Taking some time off

In January I applied for short-term disability from work, which would allow me to go home for a bit and deal with my depression. My claim was approved and my last day of work was Jan. 20. At this point I don't know how long my leave will last.

I'm driving home, starting tomorrow. It should be a great trip. I'm going through the States and stopping in Columbus for a few days to visit my best friend. I'm doing the trip alone so that should be... interesting. My stops will be in Fargo, Milwaukee, Columbus, Toronto and Quebec City.

None of this would be possible without the support from my workplace. All of my co-workers have been great so a big thanks to them. I know most workplaces wouldn't support someone with a mental illness and wouldn't create an environment where people can feel comfortable speaking up. The Merc is different. I'm grateful for that.

Looks like *someone's* got a case of the Mondays...

Leave me alone, I don't get many chances to start a post with an Office Space reference.

I have indeed had a case of the Mondays lately. Due to the nature of my job, my Mondays are extremely busy and stressful. I always end up working super late. I have a huge workload on Mondays.

Lately I've really been struggling with the stress. I get panicky when I look at all the work I have to do. My mind shuts down and sometimes the guys have to take on some of my work, which I feel terrible about.

I had a lot of anxiety this morning. I felt better than Friday, but still not quite right - still a little low.

For once, I fought through it and finished up at 5 p.m.

Yay me. Now if I could do that on a regular basis.

Fear and self-loathing in...

 

Yeah, this comic pretty much sums it up.

I hate this goddamn illness so much.

A dilemma that comes up too often

Tonight, instead of doing colour for the Bruins-Ice Wolves game like I was supposed to, I'll be on the couch trying to survive an attack from my old friend depression.

I didn't want to go to the game last night either. Today is worse.

Believe me, I feel lower than a snake for not being able to do my job. I missed a game late last year because of depression and now it's happening again.

I face this dilemma a lot. The vast majority of the time I grit my teeth and go. But sometimes, like today, the pain is just too much.

When I'm in the belly of the beast, the very last thing I want to do is be around other people, let alone hundreds of people. I want to stay home and lie in the fetal position until it passes. These attacks do terrible things to me and I've learned that the only thing I can do is ride them out by myself. When I have to cover a game (or go to work), instead of riding it out I have to put on a face and try to stop it from consuming me. People think it helps to be around other people but it doesn't. When episodes strike, I HAVE to be alone.

As a sports reporter, I don't often get that luxury though. Which leads to the internal struggle that happens every time I'm going through a bad day and have to be somewhere. And when I do miss a game I feel horrible. My job is the only thing in my life I feel like I have my shit together on. When my depression messes with that, I feel like even more of a failure than usual.

Another bad day

Hold on

Feeling like I'm headed for a breakdown

And I don't know why

But I'm not crazy, I'm just a little unwell

I know right now you can't tell

But stay awhile and maybe then you'll see

A different side of me

I'm not crazy, I'm just a little impaired

I know right now you don't care

But soon enough you're gonna think of me

And how I used to be

I am so worthless.

Ghomeshi, Taveras and racist cartoons

It's been quite a news day for a Sunday.

Jian Ghomeshi was turfed by CBC, who let him go by issuing a three-sentence release on a Sunday afternoon. Ghomeshi responded by suing the network for $50 million.

Ghomeshi's statement on his Facebook page is quite something. IF - a big if - he has told the entire truth, CBC is in a pile of trouble. $50 million apparently represents five per cent of their allocation money.

However, my guess is there's something missing. Maybe he mostly told the truth but left stuff out. Maybe he is lying entirely.

No one can form an informed opinion until we hear both sides. We have only heard the woman's side through Ghomeshi. It would be wrong to blindly support him when we don't have the other side.

If any sort of abuse happened here, then CBC obviously made the right call.

But some of the comments about him on twitter are also out of place. I saw one person that called him a "rapey f***". That's mere speculation. We have no idea what happened, and we don't even know what the allegations are yet.

To support one side or the other before the truth comes out makes no sense.

I think it will be a bitter, ugly, public fight.

Edit: There are now nine women claiming Ghomeshi abused them, with two of them allowing their names to be printed. Pretty hard to defend Ghomeshi at this point.

