Tag: depression

Movie Review: Causeway (in honor of Memorial Day)

I’m pretty late in writing this post since Memorial Day happened last week, but I wanted to squeeze in a movie about veterans to commemorate the day. I was figuring out what movies to watch for Memorial Day, but I have a weak stomach and probably couldn’t sit through Apocalypse Now or Saving Private Ryan, even if these are critically acclaimed movies. However, I remember trying to catch up on my Oscar-nominated movies last year, and I missed one of the nominees. It’s a movie called Causeway, and it stars Jennifer Lawrence and Brian Tyree Henry (I was almost going to type “Brian Austin Green” because I watched an episode of Abbott Elementary and Barbara Howard keeps mixing up Black celebrities’ names and White celebrities’ names. She says she loves Brian Austin Green, but she meant another actor, Brian Tyree Henry.) I saw the trailer, and I love A24 movies, so I was pretty excited from the beginning to see this movie. I am forever thankful I have access to Apple TV, because Causeway is an Apple TV movie.

Causeway is about a young woman named Lynsey, who returns from fighting in Afghanistan to her hometown of New Orleans, Louisiana, after suffering a traumatic brain injury. The beginning of the film shows how she goes through rehabilitation and has to learn how to speak and walk again after the injury. She also has to take several medications and suffers severe PTSD. She leaves the rehabilitation center even though the person taking care of her doesn’t think she is ready to leave, and she moves back home to her mother’s house. She gets a job cleaning pools, but while she is driving the truck, she has a panic attack and cannot steer the truck and ends up crashing it while driving through a busy intersection. She takes the damaged truck to a mechanic named James (Brian Tyree Henry) and has him get it fixed. He tells her that he will call her when it is fixed, and she says she doesn’t know her phone number. At first, he thinks she is kidding, but she tells him she is actually serious that she doesn’t remember her number. He develops a deep understanding towards her, and they develop an incredible friendship.

This movie reminded me of another film I watched called Mudbound. In the film, a white couple named Henry and Laura McAllen move near a Black family named the Jacksons in 1940s Mississippi, and they have to navigate racial tension. Ronsel Jackson and Jamie McAllen both serve in the war. Even though they fought in different units, they come back feeling disillusioned and lost after the war. The rest of the family can’t see eye-to-eye, but Ronsel and Jamie develop a meaningful friendship and share with each other their experiences fighting in the war. Jamie experiences PTSD and has serious flashbacks to when his fellow pilot got killed in battle. Ronsel comes back to a world of Jim Crow racism where he can’t go through the front door of a shop like white people do just because he is Black, and where he gets called “boy” and the N-word. Both Jamie and Ronsel struggle to readjust to life back at home, and even though they live in a segregated community, they treat each other like brothers and friends. In Causeway, James empathizes with Lynsey because he was in a traumatic car accident and he lost his leg and his nephew, Antoine, who died in the accident. Both James and Lynsey dealt with the worst kind of suffering imaginable, and due to their shared experiences, they develop a very deep connection of trust and respect. There is one scene where James takes Lynsey out to eat and a guy hits on Lynsey when she is trying to enjoy her time with James in peace. Lynsey lies and tells the guy she has a boyfriend, and James tells the guy to back off. After the guy leaves, Lynsey tells James that she doesn’t have a boyfriend and while they are leaving the diner she tells him that she is actually a lesbian. But James is respectful of that, and they end up smoking weed and drinking beer on a bench in a basketball court. Lynsey opens up about her brain injury, her brother’s drug addiction and how her mom was the only one left in their house, and James tells her about the car accident he was in. I think what their interactions showed me is that vulnerability takes courage and it’s not easy to open up to people we don’t know, but once we do it can open the doors to a beautiful connection.

