**Hey everyone, this an edit from a week afterwards. I realized I posted this in the wrong publication. This was supposed to be part of my weekly media round-up, but I accidentally posted it on Digital Burnout. My bad. If you like this piece, check out others like it here:
I’ve been spending all morning looking for my vape. Yes, that’s really pathetic. Still haven’t found it. I quit smoking cigarettes in the fall of 2021 and replaced it with vaping—that step away from smoking that really ends up just being a different addiction. I hate how much of an addictive personality I have.
I can often forget about my addictive personality because I have most of the things that I’m addicted to readily on hand. That’s how you don’t notice addictions, when you’re actively feeding them. You only really notice them when you don’t have that cup of coffee in the morning or didn’t get that smoking break you needed.
Moving from cigarettes to vaping has made me go longer without noticing my addiction. I can vape indoors; I can’t smoke indoors. This means that smoking entailed the, often humiliating, process of stepping out to find a spot where I could satiate my addiction. Cigarettes also cost more money than vape juice, and you need to buy them more frequently, so I was always hyper-aware of how much I was smoking. There would be periods where I was buying a pack a day, or better periods where I was buying one once a week.
Vaping can be indoors. Vape juice lasts me usually about a month per bottle, so I really don’t notice how much I’m doing it. The plus side is I don’t feel the same perpetual damage to my lungs; I’m not wheezing the same way. My voice is higher than it was four years ago—I’ve noticed this when I’ve gone back and listened to podcasts I did in 2020, when I was chain-smoking.
So overall, vapes make me less aware of my own addiction. Except for one thing that will make me more hyper-aware and irritable than when I was a cigarette smoker: a vape is a small, single device that’s very easy to lose. I’ve got some vague form of AD/HD (I saw a psychiatrist when I was a kid, but decided I didn’t like Ritalin, and so I didn’t really get much further help outside of that handful of visits; I regret that now, especially because I don’t really have any official diagnoses, and whenever I’ve gone to the doctor about it as an adult, they end up getting more concerned by my depression rating than my complaints about my dogshit executive functioning skills and inability to focus, and they end up convinced that those are all side effects of the depression rather than one of the potential causes).
I’m really good at losing things. Wallets, phones, keys, and, now, vapes. I once had to call into work because I lost my car keys. I found them under my bed after 4 hours of searching. Another time, I left my car running for an entire 8 hour shift at work, spent twenty minutes looking for my keys at the end of the shift, only to come out and hear that stupid old van humming away. Its age is probably the main reason it didn’t get stolen.
I feel like I’ve gotten even more neurotic with age, and I don’t know what the reason for that is. In my head, I kind of assumed that being an incredibly anxious, depressed, or AD/HD person was something that you eventually get sorted out by the end of the your 20s. Obviously not completely, but I assumed that by then you’ve learned to live with it better. As I’m in the second half of my twenties, I’m discovering that it seems like bad patterns of thought, anxieties, and lack of focus can become even more entrenched with age. I think the worst part is knowing that there’s a degree of control I have over this. I understand the desire to frame mental health as something that’s completely out of your control, something that results from having the bad chemicals in your brain be bad. It’s not that that’s not true, but there are ways to make that better and ways to make that worse.
The relationship between personal responsibility and mental health is really thorny. On the one hand, you shouldn’t blame someone for their own sickness. Obviously. On the other hand, there’s been a tendency in online mental health communities since I was in high school to act like nothing is capable of making things better. I think this tendency has declined a bit in recent years, but I remember it dominating Tumblr discourse when I was a teenager.
I always think of this post that really made me mad. Someone said their therapist (or other mental health professional; I don’t remember specifics) told them to try to go for walks every day, try to socialize more, and try to eat better to see if it helps their depression a bit. They were furious with their therapist for this suggestion. “These are the things that depression prevents you from doing!” they said. Through this, people were being encouraged to disregard what a professional psychologist was suggesting because it didn’t fit the orthodoxies of Tumblr depression-porn—that depression is a big hole that’s impossible to dig out of and there’s no curing it and any answer to it is invalidating you. You see how this becomes counterproductive, right? Depression, of course, tells you that you can’t ever get better; so this is just giving into it.
Often posts like the one above have an argument about how mental health is health, mental illness is illness, and that we should treat physical and mental health as equivalents. So when their therapist suggests trying to spend more time outside as a way to help with depression, they’ll say, “This is like telling someone with a broken leg to walk in order to heal their legs!” I think that’s a really silly comparison for a few reasons—firstly, those two things just aren’t the same. You are not going to make your depression worse by stepping outside the way you would trying to run on a broken leg. But secondly, and I think the funnier reason, is that having someone with a broken leg go for a walk to heal is very much a real thing that medical professionals do. That’s physical therapy. It’s a very vital part of recovery! And that’s honestly a good parallel to why you should do all those things listed above. Much like physical therapy, there will be times it’s painful and you may have to tap out early, and there are times when it will feel easy and give you a surge of confidence. It’s small baby steps. That’s the point.
