…is that when you get them, you usually want to think about what you’re going to say when you call back. So you think, and the day ends, and night comes, and…well…you don’t want to interrupt their evening. So the next day comes.

But then you don’t get to it the next day, and at the end of the day you realize this, and realize that it’s been quite a while since they called. You feel bad about it and put it out of your mind.

Then the next day you realize it’s been too long since they left their message, and you feel uncomfortable about talking to them now. And the days go on.

That’s the thing about phone calls. And the thing about emails. And (have you figured out the theme of this post yet?) the thing about blogging.

In fact, funny story: I haven’t posted anything on Facebook for about a month simply because I feel so incredibly guilty about messages sent A MONTH ago, and I don’t want the people to think I read their messages yet. I don’t want them to feel hurt.

Wow! That’s chronic anxiety alright.

So, why am I posting this? Well, I’m mostly riding the wave of inspiration, taking the incredibly rare opportunity in which I feel like saying something, and doing something with it before it goes away and the guilt returns. I’ve been waiting on posting anything until I had a nugget of goodness to write.

But nothing has come, so I decided to write about that.

Related posts:

1. T-Mobile unlocked my phone!
2. Becoming a superhuman, month by month.
3. Real

Audio and PDF versions of this post will be coming soon. Sorry, it’s the end of the school semester, and things are a little hectic. Enjoy!

The week passed quickly for David. Large amounts of caffeine had an effect like speeding up an audio track of his life, without the squeaky voices.

Everything felt rushed and nothing seemed to get done. Todos lingered on his list as he rushed from class to class. He spent his lunch time finishing the next class’s homework. He ate quickly so he couldn’t taste the food.

Today was another Monday. David had spent his entire weekend creating a digital inventory of his coin collection on his computer. He hadn’t thought of homework beyond the occasional glance towards his shoulder bag.

David was in study hall. He was drawing a floor-plan. He wanted to rearrange his room so that it had a more professional, more productive feel. David could be a little obsessive sometimes about reorganizing his room. Every few weeks, he would come home exhausted at the end of a long day at school, take a look around his room, and spent the entire night reconfiguring every speaker and bookshelf in the room.

He could be doing his homework for the next day, but David just didn’t feel like wasting his time. He needed that pump of adrenaline that came right before the work was due, otherwise he just couldn’t focus on something so utterly unnimportant. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t tried to get some work done, but it was as if the focus was broken on his eyes.

“Alright, you’re free to go,” the polka-dot-wearing teacher yelled from her desk. She wasn’t in a good mood today, and David wondered why. Had she not meant to wear the polka-dots today? Did a gumball machine throw up on her?

David broke into a cough to hide his laughter. It felt good to laugh! He looked around for someone to share the joke with. It was more of an excercise than anything else. Why did he even try? Maybe he would go crazy soon and start making up friends to talk to him. Maybe he would start to have mysterious blackouts, and the newspapers would start printing stories about a mysterious thief who breaks into the school gym and steals girl’s panties from the dressing rooms.

David stood up, slung his bag over his shoulder, and breathed a sigh of relief. He had speech next. If he had to have a class at the end of the day, speech was a good choice. He reasoned that experience in drama, as well as his pent-up desire to communicate would offer him a perfect toolset for breezing through the class.

The dozen or so students waiting for speech class looked as if they were all about to lose their virginity. Their tense faces told David they were already regretting their choice to break out of their shells and sign up for the class. No doubt their parents had encouraged them with statements like “You only have to take it once! Just get it over with while you’re still in high-school.”

David stepped over the threshold of the classroom and found a seat near the front. He didn’t like to sit in the front row for any class. He felt it made him seem too eager. He felt uncomfortable without the back of a head to look at.

The girl in front of him had curly brown hair. She was wearing sunglasses and could have been sleeping she was so still.

An overweight kid dressed in a baggy shirt that read “Yo Fadda” kept shifting uncomfortably in his seat as he searched for comfort in the plastic-mold school desk.

David hated those school desks. He could handle their bias toward right-handed humans, even though he was a leftie. It was their plastic-mold-connectedness that made him feel so much like he was in a car-seat. When he sat in one, he felt as if the roller-coaster operator had just clamped the uncomfortable bar over his lap, and then the ride just sat their. For fourty-five minutes.

David looked up from his notebook to see the shiny-headed Mr. Ronald in the doorway. The teacher had a look on his face David couldn’t quite place. Smugness was the closest adjective he could think of.

A fake denim shirt was draped across the wiry form of Mr. Ronald today. It was too big for him, and the collar hid any view of whatever neck had been there to begin with. The overlong sleeves of the shirt were not rolled up. Instead, they were buttoned tightly around Mr. Ronald’s wrists so that the sleeves billowed out.

“Hello class!” Mr Ronald said as he bounced through the doorway, “Welcome to speech!”

“He-lo-mis-ter-ron-ald,” the entire class sounded in unison. Everyone knew this routine from elementary school, and the “Hello Mister” chant had become more of a mockery than a sign of respect.

“Please, call me Saint! Now, raise your hand if you have ever given a –” but the rest of his words were lost on David. His mind had siezed up at “call me Saint.” Was he kidding? Feeling confident, David raised his hand.

“David, good to see you again! Did you have a question?”

“Uh, yeah, what did you say you wanted us to call you?”

“Oh, call me Saint. I don’t like Mr. Ronald, too formal.”

David hadn’t heard wrong.

“Is that a nick-name or something?”

For the first time, his new teacher’s smile faded a little.

“Saint is my first name. Saint Ronald.”