Even though I don’t have PTSD, I felt I could kind of relate to Lynsey’s struggle with mental health. She goes to the doctor, and he goes over her medications, and she tells him that she wants to stop taking the medications. He tells her that getting off the medications could cause depression, seizures and other side effects, and that she is probably functioning precisely because she is taking the medication. He then has her tell him in more detail about the brain injury she suffered, and she discusses it in more detail, reliving the nightmare that she lived through. She later tells the doctor she wants to redeploy, but he tells her she might not want to do that because she suffered a traumatic injury, so she needs significant time to recover from the injury, especially since the injury impacted her mental health. But she tells him that she wants to redeploy because serving in the war made her feel like she had a purpose, while back home in New Orleans she doesn’t feel like she has a purpose. She tells her mom that she wants to redeploy, and her mother tells her to not go back. Her mom tells her that a friend of hers is hiring in an office she works at and encourages Lynsey to take the job, but Lynsey says that she is already employed cleaning pools. Her mother is disappointed that she is cleaning pools instead of working a comfortable office job, but Lynsey tells her that she can’t work in an office at the moment while she is trying to recover from the injury, especially since she is still just getting back to life at home. I remember when I was in my junior year of college and I suffered a serious depressive episode, and I came home for winter break and my parents found out I was depressed and they sent me to a therapist, who referred me to a psychiatrist. However, I didn’t think I needed to get on antidepressants, so I decided not to go. I also begged my parents to let me go back to school and my parents asked, “Are you sure?” because they were (reasonably) worried after what happened, but I told them I would be fine, and that I just wanted to graduate. However, I came back for the second semester, and it was even harder, especially because I still wasn’t seeking professional treatment for the depression and kept it hidden from so many people. I felt deeply alone, and I had no friends in the new dormitory I was in, so I couldn’t really talk to anyone about what I was going through because I didn’t think anyone would understand.

However, I remember there was a young woman who lived two doors down from me and somehow, she saw deep down that I was depressed, and so she showed me one day that she made a WordPress blog page for me with a message saying, “It’s important to SHARE.” I can’t remember what each letter stood for, unfortunately, but she made it for me because she saw I was really going through a lot of sadness, and she wanted to be there for me. The first week of college, she asked me for directions to a building on campus and we ended up having a really great conversation as we walked. I didn’t know that even just an interaction with someone could save my life, but looking back I have so much appreciation for this person because I really was suffering and felt I had no one to talk to, and she was the only one who could see I was going through something even though I hadn’t opened up to her about my depression. I think watching Causeway showed me that it’s important to ask for help, especially when it comes to struggling with mental illness. The film shows that asking for help isn’t easy, and it often comes with feelings of shame. Lynsey wants to live her life normally again after the brain injury, but she needs to spend a lot of time in recovery. She cannot do a lot of stuff on her own and has to have someone help her. She ends up moving back home, which she doesn’t want to do because she doesn’t feel like she has a purpose living at home anymore. There is one scene where James opens up about the car accident that he was in that killed his nephew. James’s fiancée was in the car accident, and after her son died, she left James, so now James lives by himself. He offers to let Lynsey stay with him because he is lonely and wants to have companionship, but she politely declines and decides to continue living with her mother. However, Lynsey realizes that her mother isn’t looking out for her daughter’s best interest. In one scene, they are in a pool in their backyard just spending time with each other, but then Lynsey’s mother gets a call from someone and leaves Lynsey sitting by herself. Lynsey decides that her mother doesn’t actually care about her life, and she decides to eventually go live with James. I kind of related to Lynsey’s struggle because at first when I moved home, I just needed a place to crash, but I was also incredibly depressed. I hadn’t finished addressing the mental health issues I dealt with in college, so I needed time to address them after college. I remember spending days lying in bed as I searched for jobs, getting rejection after rejection. Most of my friends lived in other parts of the country, and I didn’t see them as much, so I got really lonely. I think having my Buddhist community around was so important during that time because the people in the community supported me and encouraged me not to give up. Even though I didn’t get the symphony job I wanted, I got a job at Starbucks and looking back, that was the job I needed because I needed to gain some basic work experience. In retrospect, I think at the time, I needed to take care of my mental health and focus on paying off my student loans rather than trying to get the job at the symphony. In Causeway, even though Lynsey’s mom tells her she needs a better job than cleaning pools, Lynsey likes the work she does with the pools and it’s where she and James hang out a lot.