So there is personal responsibility built into mental health to some degree. You are not completely stripped of agency by depression or anxiety. This is probably different when talking about a more extreme diagnosis; I’m not saying that someone with serious paranoid schizophrenia should be held personally responsible for their disorder. But we do need to acknowledge that there are behaviors which will make your mental health better and worse, and that you should probably do the better things.
But this is what’s thorny. For me, I use this knowledge of personal responsibility as a cudgel on myself. It becomes yet another thing on the list of things that I don’t like about myself, and they feed into that inner monologue that makes me feel depressed and anxious in the first place. I use the knowledge of how to get better in order to get worse. Instead of thinking “you know what? going outside more would probably help my depression,” I think, “you fat, weak fuck. You would feel better if you just stepped outside, but you can’t even do that.”
The result is that I never actually take personal responsibility, but I use personal responsibility as a reason to beat myself up. So this morning, I keep thinking about how weak I am, as I dig through my dirty, cluttered apartment looking for a little vape. I tried to give up looking three times, but then I’d start searching the same few spots again and again, unable to focus on writing. I really hate that this little device has enough power over me to completely ruin my morning.
Um. I don’t really know how to pivot out of this opener. It’s gonna just have to be some tonal whiplash. Welcome to the media round-up I guess.
New from me
Nothing new from me. The episode I was recording last Friday caved in, so I’m in a bit of a scramble right now. I didn’t want to spam everyone’s feed at the end of the month, but that’s how it worked out.
I did record something this week although I think I’m going to wait to release it until later next week. It’s a Patreon episode, and I feel like I’ve put out too long of a streak of Patreon episodes, so I want a free one out first. It’s the next Music Exchange with Josh and I. We discuss Arc by Agoraphobic Nosebleed and I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning by Bright Eyes. Keep your eyes out for that. The Fruitless Patreon is on $3 per month.
A miniseries and some reading
I got up and looked for it again.
I think part of the reason mental health is on my mind is that I finished Baby Reindeer last night. This is, of course, the big Netflix series du jour right now. And rightfully so, it’s a really fantastic series with some real emotional complexity and artistic ambition that I usually don’t expect from Netflix originals. While it’s technically yet another series about trauma and mental health, I think it’s an incredibly well-done one that does not have an easy, packaged takeaway.
Unfortunately, the online audience for Netflix originals is incapable of seeing a piece of art as a piece of art. This is not a series that tells you how to feel about it; it’s got a lot of ambiguities, and those ambiguities are difficult to swallow. That’s what makes it so compelling. Unfortunately, it’s also based off the real life experience of director and star, Richard Gadd. I think the biggest blunder this series made was by advertising that it was a true story.
If you want to avoid spoilers, go ahead and skip the next four paragraphs. You should also skip these paragraphs if you want to avoid reading about sexual assault and stalking, since this is the biggest theme of the show.
Baby Reindeer is, of course, a fictionalized retelling of events that happened to Gadd. Which is incredibly common. That’s how a lot of art is made; it’s only an issue if someone feels entitled to know the real story, which no one should. The fictional Gadd, named Donny, begins to be stalked by a woman named Martha. It starts out somewhat charming to Donny, and he feeds it and enjoys the attention, until it begins to destroy his life and unearth some really difficult things he hadn’t confronted. Particularly, that he has been raped multiple times by a famous comedy writer a few years prior; he had stayed because he believed this writer would help him launch his career, and he has been living with a deep sense of shame ever since.
So now Piers Morgan has found the woman Martha was based on. Or a woman who seems to be. I’m not sure, and I don’t feel like it’s a worthwhile thing to explore. Why do we need to find an incredibly unwell woman and put her on TV? People feel violated that aspects of the series are fictionalized, including the woman who claims to be Martha—despite those fictionalizations being there in order to prevent this exact thing from happening. Even more dangerous are people’s attempts at trying to identify the comedy writer who assaulted Gadd. I understand the desire for justice here, but a McCarthyite obsession with everyone Gadd potentially worked with at one point is helping no one.
And all of this scrambling to find the true story really misses what, I think, makes Baby Reindeer great. Which is the ambiguity. This series explores a lot of uncomfortable and taboo aspects of abuse and trauma. Gadd does not present himself in a good light. He’s dealing with this tension between personal responsibility and mental health like I was discussing at the start of the newsletter, although his circumstances are obviously much, much more extreme than mine. Baby Reindeer is not about having a panic attack because he lost his vape. But he’s also aware that he keeps inviting abusers into his life, returning to old abusers, and has only really coped by trying to monetize his own trauma. Baby Reindeer started as a one-man show about the stalking. Prior to that, he did a one-man show about getting raped called Monkey See Monkey Do.
