Photo credit: Matt Marton / AP
The Mariners won today, 9-2. I’d love to tell you how that happened in detail but I couldn’t watch, and also there’s no particular reason for this roster to win any game on any particular day. So how did the Mariners win today? Well brother and sister, you tell me. I know It’s by and large a lot more dingers from a variety of guys the Mariners either acquired because they had to in order to get rid of someone expensive they didn’t want, or guys that were so bad last year they were hanging around the MLB clearance rack, snot-covered from over eager baby hands smeared all over him.
What I really know is the Mariners should have probably lost and instead, like eight of their first 10 games, they won. Because of the way this team has historically been, and the way I very much am, I want to use that to talk to you about depression.
(What a seamless transition!)
“Depression lies” is a phrase I hear a lot when talking about mental health. I’m sure that in many circumstances it can be true. For myself I’ve always felt that depression, by which I mean that feeling that sucks any ability to engage, share, or facilitate emotional experience with either myself or the people in my life who need me to be emotionally present straight through my nostrils and dumps it in a fat puddle on the floor for up to weeks at a time is the byproduct of too little lying. The truth is, looking around at the state of things, we probably shouldn’t be happy, and any unchecked mental push towards that reality without some built in fail safe distractions, or mild self-deceptions can lead us too far down a path most of us aren’t really meant to go down.
I’m more fortunate than most, but I have plenty of my own baggage. I got married far too young, and had children before I should have. I’ve been, in the past, extremely poor with my financial management and responsibility. I’ve abused alcohol, neglected anything resembling exercise, lied to avoid work responsibilities, and a lot more. I’ve shut myself in my bedroom with curtains drawn and a bottle of whiskey, door locked and wife and young children on the other side, just to try and grab a moment’s escape from the world. I count those experiences and many more like them as losses, and I’ve lost. I’ve lost plenty.
The latter half of 2018 was not kind to the Mariners, and it wasn’t kind to me. As the team’s hot start and miraculous May-June run faded into a fractured locker room. 17th consecutive missed playoff appearance, and an avalanche of self-induced scandals, I and my family were threatened by mounting work stress, financial obligations, fracturing relationships, and my response of bottoming out and being completely useless. Any honest appraisal of the situation in both cases could only return that, while things weren’t lost, there just weren’t a lot of fact-based reasons for hope. As the Mariners broke up their roster I spent the the holiday season in a self-medicating fog; each day’s challenge merely and solely to not go to bed before it was over. As I fell to sleep every night, it always felt like a loss.
Nothing substantive changed, for either of us. The Mariners did not stumble upon a previously undiscovered Next Moneyball, and find themselves three steps ahead of the rest of the game. I did not break through my depression through therapy and/or medication, as useful as both can be to so many. All I can say is for awhile now small problems that would have recently left me quivering in a heap have been overcome, one at a time, day by day. Work stress feels like nothing more than exactly that: the stress of a job that doesn’t define my daily experience, and is dealt with and left in the proper proportions.
It never feels easy or routine, and I always expect it to fall apart. There are so many reasons it should, and probably will. In the past I’d have almost thought those reasons into existence. But I had a thought a few weeks ago about things turning to shit, and I’ve held onto it ever since: It doesn’t have to. All I have to do is win today. So that’s what I’m trying to do.
The Mariners are 8-2, and you probably don’t need me to tell you that, well, lol. They really shouldn’t be. They can’t pitch. They CANNOT field, and the bullpen is Evel Knievel soaked in gasoline jumping over that Game of Thrones green flame stuff while holding a box of lit matches. It really, honestly, probably will end very poorly. But it doesn’t have to. It just might not. The Mariners won today. That’s all I can ask of anyone.
Dome and Bedlam 