Honestly, even within the first ten minutes of Causeway I was crying a lot. Even though I don’t have PTSD, just seeing how Lynsey really struggles through recovery and with her mental health made me think about my own recovery from my depressive episodes. I wanted to just go back to being busy all the time and running around on high energy 24/7, but my depression was a wake-up call for me to slow down and take care of my health. Having depression made it hard for me to do a lot of things I took for granted, and there have been many times it sapped my will to live, but now that I am recovering, I am taking everything a day at a time. I also began to appreciate the little things that I take for granted, such as waking up and brushing my teeth, eating food, and getting sleep. I think also the film score in Causeway was really beautiful and so I think that is why I cried. Honestly, I wouldn’t mind seeing this movie again. It was a really powerful and heartfelt film. Also, the acting was incredible! I remember seeing Jennifer Lawrence in Silver Linings Playbook, and she was a really good actress in that movie. And Brian Tyree Henry was in another movie I saw called Widows, which was also really good (I saw it three times because it was THAT good.)

Causeway. 2022. Directed by Lila Neugebauer. Starring Jennifer Lawrence, Brian Tyree Henry and Linda Emond. Rated R for some language, sexual references ad drug use.

On Burnout, part 1 (content warning: mental illness, self-harm)

I am no stranger to burnout. In fact, this year I made a determination to take better care of my physical and mental health, and in Buddhism whenever we make a big determination, we face obstacles. One thing I’ve been noticing about me is that I tend to burn out very quickly. In my first year of college, I wanted to take on as much as possible, and I’m glad I took on the challenge, but I remember I wasn’t taking care of my health much during that time. I decided to work two work-study jobs, one in the dining hall as a dishwasher and the other as a pre-K teaching assistant at a daycare. I had a heavy courseload and also was burning the midnight oil well past my bedtime. My roommate would turn off her light around 9 pm, and I was determined to stay up until 12 or 1 in the morning poring through my philosophy textbooks, studying each book several times and perfecting every draft of every essay I wrote. It’s no surprise that I would come into class feeling tired and sleepy, and I would nod off during class. I would at first start off enthusiastic and alert, but as the class went on, I found my notes started to get a little less legible and my eyelids were feeling rather heavy. Before I knew it, I was dozing off at my desk in just about every class that I took. It wasn’t that the lessons were boring; they were very interesting topics. However, when you’re running on four hours of sleep each day, your body soon starts indicating that this is not a sustainable habit in the long run. And by junior year, I realized that it certainly wasn’t. During my first and sophomore year, I found myself gradually becoming more tired, more irritable and more withdrawn. And by junior year, I had hit rock bottom with my mental health. That fall semester there were several unarmed Black people that got killed at the hands of police, such as Eric Garner and Tamir Rice, and reading the news about police brutality made me feel disillusioned, frustrated, and depressed. I became a lot more hyper-aware of my Blackness, and going down the streets of the predominantly white town that I was in made me feel very self-conscious and unsure of whether people were looking at me because I was Black or whether they were thinking about what to grab for dinner or what time to pick up their kids from school (a.k.a not looking at me because I was Black). All I knew was that I was in a life state of pure Hell during that fall semester of junior year, and frankly I’m not sure how I even made it out alive, because I had lost so much hope in life. When I came back to school in my spring semester that year, I lost steam and was just running on fumes at this point. I had very little energy, I went to class feeling like a numb zombie, thinking everyone around me hated me and wanted me to disappear. I would go to bed a lot earlier than normal, which was great because my body needed to compensate for all the hours of sleep it lost due to my poor sleep hygiene those first two years.

I remember during my first year, I would hear gentle reminders from folks to take care of myself, to schedule fun time, to hang out with friends. The seniors often saw me running around during my first year juggling all these commitments, and they always reminded me to get sleep when they saw me staying up late in the hallway, click-clacking an essay on my laptop. I didn’t even go to senior banquet because I thought all I had time to do was study. However, the next day the seniors let me know, “Hey, we really missed you.” One of them gifted me a planner so that I could schedule time for myself, reminding me that college wasn’t just about the classes. At first, I got upset and offended when anyone told me to take care of myself and schedule time for self-care, but now that my body is recovering from years of being on all the time, I’m learning the tough way that self-care is a daily practice. I’ve also learned self-care doesn’t always need to be expensive. Sometimes self-care for me was taking walks in nature (as hard as it was to not have my own vehicle on campus, I did a lot of walking and I think that helped with my health to some degree), reading a book that wasn’t for class, or hanging out with my housemates. During my senior year I decided to try twerking for fun, so during study breaks I would twerk in my room to Iggy Azalea and other hip-hop artists’ music. I wasn’t very good at it, but it was fun, and it relieved some of my stress.