David stopped all movement in his face. He had learned this useful skill in drama class, and it had served him well through the years of highschool classes. He could entirely paralyze his face. If he twitched so much as a single muscle however, his entire face would give way to whatever emotion he was hiding.

Had this man’s parents actually named him Saint Ronald?

“As I was saying, who in here has ever given a speech?” Mr. Ronald contined.

A few of the students raised tentative hands, tryning to communicate with their curvature that they were to be noticed, but not called on.

“Hi Jamie, I remember your brother from last year. What kinds of speeches have you given before?” Mr. Ronald directed his question towards a perky bonde girl with thin, dramatic glasses, on the right side of the room.

“Oh, like, when I was in seventh grade we did, like, these presentations for our, like, science class.” As she spoke, her tightly-arranged ponytail bobbed back and forth. She looked like the love child of a Barbie and a bobble-head.

How did people like her survive in this school? David wondered to himself as he examined Mr. Ronald’s face. To his surprise, Mr. Ronald was beaming at her as if she had offered to shine his head for free.

“Great! And did you feel as if you did a good job in your presentation Jamie?”

“Oh, like, well, ya. I mean, it was, like, really hard to talk in front of, like, that many people.”

David’s head exploded and bits of his brain splattered the walls of the classroom. No, not really, but that’s how he felt. He wanted out. Out of this school. Out of this classroom. Out of this plastic seatbelt seat. But he didn’t show it on his face. He didn’t want to expose his hatred for the system, or the system would fight back. He knew this from experience.

The year before, he had nearly lost all momentum. In a school as intense as his, that would have meant all of his “work” from the beginning part of the year would have been meaningless. He would have had to repeat the grade.

He had pulled through with the help of a therapist named Mrs. Perch. She was patient, and almost as jaded about school as he was. When he had told her he wanted out, she hadn’t fought him.

“Then go,” sho had said, “school just isn’t the right thing for some people.”

He had said he wanted to stay through at least the rest of the year, because his parents had paid for it. She had given him some coping techniques. One of the ones he liked was just to look at the semester in chunks. She told him not to look at it as a whole year, just look at making it through the next month, the next week, even the next minute.

David tried to use this method now. He focused on listening to Mr. Ronald’s next sentence, and then the next. He focused on staying calm and focused for the next five minutes. THe focus didn’t come, but at least the chunks of brain stayed in his skull.

Related posts:

1. Please Be Mind: Chapter 1
2. Please Be Mind – Chapter 2
3. My first novel “Please Be Mind” will be published here starting Wednesday

Click here to listen to me reading this chapter.

Click here to read the PDF version of this chapter.

Where on earth was 1965?

In the hot doldrums of summer, David had made many attempts to replace the activities he would have usually done with friends. He had started a job selling singing telegrams door to door. He had zeroed in the first week, but he became industrious in the second, and started giving samples. By the third he had given one-hundred forty-seven and a half renditions of “Fly Me to the Moon.”

David had even tried taking a dance class at the local ballet studio. He wasn’t too bad at the movement part, it was the girl’s outfits that made it so hard for him to focus. On the third day of class the teacher jammed the stop key in the CD player and looked directly at David.

“Well David,” she had said, “You’ve got the hips and chest movements down now. How about taking a look at some of the other body parts. David hadn’t returned to class.

His final try was collecting, and it was working out well. He had a coin collection, complete with two collections of state quarters, one organized by state and one by date. He had a movie-stub collection, he had his books, organized by author of course, and DVDs by director.

The infamous end-of-year performance wasn’t the only reason he had no friends. His previous “best friend” Justin Kinney had moved far away, and now they only talked every few months. The conversations mostly consist of rapid “stock” updates, the kind you tell a million times to everyone when they ask you how it’s going followed by excuses to get off the phone.

At first, David had been hurt by Justin’s sudden detachment. After the second friend moved, and the third, David began to understand that they hadn’t been real friendships at all. They had been more like relationships of convenience. As soon as it was more convenient to be friends with people from their new town, they were.

David wished he had known that before pouring his heart and soul into them. He had made sure to do as many favors for his friends as he possibly could. He made a massive central calendar in his room, wrote all of his friend’s birthdays on it, and made a special habit of checking it each night before brushing his teeth to see which of his friends needed presents and cards.

David put his last penny into its place in line with the others on his carpet floor. He counted each one, double checking the dates, and used a small washcloth to wipe off as much dirt as he could. That summer, he had painstakingly sifted through every ounce of change he could find and picked out one for each year. He didn’t even try for the coins below the 50’s, they were too rare and hard to find.

As he counted each coin, David checked them off on a small piece of paper. He had most of the quarters since the 50’s, and some of the nickels, but his real pride was his penny collection.

These were his favorites, but they also drove him a little crazy. He had every single penny from the year 1950 to 2009 except for the elusive 1965. David had used this dilemma as one of his stock conversation pieces when he was talking to a distracted Justin on the phone one day:

“I swear man, its a conspiracy. I can’t find a 1965 penny anywhere.”

“Uh huh, ya that sucks man.”

“No, seriously! It’s bugging me so much! Where did they all go? Is there a 1965 penny collector who’s keeping them all stockpiled? Did the government have some sort of 1965 penny recall?”

“You may be over-thinking this a little.”

“Wait, hold on, one…nine…six…five…together that makes twenty one! Aha!”

“Um…my mom is calling me for dinner. I have to go.”

Come to think of it, that was the last time David had heard from Justin. David was ponding this when he heard his mother’s voice through his thin walls.

