How am I doing?
by Mark Hoover

Hi, Mike here. I recently checked in with a friend via email to see how he was doing. And he was brave enough to level with me. Like so many others, he’s fighting the black dog of depression. One of the awful things about depression can be a sense of isolation and aloneness—our friend Mark Hoover has generously agreed to post here, in hopes fellow travelers will understand that no, they’re not alone.

Wow, I always thought my first ever post would be about role playing games or comic books. I’m honored that Mike encouraged me to write this and to have a spot on this blog is an appreciated privilege.

Lots of folks have asked me lately how I’m doing. Most are well-meaning acquaintances and to them I usually respond “oh I’m fine, a little down… for obvious reasons.” I’ve recently gotten divorced and so naturally everyone just assumes I’m heartbroken, gives me a pat on the shoulder, tells me to keep my chin up.

My reality is a word that usually invokes a reaction in folks like theater audiences in horror movie trailers from back in the fifties: Depression (cue organ music blast and stampeding crowds).

So I’m outing myself with this post. I’ve only recently been diagnosed, but I suspect this has been settling on me for a few years now, layer by layer. I have never had thoughts of self-harm or harming others, thank goodness, but otherwise I have the classic symptoms: I don’t speak nicely to myself, have let all but the most vital things slide, and respond with a shrugging “why bother” to a lot of the messes and conflicts in my life.

I’m not proud of this way of being. Here and there I have good days, where I can make myself get up and get active. My two daughters have not suffered during my off days, but that doesn’t ease the shame I feel. I don’t feel active in my life or theirs… more like I’m just filling time, reacting whenever absolutely necessary.

During bad days, I feel unloved and unlovable. I tell myself I’m the crazy one; that I’ve broken things beyond repair this time. See this isn’t the first serious setback in my life, but in every other instance I’ve bounced back, stronger for the experience. I know, logically that these negative thoughts are exaggerated by my disease and that I’m capable of coming out of this as before. Knowing a thing and feeling it however are two VERY different things.

My depression is an evil Jimminy Cricket on my shoulder, keeping track of every mistake, every misfortune, then pointing out that these were inevitable; the reward of trying to be remarkable or reach for life’s heights. It’s like living through layers of plastic wrap. I can see out into the world, albeit distorted, but I can’t actually feel it.

The most insidious part of my disease is isolation. It very convincingly suggests that my condition is unique and so, since no one else has ever gone through this no one else can help. One more layer of plastic to fight through.

I say MY depression because I’ve learned that this disease is chimeric and has lots of varieties. More than that, my depression is right in that everyone suffering is dealing with something very personal to them. This seems to lend credence to the isolation it preaches. It is a treadmill of thought that never stops and never lets you off. Every once in a while though, you get water breaks.

Someone recently coined these to me as “routines”; things folks suffering depression do to try and break the cycle of negativity in their head. My own involve writing, planning my games, and experiencing nearly all aspects of 80’s pop culture. Now these are all things which, in the past have centered me, brought me peace. Under the plastic layers of my depression, these activities barely register as anything more than chores. But somewhere in the back of my head, something stirs whenever I force myself to do these things: hope.

Playing golf with my dad for years taught me to respect one primal rule of nature: muscle memory. Long after logic fails you, your body remembers things it’s done and the resulting response to those actions. Hit a long drive enough times with a certain swing and every time you tee up your body will fall into the predictable pattern that gets you three hundred yards.

So the “hope” that’s trying to claw it’s way to the surface is nothing more than my body, my brain remembering that performing these activities are supposed to yield a positive result. Of course, my depression tells me I’m fooling myself. When I write, it points out how terrible I am; when I’m designing my game, it reminds me all the players who’ve quit; when I watch an old movie my depression triumphantly points out how stuck I am in the past.

The cherry on top of this nightmare sundae is that all of my own depression’s commentary mirrors criticisms I’ve heard from external sources. We all make mistakes at our jobs or in our personal relationships, but for me the disease has a way of using this as evidence to prove its point.

So, THAT’S how I’m doing.

What am I doing about it? Well I’m actively in therapy. I’m also forcing myself out into the world around me, even when I don’t want to. I seek out nights with friends, play with my kids, and have joined a writer’s group and other social outlets. I know that in my case the best weapon against my depression is other people. They have to be the RIGHT people, but when I find them I stick to them like glue.

You remember that isolation? Well recently after writing I stayed to have lunch with some of the group. Their stories, their experiences, they were just like mine. From the way they’d been raised and the role we all seemed to take in our families to their own bouts with depression. Yet as I sat there I also recognized these were peers, people I admire: published authors, passionate advocates and local gurus. If we’d all sprung from such similar roots and these successful humans had all triumphed through their plastic prisons, then I can, too.

Hope.

In the age of Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram and good old-fashioned email, I’m still dumbfounded some days when my physical mailbox is chock full of classic junk mail.

One of many novel billboards spied on our Wisconsin drive.