After college, I still had to learn that self-care is something I have to do every day, not just when I feel like it. And I learned that taking care of my body is important as a musician. In 2016, I auditioned for a local professional orchestra. I had this idea in my head that I would get the audition and be able to pay off my student loans just like that. Little did I know that it was a lot more challenging than I had envisioned in my idealistic mind. I remember shredding away at the audition excerpts for hours on end, without taking a single break to get up and drink a glass of water or exercise. I did go to the gym, but only sometimes, when I felt like it. I remember feeling really exhausted after practicing for three straight hours, and unfortunately, I still felt horrible about how I was going to do at my audition the next day. At around 2 am, I started harming myself, which is something I struggled with in my junior year of college. I didn’t want to be alive at that moment. Life felt too painful. The next morning, I lay in bed, feeling like life was over for me and that I should just give up. I didn’t have the energy to leave the bed, I didn’t have the energy to go to my orchestra audition later in the evening. I felt like a complete and utter failure. A relative who lived out-of-state called to check up on me, and at first, I missed his call because I didn’t have the motivation to answer the phone, but this time I answered and thanked him for calling me. He told me to take care of myself, and honestly, I think his phone call saved my life at that moment, because before he called, I had no hope and had lost the will to live. I made sure to rest my body before the audition, and in fact, that was all I had energy to do at that moment. About fifteen minutes before I had to go to the audition, I decided to chant to my Gohonzon (it’s the scroll I chant to morning and evening as part of my Buddhist practice) to have a good audition. I was terrified at this point about auditioning, and as I chanted the words “Nam-myoho-renge-kyo”, I started crying. I realized that I didn’t want to take my own life, I wanted to live, and I was tired of feeling numb. I cried on the way to my audition, and my dad gave me a hug. I got to the audition space (it was in a church) and the person helped me sign in. She was really nice. I went into a small practice room and warmed up with scales. It was an unrealistic expectation that I would play perfectly at this point. I just needed to focus on doing my best and getting through the audition. When it was time for me to go in (I saw only one other person going into the church to audition) I saw two people: the conductor of the orchestra and the principal cellist. They sat at a small table. I was nervous, but somehow because I chanted, I was able to be myself at that moment. I played “The Swan” by Camille Saint-Saens for my solo piece, and then did my best on the excerpts. Sure, I fumbled quite a few notes, but looking back, I did my best. I think because I chanted, too, I was able to have a very natural down-to-earth interaction with the conductor and the principal cellist. After the audition, my dad and I celebrated by getting Taco Bueno.

To be continued…

TV Show Review: Shrinking, episodes 1-2

I just started watching the Apple TV show Shrinking, and it is really good so far. I think one of my relatives recommended it to me, and I was excited that Brett Goldstein, who starred as Roy Kent in Ted Lasso, was a writer on Shrinking, so I partly wanted to watch the show because of that.

The show is about a therapist named Jimmy (played by Jason Segel) who is grieving the death of his wife and a strained relationship with his daughter, Alice. He is trying his best as a therapist, but he is experiencing serious burnout, and it seems like his advice doesn’t get through to them, so he decides to tell them honestly what he thinks they should do. He himself is struggling with his mental health, and in the first episode we see him drinking and his neighbor has to check on him to make sure he is alright. Alice doesn’t want to talk to him, and Jimmy doesn’t know how to have a better relationship with her. His colleagues, Paul and Gaby, are doing their best to support him but also, they are tired of him bringing his personal problems to his professional life, and Paul tells him he needs to stop bringing up his own problems because that is not what he is supposed to do as a therapist. Jimmy often gives out advice that seems promising at first but gets him in a lot of trouble. One of his patients, Grace, constantly talks about how her boyfriend talks down to her but thinks her breasts are great, and Jimmy finally gets fed up and tells Grace that her boyfriend is emotionally abusive, and she needs to leave him. Grace is taken aback but she accepts his advice, and she leaves her boyfriend and moves in with her sister. At first, I thought that was the end of it, but then when at Alice’s soccer game, Grace’s ex-boyfriend approaches Jimmy and attempts to beat him up for telling his girlfriend to leave him. Sean, who is one of Jimmy’s patients, ends up beating the shit out of Grace’s ex-boyfriend, but then the police arrest him, and he ends up in jail.