“David! We have to go! We’re both going to be late if we don’t walk out the door within thirty seconds!”

David didn’t have time to pack. He would reorganize it later that night. Maybe he could arrange them by condition? He grabbed his shoulder-bag and collided with his waiting mother in the hallway. Not even his linebacker tackle could alter her irritated stance, arms folded tightly like she was trying to keep something hidden in her belly-button.

“I made you some tea. Its in the holder.” She said flatly as he ran out ahead of her to put his bag in the car.

Caffeine always lifted David’s spirits. He had even gone so far as to try convincing the headmaster to keep thermoses of hot water next to the vending machines so the students could keep themselves caffeinated the entire day.

“That’s what energy drinks are for” the headmaster had told him.

But how could someone even attempt to stay awake and interested what was being blabbed at them by someone in a blue checkered shirt?

His mother talked into her cell-phone the entire drive to school. She was a lawyer which means she worked for herself. She could control the amount of hours she worked. The problem was, she didn’t exercise any of this control. Apparently David was important enough to drop off and pick up from school, but not important enough to talk to while doing it.

Some mornings the phone did not ring, and some of the times they would talk.

Well, she would talk.

David would be amazed at her self-centeredness. She would talk about her work, the last inconsiderate thing his father had done, what she had “on her plate” for that day. Sometimes David would mention something about how stressful a big was and his mother would chuckle to herself knowingly as if to say “If you only knew what real work was.”

David was almost happy to arrive when they rolled up to the school drop-off point. It meant more tomatoes, more dull subjects, and more cafeteria food, but at least school had people. At least school gave him contact to someone, if only just a furtive glance from a new kid that didn’t yet know what a social time-bomb David was.

As David walked down the steps and went again to his locker, he wondered when it would all end, or begin. Would things be this way forever? They couldn’t. David had once been a confident, social person. He wouldn’t go so far as to think he had been popular, but certainly not anonymous. Actually, anonymous would be better than this right now. David wished he was one of those lost-looking new kids or freshman who had not yet truly begun writing their record in social school history.

David found no tomato in his locker today.

Related posts:

1. Please Be Mind – Chapter 3
2. Please Be Mind: Chapter 1
3. Please Be Mind: Introduction

This is the first chapter of my young adult novel Please Be Mind. For more information about the book, click here.

This chapter comes after the Introduction, make sure to read it before starting this chapter.

Click here to listen to me reading this chapter.

Click here to read the PDF version of this chapter.

David gripped the plastic thermos tight in his right hand as he stared at the school building at the bottom of the hill.

Not another year! I thought this was over… he thought to himself. He had thought the very same thing the last time he was in this parking lot. Things had been more hopeful then. The end of year high had been fresh in his blood and everyone was trying as hard as they could to pretend it was the end forever. The end of high-school, the end of school in general, the end of the bureaucratic pressures and injustices.

His school wasn’t just any school, his was a private school. In his school, the teachers cared too much, the parents spoke up too little, and the end result was an over-caffeinated jittery group of insecure teenagers with embarrassingly low self esteem.

“Got everything?” his mother asked, staring at him impatiently as he shouldered his messenger bag. She had been annoyingly stressed out that morning, acting as if David had been the one who scheduled his “back to school” day on  her most stressful day of the week.

Aren’t Mondays stressful for everybody? David thought to himself as he watched his Mother queue up with the other parents trying to get out of the poorly planned parking lot.

As he made his way to his new locker – the novelty of lockers had died off somewhere around sophomore year – a few people waved at him and a few more laughed. They hadn’t forgotten. Last year, the school drama club, of which he was an active participant, asked him to sing a song accompanied by “The Jockstraps,” a band made up of four pimply freshman, for the end-of-year talent show. He had, as usual, agreed. Anyone could get him to do anything if they asked his ego first.

What they hadn’t told him was that the song the band had chosen was “Mama Said Knock You Out” by LL Cool J. The awkward and embarrassing apex of the performance came when a well-aimed tomato hit David squarely in his groin. The band’s overamped drums had stayed consistently off-rhythm for most of the performance, but when tomatoes started flying the music began to sound like something out of “Morse Code, the Musical”.

David finally managed to get his locker unlocked. As he swung the door open, a gigantic red tomato fell out with a plop onto the hard cement. By some heavenly freak of nature, the tomato stayed intact as it hit the ground and rolled under a vending machine. David sighed.

At lunch, he exchanged nods with a few acquaintances and sat on his own near the cafeteria window. He liked to soak in some of the sunlight after spending three hours in the vampire-enabled classrooms of his morning classes. David had, at one point, had friends. He used to sit at a bustling table of gawky teenagers just like himself. His group had been one of the only co-ed lunch-tables around, and the guys around the cafeteria had always laughed at him for not being “manly” enough to hang exclusively with the guys.

“Why did the good lord give me testicles if I am not going to use them?” he had said loudly to Loic Turnbull once during lunch. Loic was a hardcore Catholic who sat strategically between the gay table and the stoner table so he could more efficiently inform them of their damned destinies. David didn’t have a problem with religion, even the ones that encouraged unprotected sex. He did have a problem with the judgements produced by Loic’s very blonde, very thick head.

David tried to remember the comeback, if any, that Loic had come up with after he had heard this sinful remark. Something about judgement day? Being a target for the impending zombie attack maybe? David couldn’t hear very well in crowded areas. For some reason, when everyone was talking at once, everyone else could hear each other, but he couldn’t hear anyone. For a while he had tried lip-reading, but this turned out to be harder than deaf people made it seem, so he began to learn to read faces and hand movements.

