Depression Is A Funny Thing.

Depression Is A Funny Thing, it must be. Comedians have been sharing their tales of woe to laughing audiences for many years. I did a comedy show 3 years ago called Andrew Brown – The Most Boring Name In Entertainment. In that I talked about becoming a father at 19 years old. Not knowing where my son lived, alcohol issues in my early 20’s and even a little bit about my daughter’s journey with cancer. Yes, I said Comedy Show. There were laughs in all those subjects. There were some sad moments too.

If you want to see an incredible example of a very funny person talking about pain, funny and a bit of self hate but gathered in what is mostly hilarity the go to Netflix and look up Hannah Gadsby – Nanette. Hannah shares her life in an incredible journey through laughter and tears. As Molly would say “Do yourself a favour.”

I saw a comedian years ago do 5 minutes at an open mic night. I can’t remember his name but he was getting a lot of laughs talking about his drug addicted parents, abuse received in foster care and a sibling in prison. When I chatted to him after the show he answered my questions with “You can’t make that shit up!” I saw an ad on TV a couple of years later for a special on comedians using laughter to deal with pain.

My good friend Frank Hampster also had sold out comedy shows called Cardinal Sins where he talked to his audience about his childhood experiences and at the time current experiences in court with one of the biggest cases in Australia involving certain members of the Catholic Church.

My journey doesn’t compare to these. I’m just reminded of them. As you will see if you look at the dates on my blogs, I haven’t done one for a while. Things were going well. I was giving monthly updates on fitness and health. My plan was to be a Certified Instructor (or at least start the training and paperwork) for DDPY. As well as having my 2nd 100k Member T-Shirts earned on the DDPY Now App. But I stopped. Just stopped. 

A cool thing on the App is that every Monday, DDP (Diamond Dallas Page) posts a new video called MOTIVATIONAL MONDAY. These are inspiring, powerful and motivational. Somehow I started seeing some of them as personal attacks as they seemed to be worded perfectly at what I wasn’t doing. This obviously isn’t and wasn’t the case but something in my head had switched. There is one particular sentence that DDP said a few times and others had posted memes on Facebook and Instagram, etc of pretty much the same thing. This is where I have received some of my biggest laughs in a long time when sharing this bit with friends and family. The line is:-

DON’T BEAT YOURSELF UP!

So I would say to myself, “Yes, Stop beating yourself up you idiot!”; “Oh!” “That is still beating yourself up! Stop it you idiot”; “Wow! Are you too stupid to get this basic concept?”, etc.

Now I am wider around the middle again. Body parts are starting to ache again. I can’t bring myself to watch his MOTIVATIONAL MONDAY videos. I can’t even go to the DDPY Facebook page which is filled with the most inspirational and supportive people in the world. And I can’t bring myself to start doing DDPY again yet, even though I tell myself daily I should and even though I know that it helps with so much of this.

Guy Sebastian says it beautifully in the fist lines of his song Standing With You:-

The more you tell yourself you’re useless.

I am taking some steps to get myself back in order, I hope. As of next year I will be cutting back on my hours in the day job. I will be putting more time into writing. My other theory is that with the extra hours at home I will have no excuse not to get back into DDPY again. I was starting to like who I saw in the mirror, but now it’s just the guy with a big gut staring disappointedly back at me again. I believe that writing this blog means that I am already getting better again. I have nothing to back that up but I will tell myself anyway.

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Love to all, chat soon!