I thought Sean and Jimmy’s patient-therapist relationship was interesting. Sean has gotten in a lot of trouble over many years for getting into fights and beating people up badly. The first few visits don’t go well. Jimmy has to take a phone call during the session, and Sean ends up leaving. But then Jimmy takes Sean to a boxing club so that Sean can work out his anger there, and Sean ends up being pummeled badly by the other boxers. However, Sean had a moment where he did overcome his anger. While walking down the street, someone bumped into him and threatened him, and Sean didn’t actually beat him up. He just imagined beating him up and then he walked away from the guy. However, he ends up beating up Grace’s ex-boyfriend to defend Jimmy. This reminded me that therapy isn’t a one-and-done thing. It’s a process and it requires a lot of honest self-reflection. I remember going to therapy for the first time in my junior year of college, and it wasn’t a great experience, so I gave up on going to therapy. What that experience taught me, though, is that you can’t give up. Even if the therapist isn’t a good fit, keep searching. When I got back to my second semester of that year, I really thought I could tough it out and just keep the depression and anxiety to myself, but it was really, really hard and I ended up suffering in silence. I’m glad I had chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo during that time because man, I was about to lose it. After moving back home, I finally got therapy after dealing with a pretty awful depressive episode, and it really helped. It wasn’t an overnight thing where I changed my behavior and thinking patterns in one go; it has taken a long time, and it is still an ongoing process. Seeing therapy helped me learn how to deal with stressful situations at work. When I left my job in June 2022, seeing a therapist helped me deal with the stress of finding a new job. Seeing a therapist now is really helping. Again, it’s not an overnight magic cure, but I have found therapy a helpful tool to help me work through these personal issues that I had been dealing with. It’s easy for me to walk around and pretend like I’m okay, and to keep my problems to myself, but it’s helpful to have a professional to talk to so that I don’t just have to keep these problems to myself. There were periods where I felt, Oh, I’m better, I don’t need therapy, but then some stressful thing would happen, and I would find myself not being able to navigate it, so contacting a therapist has been helpful.

I really appreciate the scene where Alice goes over to Paul’s instead of going out drinking with the girls at school. During gym class, Alice’s classmate invites her over for drinks under the bridge, where a bunch of teenage girls get drunk under a bridge. Alice doesn’t want to go, but she doesn’t know what else to do, especially because she can’t really relate to the girls at school. At first, Jimmy wants to eat dinner with Alice, but she says she has plans that evening, and he feels hurt. But then his friend asks him out to pickleball that evening and so Jimmy accepts his invitation. Alice picks up chicken sandwiches and goes home to eat dinner with Jimmy, but Jimmy tells her he is going out to play pickleball. At first, I thought Alice was going to decide to go to drinks under the bridge because she wasn’t going to get to spend time with her dad, but then she ends up going to Paul’s and they eat the sandwiches and watch TV together. This scene reminded me this movie I saw called The Edge of Seventeen because in the movie, Nadine doesn’t relate to kids her age and like Alice, she is grieving the death of a parent (Nadine’s father died of a heart attack when she was 13) and also doesn’t have any true genuine friends, so she often eats lunch with her history teacher, Mr. Bruner. Nadine has depression and often feels alone, but Mr. Bruner ends up being someone she can trust. He doesn’t tell her to cheer up or get over her depression, but instead gives her a space where she can talk about what she is going through. He also refuses to bullshit her and often gives her honest advice, even if it’s not the advice she wants to hear. Like when she is telling him she is an “old soul” and doesn’t relate to her peers, who seem to be focused on social media and acting silly, Mr. Bruner tells her that maybe no one likes her. Growing up I found myself relating to Nadine a lot because I usually gravitated towards older people because I struggled to relate to my peers, but I also began to realize that I wasn’t the only 20-something dealing with insecurities. Once I opened up to people about what I was going through, I found a lot of other young people who were struggling with depression, anxiety, insecurities, loneliness and other issues. It is so easy for me to think I’m the only one going through problems and to be honest, it’s still hard for me to open up about what I am going through with people because I feel a lot of shame and guilt and worry people are going to judge me, but I’ve learned that problems are just a part of life and that sometimes talking them out with a trusted friend helps. It may not take lots and lots of friends to form a genuine connection with someone. Sometimes you just need that one person in your life who you can trust and lean on.