Perhaps in a different setting, this would have been more of a challenge. But teenagers really only say a variation of about six different phrases all day, so his task was reduced to figuring out whether someone was talking about being bored, being hungry, being “pissed”, or sex. It wasn’t such a bad system really, and the efficiency of cutting out the curses made the process even easier.

All of these skills were useless now. Though there were plenty of people he could try to observe, there was no one sitting across from him. He had his own table today. Many of the students who would usually be forced to sit near him were still on “extended family vacations”. His school was attended by rich kids, and rich kids got special treatment. That’s just how it worked. Those with the biggest family “endowments” got the most days off for summer break.

The teachers hated it, but the administration forced them to be the late-comer’s personal tutors upon their return. Why the teachers put up with it, he had no idea.

It couldn’t be the food. David thought, as he pushed his uneaten bits of “tuna casserole” away. He liked tuna casserole, but not this stuff. He had gotten excited when he was it listed as the first meal of the year on the school’s website, but the reality of school lunches had come rushing back to him with the first bite.

The friends who would have shared his disgust had all moved away, flunked out, changed schools, or weren’t willing to commit social suicide so early in the year. Who would chose to sit with the “Mama Said Sing Really Badly” guy? David wished he had thought of that nickname for himself. It had been lovingly crafted and slung at him like a rock as he was walking into his first class that morning.

Sitting alone at a lunch table was way too cliche pariah for David to stand, so he got up, dumped his tuna cardboard, and walked out into the sunlight of the cafeterias courtyard.

“Hey David!”

David couldn’t believe his ears, and didn’t, the first time he heard his name called. He ignored the social grim reaper coming back to haunt him and continued walking.

“Oi! David!” the voice came again from behind him.

David had been described as being “in his head”, but he had never heard voices before. He turned around and saw that it was a teacher who had called his name. David couldn’t place him. He searched his mind trying to remember what class he was from. He had certainly seen him around last year.

The teacher was almost completely bald with tiny bits of hair sticking out of his head at the sides. He wore a checkered blue and white shirt which hung like a curtain on the his wire-thin frame. David had always called these “teacher shirts” because it seemed like all the teachers shopped at the same special teacher stores. As the teacher walked towards him, David had a vision of a department store with flashy yellow signs adorning it saying things like “TEACHERS SALE TODAY! Buy 2 ugly checkered shirts and get the third free!”

David nodded as the man approached.

“Hi, I’m Mr. Ronald, I teach the elective speech class for seniors. I saw you on the roster for this year. Glad you signed up! I’ve seen some of the performances you’ve done with the drama department. It will be very interesting to have such a performer in my speech class.” He said this all with a knowing grin, as if David was a lab rat and he was a scientist gleefully watching the effects of his experiment. When the teacher said “performances” his grin momentarily became a leer before twitching back into place.

The puzzle pieces were filling in for David. He thought back to the halfhearted glance he had given the available elective options for the coming year. None of the options had been very appealing, but speech class seemed to be the least of the evils.

“Right!” David said as more puzzle pieces fell into place, “I always wondered what you taught.”

This was partially true, but only a very small part. David had remembered seeing an awkward looking bald guy standing in the wings last year when the seniors were giving their required speeches. He hadn’t really thought of him at any other point. Electives didn’t start until the second week of school. David didn’t want to think about any more classes than he had to just yet.

“It’s gonna to be a fun year!” Mr. Ronald was saying. “We’re videotaping the speeches this year, and we’re putting them online.”

Um…yay? David thought to himself as he imagined inviting more school-related paraphernalia onto his already overloaded hard-drive. He didn’t mind being videotaped, though. In fact, he kind of liked it. He had been interviewedon a show at the local public access television station when he was eleven. It had gotten him lots of fame amongst his classmates at the time, when one particularly television-privileged kid happened across the interview during one of its four showings.

“Well, it sounds like fun.” David said, flexing his genuine-sounding-fakeness muscle, “We meet for class in the drama building, right?”.

“That’s right David. I’ll see you next week. I am looking forward to a superior year!”

“A superior year? Interesting word choice.” David thought as he walked toward his next class.

Related posts:

1. Please Be Mind – Chapter 3
2. Please Be Mind – Chapter 2
3. Please Be Mind: Introduction

This is the first chapter of my young adult novel Please Be Mind. For more information about the book, click here.

This is the beginning of the book.

Click here to listen to me reading this chapter.

Click here to read the PDF version of this chapter.

Do you have a best friend?

Do you have any friends?

For a year and a half, I had no friends at all. No one looked at me in the hallways, and no one sat with me at lunch. For a guy of my particular genre, a lack of friends is almost as common a wallet chain. Our mission is to be rebels, to be different. To rouse a stir across the schoolyard, and astonish with our individuality.

But what if no one cares that you’re not like them? What if they look right past your black hair and nail-polish, like you’re just a stagehand in a life-sized play?

The halls of high-schools are ruthless not because we students are any more manipulative and sadistic than the adults we become, but because we are so utterly vulnerable. As students, we are still forming our beliefs about the world and its inhabitants. We are thrown into a snake-pit of other students, all grasping for attention and definition, just like us. The result is more dramatic than a soap opera.

Where are our role models? What access do we have to examples of positive adult relationships? Television? Nope. Movies? Hell no. The mall on weekends? Doubt it.

Blaming younger people for increased violence and reduced respect for authority is a foolish displacement. The responsibility lies in the adults. With each new generation, additional layers of emotional dysfunctions and tendencies are passed down. The result is now.

