Diary of a Mad Businessman 8: Yep, I’m Depressed (& probably not the only one)
By Ben Calica
What happens when the well of stubbornly good humor runs dry, and all stores are fresh out? How do you win the fight of your life, when all the fight in you just drains out?
I was doing really well. Ok not so much with the business, cause, well, COVID!!….but there was an acceptance and almost peace with trying to find a new path, in a world that had tossed everything we knew up in the air. In a way, there was a soft warmth in possibility in trying to rebuild something new, something wiser from the busted up lego pieces. It’s not that I was being foolishly optimistic. I’m kinda cursed with Cassandra like abilities to see the future, and I could see that there was a bad time coming. That after the initial rush of help and affection from the store’s community started to fade into the everyday din of personal survival, that small businesses like ours were gonna shift from treading water to drowning, while the lifeguards started to drop from utter exhaustion. And that to survive, we were going to need to bring the absolute best of ourselves to the challenge, or this business that I’d been creating for the last 9 years was gonna die.
And for a while, we were on it. We were running faster then the bear. But the big problem is that working from fear kinda burns you out, consumes all the recharging structure that exist inside you. You can run from a bear, but it eats all your reserves, and if you don’t get away, you just end up as trembling food. I know that I do my best work jumping on a bouncy house of joy, it is the kind of energy that builds on itself. But that is a very vulnerable commodity at the moment, and I’ve been doing my best to keep it safe and sheltered. So this is the absolute worst time to fall into depression-land, even if it is the most logical and predictable human response to this situation.
At our usual weekly virtual town hall meeting for our business community, I brought these feelings up, just to see if there were other folks who might want to put a little support group together. (I’m a big believer that even just letting the fears etc. out in words lessens their power to bounce around in your insides, building up speed and knocking out all the pieces on the inside. Might, just a smidge, be why I write these things.) After I said how much I felt I was emotionally struggling, I asked if anyone else felt that way, and there was a far too long moment of silence. I started feeling pretty isolated and self conscious.
Then it started. A set of nods followed by “I feel stressed all the time”, and “it is the not knowing, the complete uncertainty that gets to me”. And it was like a little flutter of soft blinks, of firefly lights in the huge cave of blackness, and just knowing I wasn’t alone started to help. (Oh and one thing while we are here that has also come up as I keep talking with my peers, this whole thing about the small businesses being the ones who were pressuring to open early….BULLS — T! We are not stupid, and in talking with my fellow small business owners, we would all close down for another month IF everyone would do it at the same time and we could get this — ing thing under some sense of control. This half assed stuff is what is really killing us. Businesses are like, “if you are gonna be idiots about it, then we might as well open now, cause things are not gonna get better anytime soon.” And honestly, that is another brick on the depression side of the scale. I was ok closing when we did, and even doing these major shifts in what our business is going to have to become, because I knew it was the right thing and we were all working together to keep each other safe. To have done all that and see it wiped away in a sea of people being suckered into conflating personal freedoms with putting on a mask to keep each other safe is beyond depressing and distressing. And if you are reading this and disagreeing with me, I’m gonna do something completely out of my fundamentally respectful and gentle character…You are acting in an unforgivingly stupid and homicidally foolish way. You have allowed yourself be manipulated and made a fool, and if there is anything deep down that can really assess what is going on outside of that bubble, listen to it. Ok…I know that the likelihood that this is read by anyone who feels that way is slim, but I gotta try just in case.)
And it isn’t just the business that is adding to the overweighted plate we are trying to keep balanced on our respective heads. How can any of us squeeze all that worry and pressure and feeling of utter unfairness that so much out of our control is destroying this thing we spent so much of ourselves to build? So we try our best not to snap, to be patient and supportive of all those others in our lives who have had their worlds blow up too, and inevitably fail. Which just ends up making things worse.
See the truly nasty thing about depression is that you can be in it, and know (or be told) with 100% certainty what things will likely really help, and you just make yourself to do them. I know, absolutely know, that if I exercise, I will start to feel better.It isn’t the cure, but it helps get to the place where one can work on it. About a month ago, I turned the store’s game play space (which clearly won’t see customers for another couple of years), into the land of rediscovered exercise gear, so as I type this, there is a treadmill so close that if I lean back far enough in my chair, I’ll smack into it. But despite being clearly at a dysfunctional level of depression, it was only a few days ago, after almost a month of feeling this way, that I finally hauled my sorry ass onto the thing. And I knew that starting to write would help, but you can see the sparsity of my writing during that time.
