Depression – Diary of a Mad Millennial

I’ve been depressed since I was eight years old.

This is a claim I cannot back up with scientific evidence, a medical diagnosis, or even real tangible proof. It’s all anecdotal at best and perhaps a claim forged in my depressive mind long enough to the point that I believe it to be true.

But I remember being a fat little kid unable to run during gym class and “whistling from my mouth”. That’s how I described wheezing to my dad, a term I learned meant that my lungs couldn’t properly take air in whenever I was running. So from the time I could start remembering doctors appointments, I’ve been listed as an asthmatic whose symptoms only manifest “upon exertion”.

The feeling of watching the other kids jogging while carrying on full conversations and laughing what felt like miles ahead of me made me feel so sad and insufficient. It’s that twinge of self-dissatisfaction I’ve carried with me to parties, family gatherings, class, the gym, the office, alone in my room while striking out for the nine trillionth time on MLB The Show…

That miserable low has been so apart of me over the past 20 years, I can’t really think of life without it. And since the pandemic, my mind has withered into a dark cave of frustration and rage. I’m triggered by the slightest fucking nuisance – an article detailing Republicans’ obstruction of a January 6th commission, Israel’s continued overuse of power and general being racist assholes to Palestinians, a bloviating drumstick sucking off Tony La Russa for giving the opposing pitching staff a license to drill his own player, etc.

I’m out of work for the first time in my over 11 years in the workforce because one day, I threw my hands up and yelled “Uncle!”

I told my boss I needed leave, she helped me start the process, and since filing my claim over 12 days ago my primary care doctor of over a decade managed to belittle and lie to my face when saying he’d help me make my case to my company’s insurance adjuster and instead torpedoed my claim, and now I’m depending on my half-retired therapist to safely navigate herself and her husband back home from the Florida Keys through treacherous waters whilst also hoping for my psychiatrist to come through for me when submitting documents on Monday.

I’ve spent over four years making myself miserable and sick to the stomach from watching the news as part of my job and now when I need to take a goddamn break, the world seems hellbent on ensuring my leave is denied and force me back into this godforsaken stretch of never-ending mental torment.

Apparently, it’s Mental Health Awareness Month. How fitting will it be for the adjuster to stonewall my mental health claim right now? I couldn’t have timed this more perfectly!

If I’d G-d forbid broken a bone or suffered some other physical injury, this claim would have started on time. But thanks to the fact that every process involving taking time off from work in America is contingent upon making sure the claimants aren’t gaming the system, something nearly nobody fucking does mind you, I’m using what little PTO I have to give myself an unwanted staycation all because employers are incessantly paranoid over the mere chance you could be wasting their time.

Yet if you ask nearly any (mostly Republican) “expert” on such things, we need to make the process to claim disability as hard as humanly possible to stop people from mooching off of a system where the richest people in this country have effectively been given welfare and wealth redistribution dozens of times over while the rest of the population festers and chokes in its own filth.

Have we ever questioned whether this system is beneficial to the minds of the average American? Doubtful. And even if we have as a society, we certainly came to the wrong fucking conclusions if the answer was to make a clinically depressed human being send in mountains of paperwork to prove to some faceless cohort of insurance adjusters something that person has known as reality their whole adult lives.

Perhaps the pandemic and the brain-fracturing 2020 election has turned me into a leftist, anti-capitalist shill. Or maybe years of being fucked by the system has taken its mental toll and left me with nothing by resentment and hatred in my heart.

Either way, mental health isn’t taken seriously in this country.

I just wish I had enough money to run away and never look back.

I bought a house.

I’m 28, single, living and working from home.

My student loans, dating back a decade, languish in purgatorial forbearance. These loans totaling up to over 25 grand with various interest rates of 4.5-6.8% lay dormant thanks to a pandemic that unleashed the forces of plague and pestilence not known to (the majority of) humanity for over a century, gumming up my life in an awkward position.

I am a college graduate stuck in his parents’ “basement,” only now, my name’s on the mortgage and I’ll start building up equity while living life in neutral, caught between parental dependence and financial freedom.