In a few moments you will read what is more or less the life story of my best friend. His story is one of adaptation, of accepting what is and moving forward.

I would not be so bold as to urge you to be like him, but rather to emulate his spirit. To use his lessons, his patterns of thought, and to let his strength inspire your own way of living.

Though I probably should have, I did not write this book. My good friend David Shane did. I am merely the announcer, the warm-up band, now…

…Enjoy the main act.

Related posts:

1. My first novel “Please Be Mind” will be published here starting Wednesday
2. Please Be Mind: Chapter 1
3. Please Be Mind – Chapter 2

Hey guys,

This isn’t the post you’ve been hoping for. It’s not the first chapter (or the introduction) of my novel. This is actually a podcast episode (the file I’ll link to, not what you’re reading) about staying centered and being present.

Click the link to listen to it:

(MP3 – 20.6mb – 42:54) Christian David Holmes Podcast #1: Staying Centered and Being Present

Click here to subscribe to my podcast in iTunes

The episode is just under 45 minutes long, which is alot, I admit. I had tons to say on this subject.

If you are curious, and think you might like listening to me ramble for 45 minutes while pacing around my room, have a listen. You can put it on your iPod or listen to it on your computer.

If you like this one, I’ll do more. I’d like to start recording one every week or so, but I want to see if anyone likes them (or will listen to them) first. So please please please post a comment or send me a quick email with your comment (ideas for improvement, general feedback, whatever).

I hope you enjoy it!

The introduction to Please Be Mind is coming tomorrow

Related posts:

1. I’m having trouble makin a decision…can you help?
2. PODCAST: Leaving my home
3. New sponsorship items for San Diego

So I wrote a Young Adult novel a little over a year ago. Well, I don’t know that you could really call it a book. Let’s call it a draft.

The book was originally to be named Speech, but as the story developed it was changed to Please Be Mind. This is a title you will only understand once you’ve read the book.

Here’s a picture of me writing it back on Maui:

When I finished, after one month of writing over a thousand words per day, I was just happy to be done. I felt accomplished, and felt like the story in itself was kind of flawed, and the characters one-dimensional. I still feel that way for the most part.

Gee. That sounds enticing, eh?

Since I saved the final iteration of my manuscript to disk, a few of my closest friends and family have been able to read it. Some gave me the reaction I expected, some “never got around” to reading it, but some, an astonishing majority, said they actually liked it. Some raved about it.

So I’m leaving the final decision up to you.

Full disclosure: I’m editing as I go (you’ll thank me for it, believe me), so I can only post two chapters each week. I’ll be posting Wednesday and Saturday mornings at 9:00am PST. Wednesday’s post will contain the introduction and first chapter.

For each chapter, I’ll be providing several ways of reading. You can read it right off the blog (like the words you’re reading now), read from a supplied PDF, an ePub file for your Kindle or Sony Reader, and an MP3 audio-recording of the day’s chapter. To subscribe to the MP3 versions as a podcast, click here to subscribe in itunes.

Basically, I’m trying to make it as easy as possible for everyone to read it as it comes, so if there’s a way you think of that would help you, let me know.

If you want to get new chapters emailed to you each day, you can always use the email signup form on the side-bar.

NOTE: The email subscription service doesn’t allow me to choose when these get sent out, so if you want to read them in the morning, you’ll have to come to the page itself.

Tell your friends, call your parents, block out a time each Wednesday and Saturday. I hope you enjoy the world-wide premiere of Please Be Mind.

Related posts:

1. Please Be Mind: Introduction
2. PODCAST: Staying Centered and Being Present
3. Starting again with Dvorak

The hardest part of writing is realizing (or accepting) that I have something to say. It’s laughable how pitiful the voice in my head is for whispering at me incessantly and, at the same time, telling me I have nothing to write.

Scandalous.

So, what do I have to say that others don’t, or won’t bring themselves to? What honest statement can I make that will make someone say “Holy shit! That’s how I feel!”? How can I help someone feel something they’re already feeling?

Ugh. A stream of consciousness blog post? “Really Christian?” (you say) is that the best you can do after all this talk of being a writer, or wanting to be a writer, going to journalism classes and workshops. Is this unedited river of sludge all that’s in your file-folder of talent?

Fuck off I say. At least I’m being honest with myself, for the first time in…a long time. At least I’m respecting myself enough to honor my boundaries and allow myself a clean sheet of paper and pen. At least I’m not editing my first word so heavily I never get to the second. Take that!

The thing is: I have said before that I write this blog for others, to read and feel accepted and less alone and blah blah blah, but while it’s a nice idea (and one I’ll certainly hang on to when talking to people at dinner parties), it’s kinda bull.

No:

This blog is for me. I write it so that I feel less alone. I write to show myself that I have some worth when everything feels like it’s trying to prove otherwise. I write and publish the stuff online because, once people have read my blog, if they’re hanging out around me, they accept me by default. They have to.

But one day I will realize (and funny enough, this day has not come), that hiding in the open is still hiding, and acceptance by default isn’t really a workable concept. One day I will understand that short-cuts don’t work, and that the only real way to feel real, and loved, and worth something, is to learn how to do it in person.

Are you still here? Go do something real.

Related posts:

1. Life and death in the same neighborhood
2. When words escape me…
3. My new notebook

I have recently been diagnosed with Cyclothymia disorder. It’s a type of bipolar disorder. The main differences are more rapid cycling (abrupt shifts in mood or “polarities”) and less intense swings than those with bipolar disorder.