*****************

Later today came the news of the death of Oscar Taveras, and his girlfriend, in a car accident in the Dominican. The 22-year-old Cards outfielder was one of the brightest up-and-comers in the game and came up big in Game 2 of the NLCS.

These things are always hard to take. We can only imagine what he would have achieved in the majors.

Hard not to think that if the Cards had won the NLCS, he'd still be here.

*****************

Meanwhile, the Toronto Sun (who else) ran one of the most hateful political cartoons I think I've ever seen. It depicts mayoral candidate Olivia Chow in a Chairman Mao outfit, with slanted eyes and glasses, literally riding the coattails of Jack Layton's suit.

Needless to say, someone who spent 14 years as a city councillor and eight years as an MP is not riding anyone's coattails. If anyone is riding coattails, it's the Ford brothers.

*****************

In my hockey simulator program (Eastside Hockey Manager) I've begun a new game. It's too easy to win in this game so I've set myself two rules: 

1) The roster has to be made up entirely of players who weren't born in the Big 7 hockey countries (Canada, USA, Russia, Sweden, Finland, Czech Republic, Slovakia). So I'm looking for guys born in Switzerland, Germany, Belarus, Ukraine, Slovenia, etc.

2) I have to build entirely through the draft. No trades or free agent signings. Which means my entire roster is made up of teenagers.

My team won one game in the first year, with a 1-81 record. In the second year, they went winless and pointless. Just started the third season.

The only bright spots so far are Latvian centre Zemgus Girgensons, Swiss goalie Benjamin Conz and Swiss defenceman Nino Bieler.

Last year, the team scored 26 goals all season. 26!! Girgensons led the team in scoring with eight points.

I estimate it will take 37 years to make the playoffs.

Saturday...

It's a gorgeous late October day in Estevan. I can't believe the great weather we've had this late into the fall. Somehow (knock on wood) no snow yet.

Earlier, I went to Woodlawn for the Run the Course fundraiser for the Summer Games, then headed to Westview for the city girls volleyball championship. Checked out Pleasantdale against Sacred Heart. It was a great match that went right down to the wire in all three sets, with Pleasantdale ultimately winning.

Tonight I have the Estevan Motor Speedway awards night as well as a Halloween event at the art gallery. In the meantime, packing for Columbus awaits. I hate packing. Has to be done though. Three days till I leave.

*******************

I've been preparing for the upcoming draft in my hockey sim league. In this simulator, you can tell how good each player will become, so I've been putting players into a spreadsheet to figure out who I want to draft. I've worked through 350 of the 538 players eligible. It's a deep draft, but if I had the first pick (I'll have somewhere between 26 and 30) I'd either take first-ranked right winger Paul Low, or go waaaay off the board and take a risk in left winger Sergei Tsulygin.

I've also been playing season mode in NHL 15 with Minnesota. My lineup:

Parise-Granlund-Pominville

Landeskog-Hertl-Coyle

Zucker-Stoll-Niederreiter

Komarov-Wennberg-Galiardi

Suter-Jones

Josi-Trouba

Larsson-McQuaid

Varlamov

Kuemper

*******************

I'll stop boring you now. Argos play the Ticats in 10 minutes in a huuuuuge game.

Grab bag

It's a Friday night and I'm half watching CBC Newsworld (first Ebola case in NYC) and half preparing for an upcoming draft in my sim hockey league.

A few quick hits...

********************

At 7/11 today after work, I was standing in line when the two Filipino workers behind the counter briefly spoke to each other in their own language. An ignorant clown behind me proceeded to say:

"I take it as an offence when they don't speak English in front of us. We're at war. They could be talking about secrets."

I am going to attempt to list the number of things wrong with this statement.

1) They were FILIPINO workers. Are we at war with the Philippines?

2) We are not at war with anyone, unless you count a few air strikes against ISIS in Iraq.

3) Even if the workers were Arabic Muslims, they are not ISIS members. That would be like saying all Christians are members of the KKK or Westboro Baptist Church. Enough with the guilt by association, which is not really even association at all.

4) Even if the workers WERE somehow ISIS members planted in a convenience store in the middle of the Canadian Prairies, why would they be discussing secrets? What secrets would they be discussing? A suicide bomb attack in the middle of the 7/11 in the 253,284th biggest municipality in Canada?

