Random Moosings - Inside a Broken Mind

Even though most of you know me, I should properly introduce myself. The blog will say my name is John Roberts, which is true of course, but the folks on Puns and OO know me as Moosehead Jack, or just Moose, or, sometimes Grumpy Asshole. It is no secret to those who know me that a lot of things annoy me, a lot of things used to send me flying off into a rage. Things still do annoy me, there will be plenty of that on here in the future, but I have tried to get more of a grip on it because I felt like I was becoming a caricature of myself. I was the go to guy for a pissed off rant, I was always mad about something, little did I know, there was a reason behind that.



Depression, anxiety and panic attacks are NOT a sign of weakness. They are signs of having tried to remain strong for way too long..

I have seen some people put that as their facebook status, trying to bring attention to mental diseases such as depression and anxiety. There seems to be a stigma with mental disorders, like the person is just faking it, or it is not something to be taken seriously. I admit that for a long time, I was in that boat, I didn’t understand depression, and I thought it was just feeling down. Move on, get over yourself, right?

Well, in 2009 my marriage fell apart, and I suffered a nervous breakdown. I was diagnosed with severe depression, and was, according to one of the people I talked to, probably borderline in need of being hospitalized for it. I won’t go into all the details here, partly because I really don’t want everything out there, there are some of you who know it, and I am fine with that, and partly because I don’t want to bore you with all the details. Suffice it to say, starting around 2006, things started going really bad, and I just bottled it up and kept it inside. We never talked about it, we never really dealt with it, we just kept all that anger bottled up, and as you can imagine, it didn’t do any of us any good.

That has always been my thing though. After getting help when things fell apart completely, I realized that this was not a new problem, this was something I had done my whole life. Bottle things up. Internalize it all. Keep it to yourself. No one else wants to hear your nonsense. This was passed from my mother, who also suffers from depression but refuses to seek any help. What some people also don’t understand, is generally victims of depression also suffer from low self-esteem, which triggers a vicious catch-22 that just makes things worse. I am depressed because I have no self-esteem, I have no self-esteem because I am depressed. So, as you can imagine, my teen years kind of sucked. Things didn’t really get better in college, which is where the anger that so many of you are familiar with came in. You think I was bad in the last few years? You should have known me then, EVERYTHING made me mad. And not just annoyed, mad. Angry. Livid. I hated the world and every living thing in it, but I didn’t know what was wrong with me.

So, with that mindset, I went into a marriage with no communication, or at least very little. Things built and built over the years, and I am sure you can all see where this is going, it finally reached a breaking point. This is the point where I assume things can go one of two ways. 1. You take it out on the other person. I would guess this is where people get hit. I dealt with that growing up, so that was never really an option. In a fit of anger, I DID put my fist through the wall, but I never touched anyone else. So I chose option 2. I turned it in on myself, and that is when I began to break down.

By the time the summer of 2009 rolled around, I was a basket case. All this stuff had built up inside me, and I had no outlet, I had nowhere to direct it, so I started shutting down. I was incapable of making decisions…..something as simple as going grocery shopping was a nightmare because I couldn’t decide what to get, nor did I care what we got. I simply stopped caring. Outwardly, I guess I looked the same. Inside, I was hurting, like real physical pain. All I wanted to do was sleep. If I was asleep, I didn’t have to face the world. I tried to work, at the time as a substitute teacher, and it was the worst work day I had ever had. I couldn’t even take care of myself, controlling a classroom of 25 kids was impossible. It was the longest day of my life. I knew I had to go, so I packed my things and left.

The mind does funny things to you when it is in self-preservation mode. There are still things about September 2009 I simply cannot remember. And that is not because I have a bad memory, I actually have a fairly good memory. For the longest time, there were days, even weeks, that I simply lost. I couldn’t account for them. Only recently have they started to filter back into my life, and in many cases, I really wish they hadn’t.

The other side effect of it all, what memories I do have of that time, are all black and white. I have no idea why. It is literally like there was no color in the world then. I know that sounds emo and all, but that’s how it is. When people say it is like there is this dark grey cloud all around them, they aren’t kidding. The mind does some strange things

So, I left, came back to North Carolina and got some help. It took nearly a year before I felt better, and here we are over two and a half years out and I still don’t feel good. It is a daily struggle against myself to try and keep negative thoughts from creeping into my mind. Now, I know what you are thinking, everyone has negative thoughts. That much is true, but for me, they become obsessive. I have a hard time letting something negative go, and it sits and eats at me and brings me down. Letting it go takes work, and I will be honest, sometimes it’s more work than I am willing or able to do.

So what is the point of all this? Where are the angry Moose rants? They will come. This was something of a catharsis that I really wanted to write and get off my chest. That is part of it. The other part of it is to try and shed some light on depression and other mental diseases. You don’t know how many times I have heard “well just stop feeling so down!” or, “you have so much going for you!” or, my personal favorite “just pull yourself up by your boot straps!” I am not even sure what that means. The point is, if you come across someone who is fighting depression, chances are youdon’treally understand. Unless you have been through it, it is hard to understand. They don’t want to be told that things will be better because to them, they will never be better. To then, all that sounds like is lip service. If you know someone who is struggling with this, just be there for them. Just be a friend. Don’t ever tell them to just get over it, you wouldn’t tell someone with cancer to just stop having cancer, right?

So, that is that. Next time I write, I will find something to complain about. Tim Tebow, the New York Giants, the New York Yankees, something. But I wanted to get this one out of the way first. Thanks for reading.