Good morning, Hank, it's Tuesday.

So I had kind of a low-to-mid level nervous breakdown and took a break from the Internet, but now I am back-ish and feeling better-ish, and this is a video about what has helped me through this fairly serious bout of depression.

So for the first week or two, I was just getting a lot of counseling and trying to figure out a path forward and then with the rest of my day, I would do something engrossing but not particularly demanding. In my case, making pottery—these little closed forms that I call secret-keepers. The idea is that you whisper secrets or traumas or whatever into the bottom of these things and then they hold the secret for you so you don't have to hold it by yourself. Does it work? Not really, but I promised them as Project for Awesome perks like 18 months ago and never finished them, but now I have finished them, so that's a relief. For me, making pottery feels productive enough to be meaningful but it doesn't feel like pressure, which is perfect for me when I was in the absolute pits of depression. Exercise also helped, as did gardening.

The second thing that's helped me a lot is my communities. Now obviously, I am in an unusual position in that I get an amazing amount of support from Nerdfighteria, from this community, and I realize that's not replicable, although I am very very grateful for it. But I found that once I asked for help, my other communities also really encouraged and supported me, like my real life friends offered to take me on bike rides or to go kayaking. One real life friend was like, "Hey, I've never really understood all the jobs that you do. If you want, you could explain it to me and then maybe in that process, we could look at your work life balance and see if it's balanced." It wasn't. And other communities that are really important to me reached out as well, especially the AFC Wimbledon community. Like, one of the club's co-founders messaged me and said, "Look, when I've struggled with depression in the past, I really like existentially needed something to look forward to, so I put our new away kit in the mail to you, but it's going to take some time to get there, so you'll just have to wait for it."

By the way, we got a new logo on the back of AFC Wimbledon shorts in the liminal space between left thigh and buttock. It was made by Nerdfighter Jen Koch and it's based on space mission patches, and I love it so much.

Another thing that helps: Helping helps. It helps to engage with the issues I care about and be encouraged by the friendships and connections that emerge from that work. Like, right now, our friend in Sierra Leone—Henry Reider—is trying to build a well in Freetown to address the water crisis there, and how awesome is that? So I donated to that and promised to help share it. By the way, link in the doobly-doo. And that helps. Just like my work on TB has been a great source of solace and connection this past month.

But probably what helped them most was meeting with my therapist and my psychiatrist. My psychiatrist was like, "I think we need to shift your understanding of yourself and how it's informed by toxic online spaces," and nobody had ever quite said that to me before, but I needed to hear it. Some of the online spaces I engage in are pretty toxic. When I swim all day in that water and I get out and I wonder why I feel sick. It's a little bit like the Olympians swimming in the Seine, like I think I might know why you get sick. Anyway, he was like, "What are your core beliefs about humans? Like really deep down, what's your core belief about about yourself and other people?" and I said what I think is true which is that we are here to love and be loved and the one thing we all deserve is to love and be loved; And he was like, "Well, you're sure not acting like that's your core belief about yourself." He said, "When you talk to me, it sounds like your core belief about yourself is that you're kind of worthless, that you're sort of a piece of crap, and every piece of information you pick up on the Internet that tells you you're a piece of crap, you think is true because it confirms your core belief."

I really did believe that I was worthless. I think I said it in that last video I made. I believed that I was a piece of crap, which is a very strange thing to believe when human consciousness itself is so rare and precious and wonderful. So I've been working really hard on that to embrace my belief that every human being, including me, deserves love and compassion and to be welcomed into the human fold with generosity and empathy. To me, the most important thing is that I'm not a piece of crap and neither is anyone watching this. We're all human, flawed and constantly failing ourselves and others, but still worthy of love and compassion. I'm trying to make that my foundational belief these days.

Hank, I'll see you on Friday.