i felt compelled to share my mental health challenges to help take the shame and stigma off it, but i couldn't do it on stage-was just too insecure and nervous. i wanted to write the book that i wish had been available to me when i was suffering--self help books are usually very boring and i wanted to write a cool, funny one! i also wrote about getting my ear getting bitten off and almost getting arrested in guatemala which i couldn't really do while making eye contact with humans
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i would say do it. i would say be brave. you only lose by not trying, you dont lose if you dont achieve fame or glory.
I am painfully conscious of the harm that occurs when participating in the media with unclear intentions. I do not want to be a salesman, I do not want to scream, ‘Buy me!’ or, ‘Watch me!’ And I don’t want to do that tonight. What I’m trying to express – what I’d like to express – is the notion that, by being honest, thoughtful and aware of the existence of other living beings, a change can begin to happen in how we think of ourselves and the world, and ourselves in the world. We are not the passive audience for this big, messed up power play.
We don’t have to be. We can say who we are, we can assert our right to existence, we can say to the bullies and conmen, the people who try to shame u...
9am. Wake up, turn on some music I like, put on a pot of coffee, and sit down to start writing! A few productive hours and then a break for lunch, and then a couple of more hours if possible: sounds like a plan! 9:15am-4:30pm: Read, text, look up stuff on the internet, read, text, look up stuff on the internet, in a trance cycle 4:30pm: Think "Jesus Christ, have I really done NOTHING all day?!? The day is almost fucking over! I am really fucking worthless." 4:30pm-7:30pm: Write like a maniac. 7:30pm: Decide, "okay, at least I got SOMETHING done today. Tomorrow, I'm going wake up early, be at my desk by 9, and really make up for lost time. REPEAT
It comes to me. Part of my leaving the media on all day is a way of…my mind has trained itself to have a very sensitive system of radar about certain words, expressions, topics, and areas of discussion that come up. There are things that interest me more than others, and then there are things that jump out. There’s one thing I learned about the mind as a young man, when I quit school. I read a book - half of it, anyway - called Psycho-Cybernetics. The author said that the brain is a goal-seeking and problem-solving machine, and if you put into it the parameters of what it is you need or want or expect, and you feed it, it will do a lot of work without you even noticing. Because the brain doe...
I wish I could. i have a lot of journals with one page half written in.
I sometimes will write myself a quick email on my bb when I think of something.
Q: The greatest comedic novels (Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, Pale Fire, Based on a True Story) all make heavy use of metafictional elements. I'm leaving out A Confederacy of Dunces because I hated that book. Anyway, were you consciously drawing upon that tradition in BoaTS? Or did the story you wanted to tell naturally take you in the direction of metafiction? I ask because you have claimed to hate meta.
A: I love all those books. I do hate meta but I was forced into by the scriptures of convention. I was hired to write a memoir, but secretly wrote a novel so I had to use the techniques of meta to mask it. I did it so well the New York Times called it a nonfiction.
It was actually really similar in the big creative ways: thinking about how to find comedy and surprise and emotion in the unexpected and the everyday.
The more you can do the better. Always write your own stuff. Most people aren't interested in writing for you. Beeleedat.
Oh, zero. I wanted to write a novel, but they wouldn’t let me. But there are facts in the book that are true, [like] 'a river is made of water.'
Related posts tagged 'Mental health'
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Related posts tagged 'Mental health'
Every few seconds. Yes, of course. OF COURSE. What helps me is community- which means I belong to several 12-step groups, I call people, I've learned the name of every barista at the coffee shop (Brooklyn, Jeremy, Sarah, Angel, Gabby, Lydia, Anja, Matt) and I ask my friends for help A LOT. I need to "bookend" (checking in with someone before and after doing a task) in order to do the simplest 5 -minutes of rehearsal. For reals. It is sometimes setting a timer for 5 minutes, calling my friend Alex and telling him I'm going to rehearse and then rehearsing and calling him again when the timer goes off. It is sometimes EXCRUTIATING to get myself to do things and then, even when I do things, I am...
Well, obviously, I don't really know about jobs I didn't get. And entertainment is much more lenient, liberal and understanding about mental health issues than any other industry. (My manager said when I called him from the psych ward- "Oh! I have two other clients with bipolar- call me when you feel better!") If it has, I don't care- I didn't have much to lose by being open about it and it turns out, weirdly, it's been a cash cow, haha.
It hasn’t always been this way but I feel really lucky that I’ve been able to get here because when you’re in the trauma, you’re just seeing red. You have no idea what’s going on but comedy has really helped me get to this point. I can’t imagine another job that could’ve helped me the way that comedy has helped me work through all of this. I think my trauma response is telling jokes and that is what’s fun about comedy. I can take these really tragic events and I just can’t be mad at what happened because I have this creative outlet that I might not have had if I was sitting in math class paying attention. It’s the dents you have that make you unique and I love being able to do comedy about a...
Sometimes, things get so bad, that nothing can really make you feel "better", but I know asking for help (even from strangers- phone operators, suicide hotlines, delta airlines representatives) can be oddly helpful in a pinch.
Ooof, still figuring the mom stuff out! The weird part is, when you grow up with something odd you just think everyone else has it the same way. Around 12 or 13 I realized something was wrong and spent less and less time at home. By the time I was 30 I got my ass into therapy and really figured it out. And yes, separating from her was a huge help. I recommend everyone get their ass into therapy if they feel something is off. It saved my life.
You’ve said you learned in therapy that your compulsive behavior – eating, sex – is just self-medicating your anxiety. Does having that insight help?
Oh, definitely. Once you say that to yourself, “Oh, this is anxiety,” you get to say to yourself, “Why am I anxious?” because when something’s bothering you, you don’t name it, you just start eating something. I’m still going to eat the two Twinkies, but when I start opening the second packet, I say to myself, “What’s going on, buddy?” That will get me to two Twinkies instead of eight.
Q: According to the book The Chris Farley Show, Beverly Hills Ninja depressed Chris Farley a fair amount and put him back in to a bad place that spiraled into his death. Is that accurate? Any sense of that on set?
A: There was no sense of that on the set. I mean, we all were depressed on Beverly Hills Ninja. So we were ALL depressed. It wasn't a great representation of anybody in it.
i really hope so dude. sane people don't try to kill people en masse. theres a mental health epidemic in this country and its very distressing that there's still such a stigma around it. i also hear a lot of misdiagnosis i.e. doctors conflate ADD with schizophrenia, which is a very dangerous mistake. in this book i wrote about my mental health struggles in an attempt to do my part to help remove the shame around mental health challenges. i was harming myself and possibly could have harmed others due to my adrenaline addiction. i really hope one day people won't have to hide or feel ashamed about mental health challenges. its so much more common than we think, and so unfair to the people who ...
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