A younger friend of mine has snarkily suggested that it’s because, ahem, I fit the age profile for direct marketers who use the U.S. Postal Service to deliver their pitches. And I confess that I receive a fair amount of come-ons from AARP. And from every organization I’ve ever given a red cent to. But a ton of it is still labeled Resident—so it’s not all about age demographics.

It must still work. Which sort of pleases me. I used to run a whole lot of direct mail campaigns back in the early 90s. Our market was geophysicists, astrophysicists, hydrologists—accomplished, intelligent, highly educated scientists. Our product was fairly pricey software (which, back then, still came in a shrink-wrapped box) and when we undertook direct mail, I had doubts.

But the excercise taught me a lot about human nature: Everybody wants a deal, or at least a perceived deal. Even these Ph.D.s responded to free T-shirts, and language like “don’t’ stop reading because you can save even more,” and time-limited offers.

I was thinking about all this on yesterday’s 2-1/2 hour drive from Milwaukee to Stevens, Point, Wisconsin, where Beth will be delivering the keynote address to a group of educators. The group Beth is addressing specializes in educating people who are blind or have visual impairments, and it’s their annual Wisconsin conclave. They are a terrific group of people.

Roadside Billboards along the Interstate are something Beth can remember clearly. But it’s hard to convey how visual life has changed since 1985. How to explain how everything is a kind of  billboard or sign now? Buses are billboards. L cars are billboards. Flat screen TVs in elevators are billboards.

So, like junk mail, there’s something kind of quaint about conventional roadside billboards. At the start of our trip, we were on an Interstate, and there were the usual things about national fast food or hotel chains that were at an exit ahead. I didn’t pay much attention.

But when we got off the interstate, in the beautiful Wisconsin countryside, things changed. The billboards came in clusters and seemingly closer to the road. And they were all over the map in terms of subject matter. An anti-abortion group paid for one with a giant fetus and this caption: 40 million babies who won’t grow up to pay into Social Security.

Followed by an equally big pitch for an adult superstore featuring marital aids (wink, wink), adult videos, and an exotic smoke shop. (Don’t know what the latter is—maybe vaping?)

Followed by a billboard for a firearms store, which was followed by a billboard advertising a brand of hunting scopes.

That was enough, really, but this cycle repeated itself three times—either an anti-abortion or pro-Jesus sign, followed by a new sex superstore, followed by a different firearms vendor. Mixed in with billboards for hospitals, real estate agencies, and industrial suppliers.

Way back when, Lady Lady Bird Johnson led a campaign to beautify America. Her efforts help produce the Highway Beautification Act, which included restrictions on how big, how close to the road, and how frequently billboards could be placed near Federal Interstate highways and other roadways primarily funded by the feds. I’m guessing the billboard-arame we saw was on a state road—I’ll have to pay closer attention on the drive back.

Meantime, I’m left to conclude that folks that travel this part of Wisconsin detest abortion, love Jesus, love big porn shops, love hunting, and of course, guns.

God bless America.

Just got back from Champaign, Illinois — I gave a presentation to an Animal Sciences class at the University of Illinois yesterday. I speak to this class once a semester, and this time I spent a fair amount of the hour going over some of the qualifications necessary to become a guide dog instructor.

Most guide dog schools require instructors to have a college degree and then do an apprenticeship, and apprenticeships can last as long as four years. I hope I did a decent job explaining how complicated it can be to train dogs, train people, and then make a perfect match between the human and canine. That way the college kids might appreciate why the apprenticeships last so long.

Once apprentices finish their training and become full-time Seeing Eye Instructors, they’re assigned a string (a group) of dogs and given four months to train that string. Throughout the training, instructors pay close attention to each dog’s pace and pull, and they make careful notes about how each dog deals with distractions, what their energy level is, and all sorts of other characteristics. And then? We blind students fly in from all over North America to be matched — and trained — with a new dog.

Whitney and Hanni have an aloof tolerance for one another, but not much more. Whit wants to roughhouse. Hanna the doyenne is so over that. (Photo: Nancy Bolero.)

Seeing Eye instructors have to be as good at evaluating people as they are evaluating dogs. Our instructors review our applications before we arrive on the campus in Morristown and then ask us tons more questions when we get there. Instructors take us on “Juno” walks (they hold the front of the harness to guide us through all sorts of scenarios to get an idea of how fast we like to walk and how strong of a pull we’ll want from our dog). After that they combine all of this information with what they know about their string of dogs, talk it over with fellow instructors and the team supervisor, mix in a little bit of gut instinct, and voila! A match is formed.

Each Seeing Eye instructor trains more dogs than they’ll need for a class. If a dog has a pace, pull, or energy level that doesn’t match with a blind person in the current class, that dog remains on campus with daily walks and care, and perhaps more training, until the next class arrives. My first dog was one of those Seeing Eye dogs who went through a second round of training before she was matched with me. Back in 1991, the Seeing Eye knew that the dog they matched me with would be landing in the home of a very unique five-year-old boy named Gus, and that the dog would be in the hands of a woman who had never had a dog before. They must have figured Pandora would need all the extra training she could get!