I’ll explain more as we go along, but first…

Why I’m Writing This:
One day a 19 year-old teenager comes home dazed from a meeting with his Psychiatrist. He has just learned that, according to the guy he’s seeing, he’s suffering from a subset of bipolar disorder called Cyclothymia. He is very confused.

Feverishly, he asks Google about it. Okay…so Cyclothymia is a type of bipolar disorder with less extreme polarity on both ends. You don’t get so depressed you want to kill yourself, but you aren’t so “manic” you think you can fly. Great, sounds like my life, he thinks.

But as he looks around for articles, blog entries, forum posts, written by young people that could shed some light on living with the disorder, he finds only the occasional YouTube clip and an old Yahoo group related to the illness.

While this wasn’t my experience, it very well could have been. I did my own research and self-diagnosed before ever seeing a professional, but it doesn’t usually work that way. There really is an incredible lack of awareness and content written about the disorder online, which is why I’ve decided to type this piece, possibly the longest I’ve ever written.

Now, full disclaimer: I could be a charlatan. I’m probably not, but Psychological diagnosis are anything but fool-proof, and the doctor relies heavily on the patient’s self-description of events and patterns in their lives.

This seems like a pretty decent segway into…

Diagnosis:
The web is full of stories from people who walked into a Psychologist’s office, talked about their grades in school, and walked out with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). The same stories exist about Cyclothymia and Bipolar I disorder.

A Psychiatrist can only see you for something like 45 minutes per week (if you’re lucky and insured), so they only thing they have in their toolbox is your perception of your behavior, and their tiny window of analysis. I don’t doubt that thousands of patients are misdiagnosed with mood disorder’s every year. But I also believe the same amount aren’t diagnosed when they should be.

I went through the same existential quest when I self-diagnosed myself with ADHD. Until someone gives you a prescription, it just feels like complaining.

But after meetings with Psychiatrist who made me more anxious than I was before to Psychologists who told me exactly what I wanted to hear, I think I have become to understand the value of self-diagnosis. Sure, hypochondria is a risk (wonder how often that’s self-diagnosed?), and sometimes when you’re looking for answers that fit it’s all too easy to ignore the symptoms that don’t, but if you’ve done the research and examined your life comprehensively, sometimes the safest thing is to recognize the illness within yourself.

Out of all of the posts about Cyclothymia I found on mental health forums, at least 75% were titled something like “How do I know I have it?”,or “Not sure if I have it…” The most asked question from those looking into the disorder is: What does it feel like?

It’s probably a good time to talk about that.

What Cyclothymia Feels Like:
Right now I’m riding in a Muni car. I’m on the K line to be exact. Riding toward City College San Francisco’s Ocean campus. Right now I feel pretty good. But unlike someone who wakes up, goes to work, and waits for their boss to piss them off, I have no such emotional guarantee. I’m constantly PMSing.

The result is some really fast typing. I write as rapidly as I can not because I’m worried there won’t be a tomorrow, but because there won’t be another hour. I don’t think I’m going to die, but my enthusiasm, productivity, and creativity very well could. Think I’m overreacting?

Let me show you a graph of my moods for an average week. It is on a scale from 1 to 10. A mood-score of 1 means I’m feeling pretty close to suicidal. A 10 means I’m out of control hypomanic (what’s that? I’ll tell ya later), buying expensive steak dinners, and climbing telephone poles (all things I’ve done).

Anybody can have a bad day, a bad moment, a bad couple of hours. Anyone can get a letter in the mail that makes them smile, get asked out on a date by their crush, get a sugar high. It’s when these moods shift without a trigger, in the middle of a benign activity like cooking dinner or brushing teeth, that it becomes a disorder. When you don’t feel safe making plans for longer than a few hours away because you don’t trust yourself to be in the mood to see anyone.

I spend most of my days like this:

• Wake up. Cheerful or miserable.
• Shower. Inspired or furious.
• Get to the Muni station. Happy-go-lucky or in tears.
• Get to class. Loving my classmates like siblings or wishing I had never enrolled.
• Midway through class: Violent shifts in mood, sometimes two to three times. Almost always extreme polar opposites.
• Get out of class: Sometimes I cry as I take the Muni home (no reason) and sometimes I am inspired and write, like now.
• Afternoon. Cook something and decide I hate cooking midway through. Purposely burn everything I spent an hour preparing. Get angry at myself for wasting my time and food. Start to cry. Put on a movie and lay motionless in bed until I have to leave for class.
• As I walk to class, you might see me scowling and muttering to myself, purposely bumping into people on the street, almost shoving them. Or, you might see me listening to an audiobook and smiling as the author makes a joke. I might get to class breathless, brimming with enthusiasm, or sullen and shriveled, refusing to make eye-contact.
• My teachers have begun checking in with me in the middle of class: “How are you feeling?” they’ll ask. And they’re right to.
• Then I walk home to Chanterelle, and she, in her graceful acceptance, searches my face as I walk through the door, trying to gauge who I am. Sometimes I hate her, I don’t want to talk to her, and I feel like emailing my friends to let them know I never want to see them again. Sometimes I tackle her and kiss her on the bed.
• Go to sleep and start the whole process again.

I’m not being over-dramatic. Some days really are better than others, but some are so bad I genuinely consider committing myself. No one knows this of course, because when I’m up I don’t really remember being down, and when I’m down, I don’t really remember anything rational.

I’m making it sound like multiple personality disorder – but really it’s not like that.

You see: none of the thoughts I had when I was in my alternate state make sense to me. I write down how I’m feeling when it’s really strong, just so I can remember later. But when I’m up, why should I read that depressing junk? And when I’m down, well, what’s the use?

