 2022 September to the following April in 2023. During that interim postponement, the breakdown happened twice more. 

The second one was almost completely dissociated, and culminated in my wife Tiffany finding me sobbing and laying in the grass in Balboa Park–an event that led to a stay at the ER suicide watch, a misery of screaming and some violence, and a lot of boredom. It’s kind of like being put in the drunk tank of a prison–an experience I remember through a haze. Both Tiffany and the occasional therapists who would come in and talk to me for 5 minutes at a stretch would ask me about being drunk or high because of my trancelike state and periodic sobbing for death. 

As tests would confirm, neither had been the case. 

There has been a thread through all of this:  the frustrations and inadequacies of mental health support. I went through several therapists and a change in health insurance over this period. My friend Victoria recommended my current (most long lasting) therapist who is wonderful, but who I just learned I can no longer afford (one of the hits this week that contributed to yesterday’s breakdown). Psychiatrists were several times as impossible to see, so the biggest benefit of being hospitalized for suicide watch was getting rushed to FINALLY, after three long years, being able to see a psychiatrist, who is still working with me to figure out the biological side to all of this. 

That psychiatrist was not surprised by my drug-like state, and I am learning that they are my brain trying to protect me from the severity of the depressive low. Biological protections are full of unintended consequences.

On the psychological aspect, my work with my therapist has been revealing that the challenges are long and complicated, involving my 45-year life experiences. I won’t write about specifics here, but I will say that I have learned to identify how splintered my internal self is, and how those splinters or parts react to thoughts, outside stimuli, and emotional responses in ways that are often at war with each other. Something else I have been reckoning with is that “thoughts come first, then feelings.” This is why mindfulness is at the center of so much mental, emotional, and behavioral therapy. Slow down, control the thoughts, see outside the emotions, and let them pass. This has been an effective strategy for the first half of 2023, when the certain death of Horrible Imaginings (an event that was EXTREMELY volatile) could have spiraled me irretrievably. 

Friends and family:  I am struggling VERY HARD with the sociopolitical climate, the power of Christofascism and theism in general, and with with the poor outlook for the future of the world my daughter will inherit, but more personally I am struggling with end of a film festival that I had fully adopted as core to my existence on this planet. For so many years, I was so entrenched in the commitment to cinema curation and exhibition that I both coordinated and spoke on panels, programmed countless festivals, and organized artists spotlights for major conventions. (Almost comically, AS I AM WRITING THIS, I just received a message from a friend from IFC Center in New York asking me to apply to join the board for Art House Convergence.) I still have thousands of emails and over 100 unopened text messages from some of my best friends that I can’t bring myself to open or read because of the panic. But I got through April, the month we had targeted for a postponed Horrible Imaginings Film Festival, without spiraling, so I started to think I was beginning to beat this. Then yesterday happened.

I am not finished with the work I was doing with my therapist by a long shot, but earlier this week I got the message that the charge for my last two sessions were declined, along with payments for several other bills. This is in addition to mountains of debt, the most devastating  of which to my emotional well being and self worth the debt I owe to an army of submitting filmmakers from my canceled last film festival. There are other challenges that I am not talking about because they are really challenges for Tiffany, and I don’t want this to take away from her own struggles, or even worse: to make her feel any level of guilt that I know she is taking on by herself without my shitty help. 

Financial struggles are something all of my loved ones are feeling, so it feels pathetic complaining about them, but they are just the cliched backbreaking straw. I was making it through the stress, or so I thought. 

Yesterday, I flew into Oakland, California for a conference. The flight was great, but after arriving I had a canceled rental car and hotel room. My UCSD travel card expired just days before, my own credit card is maxed, and my bank account overdrawn. I found myself without transportation, food, shelter, and negative money almost 500 miles from home. Tiffany had been my lifeline when I spiraled in San Diego. Now, my warped perception was one of absolute isolation and abandonment. I spent most of the day laying in a puddle of car oil on the asphalt, having the cops called on me by Holiday Inn, and sobbing on the phone with different suicide hotline and crisis hotline people. Literally hours. Some of them were helpful; others, not so much. My only guiding emotions that I can remember were despair and rage–both of which were wildly disproportionate to the situation at hand. 

Here’s what I want everyone to know about this kind of depression. Everything is warped and destructive and hopeless, even in the full knowledge of the realities that should lead to both hope and constructive responses. Everything is a contradiction. Many of the glimpses of outreach after yesterday’s post were people (a lot of people) insisting how much they and others loved me. Here’s the thing: I know this. I am so aware of not only that, but I am also aware that I have a greater support system of genuine people than most humans can boast. The contradiction is that the depression’s response to that love is to want to die more. The contradiction is that the depression’s response to my wife and daughter at home is that their world would be better if I could just disappear. 

Yes, I can sit here now and write in some modicum of clarity. But I am terrified. It keeps happening. When will it happen again? And yes, the financial situation we are in is part of it. I have no idea how I will pay my therapist for the last two sessions, let alone be able to continue with her. I need to talk through the pile-on of situations and how those emotional responses overwhelmed my ability to cope yesterday. The mindfulness strategies that got me through April and the official death of my festival sat like a sapling against a flood, and ended up ripped from the soil. 

Thanks to my work supervisor, who I am so grateful for, I was able to meet up and eventually regulate at the end of the day yesterday. It took other people to ask for that help on my behalf. I am sorry for upsetting anyone yesterday, and I am also sorry that I am not responding to calls or texts. I am also sorry for my own cowardice in being about to reach out for help. I wanted to give some context to yesterday, and I hope I did.