So during a time when I really needed to bring my best to play, I was frozen in stasis. A pretty big percentage of us have something(s) that we find ourselves doing when it all gets to be too much. Not the things that will help, the other things. The ones who have created a well rutted path to our own private spirals. When they get a grasp in, no matter what the initial cause of feeling depressed, they change the story and add a heaping spoonful of self blame into the mix.
In my case, I don’t drink (never have…not sober, just a HS experience with my best friend at the time nipped that in the bud right about the time I was playing with trying it.), and I’m very careful about not doing anything else that is potentially addictive when I’m feeling bad. But the one exception, (ironically enough, given that I own a game store), was games. Not face to face games,Those act as ways to connect people and are pretty hard to get out of control playing. That is part of why I own a store dedicated to that. (Ok…with the very specific exception of poker, which is full on, capital A addictive and which snuck up past my defenses for a year or so in the mid nineties. The thing that got me over that was when it was pointed out that the real goal was to find people that were much stupider than you and then spend as much time as possible with them.) But electronic games, particularly online games, are another matter entirely. I can absolutely get lost, letting hours go by playing things as complex as World of Warcraft and as simple as friggin solitaire. So I never, ever play online games, and try not to play any electronic games at all. When I do, I feel like crap until I muster the strength to boot myself back off.
So it is not without some real thought that I own a store that is all about face to face, non-electronic games. There are a bunch of substivive human values gained by playing them for lots of people. And hidden among them was my space to have fun playing with other people. Using that part of my brain and let my kid play, in a way that was safely limited plus blended with real human connection. It was a part of what I’d gifted myself with for the whole 9 years I had the store. My little reward and haven for all the work I’d done all week. When we had to shut all that down, Wizards, the company who made our most popular game, and the one I liked the best, was heavily promoting their newest online version. Their old online version had be the source of one of my previous spirals about 15 years earlier, and was on the big never-never list, so I was very wary. But they were doing big promotions that involved having our customers theoretically support us by playing online when in person wasn’t safe anymore. So I had a real reason to check it out. But more than that, I missed my weekly time playing. (And, clearly I showed some talents as a high level rationalizer.) So one night about a month ago, sitting alone between the walls of my store that still had the faint echo of distant laughter, I installed this online version of this game I loved and was off to the races. Down a track as it turned out, seemed to be spinning down in smaller and smaller circles. And in that moment, the depression won, riding that sucker all the way down with me.
I’ve always found that one the things about those kinds of spirals is that you are fully awake for them. You are watching from inside your head trying different intonations of“stop that!” while you do thing you know will just end up making you feel worse about yourself. And that same thing that moves to scrape some desperate endorphins at the cost of future genuine ones, will also seal your lips when you try and tell anyone else what is going on. Just to keep the source of faximile joy coming. And that level of anxiety and misery is the sworn enemy of logic and focus.
Finally I got my hands on the controls again and started to push off from the bottom. I deleted those games off all my computers. (It doesn’t stop me from reinstalling them, but makes me really think about it before I do.) I’m acknowledging that I got habituated to the neuro-chemicals those brought in, and allowed myself to know that I was gonna feel uncomfortable and needed to push through it. I stuck my ass on that treadmill, just to remind myself why I knew that was a good idea. (This was right before the 100 degree heat wave in the bay area…so it hasn’t had a lot of company yet.)
And I’m here…writing this all down and getting ready to put it out in the world, busting myself in a pretty public way. And honestly, ever sentence I write feels like I’m putting back a jenga piece to the potential joy part back in the tower. I’m working hard to thread the needle between hating that I let the behavior happen again, and forgiving me for letting it. Because I know that without that, it creates a whole different kind of spiral, and this time, I’m listening so I don’t have to do this aching climb back out again.
It is a really hard thing to remember that we all need to forgive ourselves for letting a situation, even when the logical reaction is to get depressed, give power to the parts of us that love that ride down spiral lane. The self doubt, the inner critic, that overpowered voice of judgement. All those things that are just waiting for a crack in our carefully built balance, or humor or openness, or all the other armory of tools to help us through hard times, like these. We don’t really have time for slips to happen, don’t have the option to no be our best selves to make it through this. But, inconveniently enough, we are actually human, and it will happen. So I guess we have to make time to forgive ourselves and dust off and try again, as many times as we have to, and not one time less.
Oh..and a bit of a P.S. For those of you lovely, loyal customers who are continuing to try and keep businesses like ours around, two things:
- We’re gonna need that help for a while longer. It is probably going to take most of us over a year to even come close to getting back to even close to doing reasonably again.
- Your words of kindness and support mean a lot to us. I mean a lot, a lot. Touching our hearts, making us feel really like what we are doing is worth while, and keeping many of us from giving up, a lot. So when we say thank you, we really, really, cross our hearts, pinky swear, mean it.