By all accounts, I’ve accomplished one of the hardest feats members of the Millennial Generation can – without a spouse!

I’ve matched my parents’ age of their first home purchase; both were 28 when they became homeowners.

So, why do I feel like an absolute failure?

Well, dear reader, I think I’ve got an idea.

As I’ve explained before, I’m a failed broadcaster. OK, technically I’m not so much “failed” as I am employed in a completely different industry than the one I earned my college degree for (along with my forborne school loan debt). My definition of “success” once looked like working as the number two broadcaster for the Biloxi Shuckers in Biloxi, Mississippi (a.k.a. Jim Crow Vegas).

That or working for a random-ass New York-Penn League club like the Renegades or the Scrappers or perhaps even as a media relations intern for the Gwinnett Stripers or Iowa Cubs.

My point is that a year or two ago, if I’d landed a job with any of MiLB’s 160 (now 120) franchises, I’d be fucking golden, baby! On my way to The Show!

However, thanks to reality and watching a year of wanton death and destruction unfold before my eyes from the comfort of my spare bedroom in MY HOUSE (that’s kinda nice to write for the first time, not gonna lie), I’ve discovered that my idea of #winning wasn’t so much a dream as it was agonizing limbo.

I’d be working a low-paying job on a monthly $2,000 stipend while trying to balance a rent, utilities, groceries, general living expenses (including managing my diabetes and depression) on top of any surprise or unforeseen costs. It would be living a life of all work and no play while ironically busting my ass to provide baseball fans a cheap, fun family experience they’d never forget.

In my darkest days with my former MiLB team in 2016, I had convinced myself that the little town I was toiling away in would never forget my name.

Now, I’m just curious if they remember me ever existing at all.

Good fucking riddance.

Yet even now, knowing that my one-time dream was just wool pulled over my sheepish eyes, I see colleagues, friends, unrequited loves and their “successful” boyfriends calling games for collegiate summer league teams and wonder why the shit I’m stuck writing angry soliloquies to myself on a blog that in spirit still doesn’t have a name, indeed one not even bearing my real name!

I waffle between self-assurance that I’m on the path required to further my journey and bemoaning my failure to become a faceless cog in the Entertainment Exemption Industrial Complex of American minor league sports.

10 years of playing little league/rec league baseball, ages 4-and-a-half to 18, I never suffered a single concussion.

One year in minor league baseball, I rung my fucking bell like I was the Philadelphia Phillies celebrating a Bryce Harper dinger while, of all things, pulling a tarp wearing shorts and a T-shirt in a biblically rain soaked derecho working for a team that couldn’t afford a full-time grounds crew staff!

Those seven months slogging as a good little worker ant brought me crippling debt, worsening depression, and post-concussive symptoms.

It was the lowest point of my life that I somewhat artfully hid through some nifty smiling depression. Determined to score that next job in baseball, I knew I was gonna land on my feet in yet another small town that also would never forget the great “Sam Brody.”

I mean, c’mon, I got my last job while working as a cashier at Target! How hard can this shit be?

Four years later, I should be thanking all 120 surviving franchises for refusing to hire me. Sure, they might have avoided me due to the workers’ comp I took for one weekend’s worth of games lost due to my one and only concussion (knocking on all the wood) that likely soured my boss’s perception of whether I’d be a good fit, but at least I wasn’t stuck in Flyhead, Texas watching the pandemic tear through our country, unable to be with the two most important people I’ll ever know.

Ah, that phrase though, “a good fit.” As if the totality of a human beings’ worth within the workforce can be unequivocally encapsulated by the same turn of phrase used to assess the comfort of wearing a fucking Nyan Cat T-shirt or a pair of one of Joe Montana’s shitty Skechers.

Seeing how the pandemic dirty dicked all of sports, it’s an acute miracle I’m not behind the mic of one minor league baseball’s survivors – or worse, one of the now-defunct franchises that laughed my resume into their MacBook’s recycling bin.

And yet the emptiness remains.

I couldn’t get a job in the field I set out to find work within, and because of that, I feel like an utter fuckup.

I lost.

I’m 28, single, living and working from home.

I just bought a fucking house.

So, why does this feel like failure?