5) Michael Zehaf-Bibeau had no links to ISIS. He was a 32-year-old loser from Quebec who acted alone.

All you can do is shake your head at the alarming level of ignorance.

********************

There probably weren't a lot of dry eyes along the Highway of Heroes in Ontario today as the body of Cpl. Nathan Cirillo was transported to his hometown of Hamilton. The pictures on Twitter of people on overpasses with Canadian flags were just amazing. We see the best of Canadians in our worst moments.

As more details come out about what exactly happened in the Centre Block on Wednesday, it gets more surreal. Harper in a broom closet. MPs making spears out of flagpoles. Kevin Vickers diving and shooting the gunman like something out of a James Bond movie. Multiple bullet holes in the Hall of Honour and the doors leading to the caucus rooms and Library of Parliament. All of it is so, so crazy to think about.

This was nothing compared to the Boston bombings, but we're seeing the country rise up in the aftermath, just like Boston did. It's a cool thing to witness. Not to mention the gestures from south of the border, including the Pittsburgh Penguins having the Canadian anthem sung before their game against Philly. It's been quite something.

Speaking of which, you can't say enough about the heroism of the people who tried to save Cirillo's life. They didn't know if there was a second shooter. They didn't know anything. They just ran toward the gunfire to help. The story of the lawyer who told him how much his family loved him is a real tearjerker.

Not to assign blame in the midst of all this, but I'm still amazed by how easily the gunman got in. Not so much that he ran into the Centre Block with a rifle, but he had just discharged it three times, no more than 300 yards away. Didn't people hear it? Didn't anyone see him run from there, steal a car and run up onto the lawn on the Hill? There was no police movement until he stole the ministerial car at the East Block.

Finally, can we stop with the "Canada will never be the same" stuff? We weren't innocent before this. And things are already much back to the same, except for Cirillo's family.

********************

In four days, I leave for Columbus, Ohio to see my two best friends in the world. Also going to see the Blue Jackets play the Leafs on Halloween. I've been counting down the days. Can't wait. The three of us don't get together often (last time was a road trip from Toronto to PEI last summer). I also haven't seen my best friend's baby yet (born in December). It's going to be legendary. 

First anniversary of Roughing After The Whistle

Online message boards have a bad reputation.

They're known as cesspits inhabited by trolls, with endless flaming matches and general nastiness. And some of them are that way. But there are also many interesting message boards full of interesting people.

In 2005, right after the NHL lockout ended, I stumbled across the message board at Sportsnet.ca. It became a regular stop for me when I was online. I loved talking to other hockey fans about the day's scores and news.

You see, for a hardcore hockey fan who knows every player and what they had for breakfast, talking to the people around you just isn't enough. When you're talking to people who aren't as knowledgeable about the game as you, you're not really getting your fix of conversation.

Which is why there are successful hockey message boards. They offer a chance to talk with hundreds of other people who are just as hardcore as you. The kind of people who can have a 10-page conversation about a player's Corsi.

Anyway, the Sportsnet boards were around for over a decade, and many of the long-term posters there became a family of sorts. They felt like they knew each other from all those years of talking about hockey. They got to know each others' opinions on things. And when I say family, I mean people helped each other out, on and off the board. I could name a number of times when a poster helped another with something in real life. And people grew comfortable with talking about their own problems in the off topic area. Hell, that community was a great comfort for me when I was dealing with severe depression.

Long story short, after a number of issues, Sportsnet shut down its boards a year ago. I didn't want to lose the tight-knit community we had, and others also expressed that feeling. So I created a new message board called Roughing After The Whistle.

My expectations at first were to get maybe, at most, 50 members. I thought it would be a very small group. Instead, it took off like a rocket and within a week we had 200 members. That eventually grew to nearly 600.

Although the web address was different, the community was the same. It's a pretty close group which has gotten to know each other over the years, so there really isn't a lot of nastiness. We have a lot of thoughtful, insightful members. That's not to say there isn't passion and civil argument. There's lots of that, whether it's about hockey, politics or other issues of the day.

We recently (last month) moved to a brand new website. Our previous one was hosted by FreeForums, and I had whipped it together in 10 minutes, basically. After a while, we started dealing with a lot of garbage from FreeForums - tons of ads, including porn ads and redirects, and a lot of issues with functionality. There were frequent outages and not only did they not have an explanation, they didn't even know it was happening. Support was woeful to say the least.