Hypomania and Dysthymia:
Hypomania (our ups) is a type of mild mania. True mania usually involves running down the sidewalk with a gun, and very little sleep. I believe I have had a few genuinely manic times in my life (most people with mood disorders do, even if they’re not full-blown bipolar), and though it was suggested at these times that I might be bipolar, it wasn’t pursued.

“After all,” my parents would say to the doctors, “he seems to function fine most of the time.”

If you know me in real life, you may have experienced me in a state of hypomania. You know you’re hypomanic when:

• You’ve suddenly realized you have more money than you know what to do with, and that you need to spend it as quickly as you can.
• You finally realized how inconsequential due dates and pithy little errands are, and now you need to spend as much time having fun as you can to make up for lost time.
• You have just noticed how incredibly slow everyone is, and you feel the name to tell everyone in line at Walgreens about it.
• The thought: “Later is good, but now is better,” has become your single governing rule when it comes to buying things.
• Everything routine seems boring and useless, you must rearrange your life, now!

Additionally, people in a state of hypomania are often viewed as charming and confident. This is magnified by their momentary spontaneity. For this reason, Cyclothymia often goes diagnosed for years. Hypomania has a pretty face, and the depressive state doesn’t last long enough to keep an appointment with a Psychiatrist.

Dysthymia (our downs) just means depression. The difference, as far as I can tell, is that it goes farther than just “being sad.” While all of us can get sad, very said in the case of a breakup or death, dysthymia is chemical. When the brain is in a dysthymic state, we very well may be experiencing genuine, sad emotions, but the feeling is magnified with an imbalance of natural chemicals.

You know you’re dysthymic when:

• You can feel your muscles flexing as you restrain yourself from hitting the guy on the bus who doesn’t offer the old woman his seat.
• Musicians playing on the street cause you to sit in a corner and cry, even if you were feeling fine a moment before.
• You are angry at your girlfriend for “stealing” your headphones even though you offered them to her yourself just that morning.
• Smiling to someone who smiles at you on the street causes a shock of pain to your heart.

I think everyone has their own ways of dealing with dysthymia (hereafter referred to as depression, typing “d-y-s-t-h-y-m-i-a” every few seconds is a pain).

The problem I have when I’m chemically depressed is that as soon as I realize I’m upset, I try to think of a reason. If there isn’t a reason, I make one up. I cling to things that have never bothered me, and before you know it, I find myself tangled in the web. Then, like a fly, I try to struggle free and think my way out. Turns out this is a waste of time when you’re being held-down and injected with downers.

So much of my days over the past few months have been spent tracking and monitoring myself, trying in vein to think my way to balance, there hasn’t been much time left for anything else. Did you wonder why I haven’t been blogging?

Let me tell you how it affects my work.

Productivity:
Hypomania has an excellent reputation for productivity. You’re supposed to feel inspired, obsessed with getting stuff done, and completely free of the need for sleep. Most of the time, however, this isn’t the reality. As I alluded to above, when I am feeling hypomanic (hereafter referred to as high, apparently it feels very much like a mild hit of heroin) I “forget” about due-dates. I’m above them. The stuff will get done. There’s plenty of time. So I do something else.

When I’m depressed, I have no motivation to live life as I have. In fact, I hate life as it is, and if not getting my homework done is what it takes to escape the oppressive walls of the classroom, I’m going to make that sacrifice. After all, I think at the time, I don’t have much else to sacrifice. Everything I have is rented-to-own from hell anyways. So I do something else. Or nothing.

Do you see the problem?

Most of my time is spent oscillating between these two states. Every once in a while (once a week, maybe) I get a day like today. A day when I maintain enough stability and balance to keep my head out of the clouds and free of aches long enough to get something done.

These days, while not “fun” like my highs, make me feel good. They’re like gold, and just as rare. On these days, I have a sense of self-control. It may not be reliable, but it’s there, and I hold on with both hands.

Assuming these mood-swings don’t go away, and my days continue to go the way they were, what will I do? How will I function as I go on? In school, a missed homework assignment takes you down a grade. In the world, a missed deadline takes you down a client.

No, those standard desk jobs aren’t going to work. Anything that requires consistency everyday is out. As is a job where I am required to interact with people predictably at preset times. What does this leave?

I need a career that allows three hyper-productive hours to support myself and a family for a week. Anyone know of any openings?

Didn’t think so.

So, if I have to seek some treatment, what can I do?

Treatment:
First off, I want to say that I have no idea how to treat Cyclothymia. Everything I have to say is based on a week or two of data, it’s hardly conclusive.

But, the past couple of weeks have been full of self-examination. I have done just enough research and experimentation to have something to say on the subject.

First: medication isn’t enough by itself. Pills can take the edge off of our emotions, but they will never be the final answer. Call me a hippy who had a naturopathic doctor for a mother, but it is my opinion that pills are made to suppress symptoms, not the illness itself.

I have been taking an antidepressant called Welbutrin since December. The first week I was on them was wonderful. I felt like a superhero. I lifted more weights than the athletes at the gym. I did my homework in minutes, then did everyone else’s. I bet speed feels the same way.

Then I crashed. Since then, the antidepressants have only seemed to make the mood-swings worse. I’ve been continuing to take them because I wanted to give them a chance, but my Psychiatrist and I agreed yesterday that we would phase them out pretty soon.

