Joe Maddon and the cure for depression

When Charles Schultz died without ever having Charlie Brown kick that football it felt.... right.  When you grow up as a Cub fan and a Catholic in a city where winter challenges your will to live every single year you are conditioned to not just accept but to embrace your suffering.  You are taught that "Yes, the universe is trying to destroy you, and the pain and the failure will never relent until you die, but you can offer that suffering to God and this will not only purify you, it will sanctify you."  What Cubs fan could not relate to Charlie Brown, forever trying to kick the football and forever failing?

I had absorbed into my identity the sincere belief that before the Cubs won the world series I would die or major league baseball would just end due to lack of interest or a major global catastrophe like a meteor strike or alien attack.   I am not joking when I say that I am far more mentally prepared for the zombie apocalypse than I am for this reality where the Cubs just won the World Series.  That being said just like Charlie Brown every year the Cubs had even a sniff of making the playoffs I ran full speed pulled back my leg and whiffed.  I was at game 7 in 2003 and watching the Marlin's celebrate on the field at Wrigley tore something in me.  Still with Dusty, with Lou I ran and I kicked and I fell and it felt...right.  

Every day I work with people who are struggling with depression.  People who balance on the knife's edge of whether or not they should kill themselves.  Most of them can look at their lives and point to a great deal of evidence that the universe hates them.  They have been abused, molested, betrayed by their families or their bodies, they have known a sticky corrosive pain that eats away at your soul and your will that we call depression.  Many of them have beaten it back once or twice but they face each day in the knowledge that it may return.

This weekend a former client, who should probably be in a hospital, texted me "They say people like  Robin Williams lost his battle, but maybe he won it."  Her words stab through me like an icicle from my navel through my heart.  I can't lose her.  I can't lose any of them, and there are so many.

My response to her, to them, is a broken record.  Endure and better days will come.  Life will be hard and it will be painful but it will also be wonderful and worth it.  Ignore what your experience has told you is true and look to the examples I show you of people like you who have pushed back the darkness and live now in the light.

But they hold up the Judas's of Robin and Ned Vizzini.  Before you think me harsh for using that label allow me to explain that I see Judas as figure who is tragic not evil.  Even if I had known these men were going to go I would have loved them and held them to the last as Christ did.  Still I feel betrayed by them because they were my allies in combating depression and in providing hope.  Ned's book It's Kind of a Funny Story, and so many of Robin's characters, particularly Sean Maguire from Good Will Hunting were tools I went to regularly and shaped my work and my life.

So there I sat last night next to my wife, when I wasn't shifting position to try to get just the right amount of luck to keep Baez from swinging at warm up pitches from the bull pen.  My sister and I texting back and forth pessimistic jibes designed to keep our hope from growing too large, tensing our collective muscles for the whiff  as Lucy pulls away with a smile.

And then hell froze over.  It HAPPENED.  I was smiling with tears in my eyes, my neighborhood erupted in fireworks, never mind that it was midnight, we were glowing, we were in numbed awe.  Internally the earth buckled and the temple curtain split, reality came crashing down.  I stumbled into the kitchen and made my son's lunch for today and drifted back and forth to the TV not knowing what to do with myself.

A reporter asked Joe Maddon how he kept the focus on this year in spite of 108 years of history of failure.  What I absorbed of his response seemed to me the key to combating depression.  I will paraphrase: I respect the past and tradition but there is no place for superstition and curses.  This is now.

Joe Maddon built a team that did not run from their past but would not be defined by it.  Unlike most baseball people he spit the superstition out of his club house the way he spit it out of his mouth, with disdain.  What I heard in his words was a belief that the universe does not hate you, the universe does not care one way or the other.  If you are failing to kick the football stop deciding that is your fate and get a different fucking holder!

I understand why a person would choose to build a universe that hates them, because as much as it sucks at least it is predictable.  Perhaps the only thing worse than swinging and missing is being surprised that you missed.  If we can convince ourselves that we will always suffer then we will never be ambushed.  But we will also never win.

The Cubs did not fail to win for 108 years because they were cursed, they failed because until recently only two teams from the national league even made the playoffs and most teams had better organizations with more invested ownership.  The weight of the years did become a self fulfilling prophecy that impacted players and managers and that seemed true even last night but the players destiny was always in their own hands.

Depression is real but if we can go forward each day and "Try not to suck" we can transcend the identity we have created.  Cubs fans are happy to let go of the moral superiority that came from being the longest suffering.  A decade from now when the Cubs are just another team will we have lost something?  I hope so.  I hope we will stop finding silver linings and preparing ourselves to endure the torment of life.  I hope the legacy of this Cubs team, and what I will bring to my clients from this experience is EXPECT TO WIN.  Trying not to suck, is to stop protecting yourself from failure by preparing for it, because it still sucks.

Sean Maguire described the Carlton Fisk home run as a pivotal moment in his life that he sacrificed for love.  Baseball is not just entertainment in the background of our lives, who we choose to be fans of, particularly in a city that has two teams, is a declaration of our values and who we choose to be.  White Sox fans have been the down trodden bitter grinders who stick their thumb in the eye of the universe and will tell you that sunshine and joy are for the soft.  Cubs fans have been the pathetic half way optimists, but both groups have been united in a Stark clan knowledge that "Winter is Coming."

If Robin Williams were here I think he would have asked us all to look to Sean's example more than his own.  To buy that "winning lottery ticket" but more importantly to heal from our pain and go back out and embrace life.

Thank you Joe Maddon for delivering an entire nation of fans from the tyranny of a superstitious universe.  This morning everything is different, any future is possible, and this is no going back.  Try not to suck.