Over the last few months, I've been working with our other administrator to create our new site, which is located here. He did the vast majority of the work, as I don't know much about web design. We're thrilled with the end result and while our membership list has taken a bit of a hit, due to some not making it over yet, it will be a great home for us for years to come.

The task now is to grow the membership. While I realize it will be extremely hard, my goal is to eventually have representation from every fan base in the NHL. Right now we have forums for all Canadian teams, as well as recently opened boards for Boston and Chicago. That's to go along with boards for baseball, football, basketball, other sports, off topic, etc.

It's crazy to think of all the things that have happened in my life since I began interacting with this online community. When I found the Sportsnet board, I was in my second year of university. Since then I've graduated with honours, moved to Saskatchewan and am now working my second job in my dream field. I've also suffered a massive loss in the family and survived life-threatening depression.

I don't know how long RATW will last. Sportsnet was constantly getting new members because their forums were linked from their home page. We don't have anything like that to bring in new members consistently, so we have to work hard to advertise and use social media. Some people gradually stop visiting for a variety of reasons, so we need to work at replacing those members with new ones in order to sustain the site long term.

Here's hoping there are many more anniversaries.

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P.S. I am going to start blogging regularly. Promise! At least one new post a day.

Surviving depression

For the last few months, I've had an awful lot of nights where I've felt strong emotions.

The difference? Before April 21, those emotions were despair, hopelessness, pain and extreme sadness.

Since then, I've continued to feel strong emotions, but now I feel grateful. Grateful that I survived the fight of my life to feel a way I never thought possible and grateful that I'm now in a position to help others.

Don't get me wrong, I still have depression. I'm not exactly walking around feeling like a million bucks. I simply feel normal. I don't have days where I feel like a 9 or a 10, but a 5 or a 6 is incredible when you've been where I've been.

Winston Churchill called depression his black dog. Before April 21, the dog had me pinned to the mat, with no way out. Now I've got it under my foot.

What happened April 21? I finally gave in and decided to let the professionals take care of me.

I'd been spiralling out of control for months. Despite doing therapy and trying out new coping tools, it was getting worse. Finally, in the week leading up to April 21, I was suicidal. I couldn't take it anymore. I was in such a dark place that I wanted the light at the end of the tunnel to be a train. The pain was so great and it kept hitting me in such waves that I didn't want to endure another day. I was drowning.

I never attempted it, but I came close twice. And I had the means.

A lyric from Wilco's Ashes of American Flags kept echoing in my head:

All my lies are always wishes
I know I would die if I could come back new

Finally, on April 21, I broke down and admitted myself to hospital. I was tired of fighting. I wanted to end the pain but there was something inside me telling me to stay. I was there for almost a week and started feeling better the day after I went in. I was put on medication that made almost an immediate difference.

I felt the bliss of normal. I didn't feel any pain and my anxiety was dramatically reduced. I didn't feel great, but normal was great to me.

And I've felt that way ever since. Even-keeled. On Michael Landsberg's Sickter Scale, I haven't been below a 5. Yeah, I've had a couple of down days, but no worse than how I felt every single day before April 21.

And there are days when I'm just bursting with a desire to talk about it and help others. After where I've been, I'm incredibly grateful that the medication is working and I can live a normal life again. Because the depression messed with absolutely everything in my life.

It was only a month ago that I didn't think there was any hope. I had tried things and not gotten anywhere. I was frustrated and angry. But I'm living proof that there IS hope. The first resource you try might not work, or the second one, but if you keep at it, it's possible to turn things around.

Talking about it is a big step. It took me a while to decide to go public with my struggles. It's tough and the anxiety that comes with depression makes it even harder.

But it's worth it. I promise it's worth it. I've had so much support as a result, and I've had people tell me about their struggles. In some cases, they haven't told anyone else. Sharing empowers you and it encourages others to open up.

Trying to bear the load of depression by yourself is crazy. Tell someone. Tell anyone. Tell me. I'm more than willing to talk to anyone about this. Having someone you can talk to helps.

Talking about it saves lives. It saved mine.