Just so you know: Anti-depressants are almost never prescribed for bipolar disorder or cyclothymia. They’re often reported to make manic episodes more frequent (and worse), and can knock someone with a mood disorder even farther off-balance. My doctor didn’t know I had Cyclothymia when he prescribed them. All he had to go on was my report of an extended depressive phase. “Why tell him about my highs?” I thought.

So yesterday, my Psychiatrist prescribed lithium carbonate. I took his little blue slip (I love these things for some reason) and gave it to the nice woman at Walgreens. In a half-hour, I came back and picked up a little bottle of pills. I took my first one yesterday as I was walking home.

Lithium carbonate is, from what I can gather, a sort of non-organic salt. Maybe if I had gone to high-school past freshman year I would know more about the stuff than the fact that it’s used in batteries. Whatever it is, it has been around for a long time. One of the things I that attracted me to it was it’s long lifespan. “Old-fashioned” has become the search phrase I use in Google when I want pie recipes that don’t include instant jello puddings. Old-fashioned means quality.

Last year a study in Japan showed reported that communities whose water contained large amounts of lithium had significantly less suicide rates, and psychiatrists have been using the stuff for over 100 years.

A tid-bit: apparently lithium used to be in the majority of sodas until around 1950. In fact, 7up is named after the number “daltons” (what the hell are those?) that make up lithium’s atomic mass.

So there’s always lithium. Jeremy Brett, a hero of mine who played Sherlock Holmes in the 1984 Granada television series took it after he was diagnosed as bipolar midway through taping a season of the show. Apparently it helped with his mood swings, but his liver was so weakened by it that he began to take on large amounts of water. He gained an incredible amount of weight as the Sherlock Holmes series went on. That scares me a little.

I can’t say much on the effects of these little pills, because I’ve just started taking them. If they don’t work, I’ll likely move on and try something else. The other common drugs used are anti-seizure medications.

What I really want to talk about, though, is therapeutic treatment. My Psychologist (different from my Psychiatrist) is excellent at what he does. He is holistic, and realizes that treating people isn’t just about listening to them whine, and giving them advice. He works to help me pry the right answers out of myself. And that works.

The most helpful thing he has worked with me on so far, is the acceptance of my states. What I mean by this, is the willingness to acknowledge and stop fighting the moods as they come and go, whatever they may be. As I mentioned earlier when talking about what chemical depression feels like, the default tendency is to try to invent reasons to justify your mood.

The trick is to change this pattern. The reward? The mood swing will last only as long as it needs to. If you let yourself get tangled, you’ll stay angry, depressed, whatever, for longer than you need to. For the past week, I’ve been focusing on remaining centered, recognizing the early warning signs, and changing my default responses to unexpected chemically-induced emotions.

And, of course, I’m still terrible at it. But I’ve already noticed a difference in the length of my swings.

Relationships:
Much of the time, I am reliant of Chanterelle to keep an eye on me and try to supervise my actions. The common script when we’re out:

Me: Hey, let’s try out that new Indian place!
Chanterelle: (Looking hungry, but retaining self-control) We don’t have any money. It’s too expensive.
Me: Oh come on, we’ll just do one less load of laundry. Don’t worry about that.
Chanterelle: Christian, no.

Thankfully, I respect her “no” enough to let it be the final word on the subject. If I didn’t, we’d be in trouble.

My closer friends who I see in person have started asking Chanterelle what sort of mood I’m in when we get together. Sometimes (like just the other day, when Samantha brought her cousin to meet us) I’m in a crappy, I-hate-you-and-everything mood. But they know that within as little as 5 minutes I could be talking like an auctioneer and dancing down the sidewalk.

The only one who does not respect my boundaries and leave me alone when necessary is our cat, Maya. She finds my worst moods convenient times to take a seat on my lap, and funny enough, she never gets mad at me for being such a jerk.

The future:
Who knows how this will all turn out. In the end, I think it’s better to know about a disorder like Cyclothymia, even if you don’t know quite what to do about it.

If you’re interested in learning more about bipolar disorder and Cyclothymia, the actor Stephen Fry (who played Oscar Wilde in the movie) created a documentary after receiving his own diagnosis. In the film, he goes to various friend’s houses (including Robbie Williams and the woman who played Princess Leah in Star Wars) and interviews them about their bipolar disorders. I have seen it, and really enjoyed it. It’s called: “The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive.”

Thanks for sticking with me through this post. It may be the longest post I’ve ever written. As I mentioned before, it is my hope that my words will serve as support and comfort for someone who might be trying to understand why and how this illness has slipped into their lives.

The most important thing to remember: accept your moods for what they are, and don’t get caught in the web.

No related posts.

I have people in my improv class who center me. I just need to hear them speak, and I’m zeroed in.

They’re black guys wearing big brown boots and cornrows, constantly blasting down the wall of racism and judgment I thought I was too conscious to have.

They’re white guys wearing big jackets and jeans 3 sizes too big, getting on stage and acting out a sex scene with another guy, free of homophobia.

They’re the guys who applaud me after I read my poem about my journey with sexuality, and pat me on the back in congratulations in the restroom after class.

They’re the people I judge, without thinking or reasoning, who later become my best friends.

I grew up thinking I was better than everyone. Smarter. More enlightened. Cooler. Better looking. I didn’t admit it to myself, but deep inside, I knew what I felt.

But now I see these people are beautiful. They are wordsmiths. They are masters of humility.

These people have shown me that I am the one stuck in the prejudices of my breeding.

I am the one who needs to learn from them.

Related posts:

1. Finishing off the cookies
2. PODCAST: Staying Centered and Being Present
3. Sponsor me in San Diego