Unwarranted Depression

I think we'd all agree that those of us living in the United States are, for the most part, blessed beyond belief.

After all, we have Costco. We have Home Depot. We have 7-Eleven's on nearly every corner, supermarkets on every other corner, with food overflowing the shelves and high-fructose corn syrup in practically everything so that no one has an excuse not to be obscenely obese.

We have Best Buy, where the walls are stuffed with big-screen HDTVs and you can purchase a cheap PC for under five hundred dollars.

We have cable television and DVDs and NetFlix and movie multiplexes with matinee prices so that no one need go un-entertained.

We have public television so that our children can watch Sesame Street and Dora the Explorer and even occasional historical documentaries.

We can book flights on our home computers, print out our own tickets, and drive down to the airport for a quick jaunt to just about anywhere in the world, if we so choose.

We can fill our houses with junk we don't need, food we will eventually throw out, toys that break five minutes after purchase.

We have hot water on tap, electricity that works nearly all the time (barring natural disasters or idiots who can't steer away from power poles), and automobiles which can carry us and our children and various number of possessions all over the country.

We are blessed beyond belief.

And when we get down to a personal level, we-the-Meyer-family are blessed far in excess of most of the world.

We have children who are healthy and (somewhat) well-adjusted. We have a nice house in a nice neighborhood. I have a job (so far). I have an awesome wife who still puts up with me. Mostly.

So why do I get depressed?

I read an article this morning about Brook Busey-Hunt, the girl who wrote the screenplay for "Juno", and it mentioned how she, a novice screenwriter, had written this marvelous masterpiece while sitting in a suburban Starbucks in a Target. Now the movie has become a popular hit. She's famous. What's more important, she is recognized as a talented, intelligent writer.

It reminded me J.K. Rowling, who is now the richest person in England thanks to Harry Potter. Of course, she worked very hard to get there. But she did it by writing.

I don't envy their fame. There are too many examples of how that can really mess up someone's life. But the fact that they are actually writing, and writing well, and being recognized for it - that gets to me.

There's something inside every person that needs some kind of acknowledgement that they are special, that they have something to offer outside of mere existence, that they are valued for more than just being a human being. We've all heard the platitudes about how "everyone is special", but that's a meaningless statement unless it is qualified with a non-generic adjective to explain the particular quality inherent in each particular person.

My children are special because I recognize in them specific qualities, and it is those qualities that makes them especially valuable to me. I could say that they are 'special' because they are human beings, or because they are in my family, or because they are my genetic offspring; but those are meaningless because it doesn't give them any credit for developing their talents (and likewise suppressing their baser instincts). I like to focus on their special abilities, like Adam's game designing or James' artistry or Deborah's servant heart or Mary's love of dance, because those are things in which they can take some pride in developing, in expanding, in perfecting. And these are the characteristics which are displayed to the world, the things for which they may be known as they become adults.

I, too, wish to be appreciated, but not because I live and breathe and work and am a member of and support my family; those are the things that just come with the territory. I would like others to see in me the desire to create, the ability to craft words and music and concepts into works of beauty or usefulness. And I'd like to create a few of those things before I die.

But I don't have time or energy.

Most of my day is taken up with work. And the people at work aren't interested in how creatively I can get my job done, they just want it done. And though we get a lot of lip service from The Company about Career Growth and Personal Growth, we all realize that The Company's goal is not to provide a springboard for each persons individual goals and aspirations, but to put people in a slot where they will be the most productive for The Company.

At the end of the day, and sometimes on the weekends, there is time for family, mostly a matter of re-acquainting myself with my wife and children (who wake up new and different every day) and trying to get a few things done around the house before it falls down around our ears.

There really isn't time to just sit and create, not outside the time-slotted, fitting activities into the daily schedule kind of thing. And I can't create when there's an alarm clock in the back of my head ready to remind me when that time is up, and the next task comes up.

So the net result is somewhere in the neighborhood of seventy-five to eighty stories sitting in a hard drive on my other computer which haven't been touched in years, and a multitude of half-finished songs which have been badly performed in a rush and then forgotten, and a website that doesn't get updated more often than a couple times a month.

And the hours pass into days, and the days pass into years, and suddenly this year I'm going to be forty-five, and I'm reading about these young people who managed to find the time to write their screenplays and now everyone recognizes that they are really something special...

And although I'm blessed beyond belief, and have absolutely nothing in the world to complain about, and have the most wonderful family in the whole world, and am married to the most beautiful woman in the whole world, I'm depressed.

Oh, well. As Mr. Bennett would say,

``You may well warn me against such an evil. Human nature is so prone to fall into it! No, Lizzy, let me once in my life feel how much I have been to blame. I am not afraid of being overpowered by the impression. It will pass away soon enough.''