There are a lot of uncomfortable ambiguities here. Gadd blames himself for the circumstances he got into, and yet we as viewers also understand that he’s a victim. He’s not a perfect victim. He’s a difficult victim. He makes incredibly upsetting decisions throughout the show, and he suggests that there’s a degree that self-loathing can become an addiction. While I cannot fathom what he has experienced, especially the way this impacted his sexuality, I can relate to and understand that aspect. Self-loathing is addictive. And even the knowledge of our personal responsibility here can just feed into the addiction. You can flagellate yourself about how much you loathe yourself. “Why don’t you have higher self-esteem, asshole? What the fuck is wrong with you?”
I don’t really know the way out of this. I’m stuck in my own variation of it. Another piece of art that’s been making me reflect on my own mental state has been Hell is a World Without You by Jason Kirk. I wrote about it briefly two weeks ago. It’s a novel about growing up evangelical in the 2000s. A good chunk of it is about the inner dialogue that this environment produces.
There’s this vengeful, shame-filled voice in the protagonist’s head. Isaac is an anxious kid, clearly, and he has identified this self-hating voice, stylized “IN ALL CAPS AND BOLD”, as God or the Holy Spirit or his conscience. At one point, during his freshman year of high school, the voice almost talks him into suicide. I haven’t engaged with a piece of art that so accurately reflects a lot of my inner dialogue.
This comes back to a book I reference too frequently—Against: What Does the White Evangelical Want? by Tad Delay. The chapter “Against Sexuality” lays out Delay’s theory that the white evangelical environment produces a sadomasochistic relationship with your own sexuality. You associate sexual pleasure with shame and with guilt, and you eventually get off on your own suffering. You learn to love your own inner turmoil. I’m sure this isn’t true of everyone raised in evangelicalism, but I can say that it’s true for me. If you are someone who already would have struggled with anxiety or depression, I think this is an environment that pours gasoline on that fire.
I want to have a conclusion here where I say how to get out of this mess, but I really don’t have any answer for myself, let alone for others. Part of it, for me, is trying to dethrone the voice in my head that hates myself, the voice that constantly criticizes me. This isn’t because I’m not worthy of criticism but because this ongoing, self-flagellation prevents me from being able to actually act on real, helpful criticism. Beating myself up about not going to the gym has never actually gotten me to go to the gym. Fearing hell nonstop has never actually helped me grow spiritually.
Film
Last weekend, I dipped my toe into a blindspot for me: African cinema. Although all three of these films are more diasporic, and I’m not sure what makes something properly qualify as African cinema. I apologize if I’m misusing any terms in this section here.
I watched three films that were all incredibly moving. The first film is probably the one with the least claim to being “African” proper, as it’s a Guyanese film. I’m not really knowledgeable on the ethnic and cultural characteristics of Guyana, so I’m not certain if me calling the film African is offensive or if implying it isn’t African is offensive. Nevertheless, the film was really great. It was The Burial of Kojo (2018).
The film has beautiful cinematography with a dreamlike structure telling a simple story about a man who falls into a mine-shaft, and his daughter going on a magical journey to find him. I don’t want to say much more than this because I don’t want to spoil anything, but the film is short (80 minutes) and has some really captivating images. If you like late-period Terrence Malick, you’ll probably like it.
Now, the second film was less beautiful and more genuinely troubling. This is Mother, I Am Suffocating. This is My Last Film About You. directed by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese. I don’t know what to do with this film, but it is breathtaking. It’s an experimental film, partially a surreal documentary, about the experience of diaspora. Mosese moved to Berlin to be a filmmaker, but he was born in Lesotho. He expresses a lot of taboo hatred toward his home; he describes the way that he feels himself starting to look at his home the way white people do, “You deserve your war. You deserve your famine.” And yet, no matter how much he feels accepted by white Germans in Berlin, he sees Africa when he looks in the mirror.
This is a film that’s hard to digest, especially if you aren’t an immigrant. I would find myself, at times, becoming defensive of Lesotho—a place I frankly know nothing about. He’s expressing a lot of taboo emotions. It’s a really masterful film, but I’m struggling with what my takeaway is from the film. I’m excited to watch more from Mosese.
Because I was now on a journey to explore African cinema, but had watched two diasporic films, I felt like it was time to watch an unambiguous classic of Africa cinema that I hadn’t seen before: Black Girl (1966), directed by Ousmane Sembène.
Sembène is considered one of the fathers of African cinema, and this film kicked off his career in feature films. It’s short—only about an hour—following a young Senegalese girl who goes into Dakar looking for work and is hired by a rich, French family to take care of the children while they are in Dakar. Eventually, she is hired to come back to France and continue to take care of the children. Once she is in France, however, the kind disposition of the family turns sour, and she is forced to cook “authentic African food” at dinner parties, and she is never permitted to leave the home. I won’t spoil the ending, but it’s an angry film, and I found it incredibly moving.
Aside from these three films, I also watched The Social Network this week. I don’t have much to say about it that hasn’t already been said, but I’m glad I’ve finally seen it.
Alright, I think that’s it for me this week. See you next week!