Hanni was the perfect dog for everything going on during her years with me. We stayed overnight with this 17-year-old wonder and her people Nancy and Steven while we were there in Urbana, and I can assure you, that girl is enjoying her retirement. Yellow Lab Harper saved me from getting hit by a car on State Street and retired early. The most dangerous encounter he’s had since was with a skunk in the leafy suburb he lives in with his people Larry and Chris now. My fourth dog Whitney had big paws to fill, and she’s managed beautifully.

My seven-year-old Golden/Labrador Retriever cross is a hard worker who loves to play as much as she loves to work. Her curiosity gets her in trouble sometimes, but when she guides me down busy Chicago streets, she is directed, determined, and driven. The only time she lollygags? When she realizes we’re heading back home. She wants to go, go, go! Whitney’s confidence is contagious, and she’s smart enough to know when to bend the rules without getting in trouble. So Whitney and I make a good match — we see eye to eye.

My upcoming book Writing Out Loud will include stories of all these dogs and more, and you can get a sneak peek of a short chapter online now by signing up for my newsletter here.

There are a lot of things I love about going to White Sox games. For one, it’s easy from where we live—three stops on the Red Line. Door to door it’s 15-20 minutes.

And it’s always fun to ride with fellow fans, as well as the out-of-towners wearing their colors. On the walk from the L stop to the gate, there’s a cacophony of vendors and people looking for or hawking tickets.

Entering the park, there’s the smell of onions and peppers and various encased meat on the grill. And there’s eating said encased meat, sometimes meats. With a beer. Sometimes beers.

And, best of all, I can afford it. Especially in April.

The White Sox offer this thing called a Ballpark Pass. You download the Ballpark app to your phone. You pay $39.95. And you can go to all 10 April home games. That’s a  hair less than $4 a game. I know this because one of the dates was postponed and I received a very nice email the next day notifying me that I was being refunded my $3 and change for the lost date. So, you can well afford to not get to all the April home games and still be way ahead.

The seat locations show up on your phone a few hours before game time. So you might end up in the upper deck, but so far, we’ve gotten good lower deck locations. For another $25 you could add an opening day ticket. Beth and I skipped the opener (thank goodness, as it was cold and rainy and ultimately postponed). But we bought two passes this year, and I’ve already been to two games.

Last Saturday was the first sunny, warm day in forever, and our friend Patrick subbed for Beth, as she was toiling, toiling on her writing. We sat in the sun. We talked baseball some of the time. We just sat quietly taking in the chatter around some of the time. And we ate encased meats and drank beer some of the time. (I will add that it didn’t take Patrick very long to eat his—he could hold his own in an eating contest.)

I walked out of there about as relaxed and content as I have been in a long time.

Then Sunday, we bicycled down with our pals Jim and Janet. Sundays are family promotion days for the Sox—cheap tickets and cheap parking and cheap food—and there are a ton of families and kids there doing kid things like eating ice cream, and asking endless questions about the quirks of the game, like why a player can hit the ball a long way and still be out.

And I rode home as content and relaxed as I’d been since, well, the day before.

My next book Writing Out Loud will be out by early May. I’d cross my fingers for good luck on that statement if they weren’t already occupied – I’m still busy typing last-minute revisions and rewrites! Here’s an excerpt from the publisher’s description–it’s straight from the Books by Beth Finke page:

Writing Out Loud: What a Blind Teacher Learned from Leading a Memoir Class for Seniors is the touching story of Beth’s experience teaching older adults how to capture their stories on paper – and deliver them aloud to their classmates.

In this memoir that reads like a novel, you will come to love the men and women whose poignant memories intertwine with Beth’s. Through telling their stories, the members of her classes come to know each other and connect more deeply with their own families. The experience is rich with life lessons for both students and teacher.

I’ve been meeting with Nancy Sayre, my editor at Golden Alley Press (a small independent publisher outside of Philadelphia) over the phone every week since we signed the contract last year, and her counsel over the phone has been indispensable. She’s made me feel like we’ve been friends for years, but, truth is, we hadn’t met face-to-face until last week.

Nancy was in town to meet with her Chicago writers, and my time slot was Sunday. She and I spent time together, and when Mike joined us for lunch at Blackie’s afterwards, he and I slid into a booth across from Nancy. As she quietly looked over the menu, Mike and I got involved in some lackluster discussion about the mechanics of our lives;  whether I was going to go swimming that afternoon, when he might go grocery shopping that day, whether he’d finished the crossword puzzle that morning. When I got a sense Nancy had made her lunch decision, I nudged Mike under the table and looked her way. “Oh, keep talking,” she said. “It helps me know how you two are when you’re together.” She said it might help when she’s editing, so we did as she asked.

I got a good laugh about that later. Gee, Mike and I have a reputation among people who know us firsthand for talking a lot. Can’t explain where that comes from, but I’m fairly confident that day in that booth with Nancy Sayre marks the very first time in my entire life with Michael Knezovich anyone has ever urged us to keep talking.

Nancy continues to help me shape my writing for the better, and you can get a sneak peek of a short chapter online now: Just complete the form here.

And stay tuned, there’s more to come.