Posts tagged manic depressive
Professional Wrestling Heals Us

I’ve recently come out of a depression.

I didn’t even know I was depressed until, around September of last year, I started feeling better about work, life, and art. I experienced the mental equivalent of clouds parting after a storm, and a warm beam of sunlight cutting through the dark. The juxtaposition of mindsets was so palpable that I realized, “Oh, I was depressed!”

That depression lasted for about two years and it manifested as a kind of dull, throbbing ache, a sense that something was about to go wrong at any moment. At my day job I struggled to decide what task to undertake next. I didn’t have a schedule (big mistake when you have bipolar!) and I would wander, aimlessly in my mind from one potential tragedy to the next. At home I was better, but I wasn’t really enjoying my life either.

To enjoy life seemed like a luxury I couldn’t afford.

How did I deal with this depression?

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Professional Wrestling Is Good For My Mental Health

For the past few months, I’ve been watching Monday Night Raw, AEW Dynamite, and Friday Night SmackDown every week. It’s been fun, and reminiscent of the early days of my pro-wrestling fandom where I watched totally devoted. Establishing this routine has made it easier to get through the work-week. Each day, I remind myself that wrestling awaits and it helps the next handful of hours pass a little quicker.

My favorite of the bunch is Dynamite. It’s the most inventive and naturalistic, featuring a fantastic cast of colorful characters. There’s the super serious sort like Jon Moxley and Hangman Adam Page and the hilarious sort like Orange Cassidy and The Best Friends. Unlike WWE-television, Dynamite has an actually funny sense of humor - that is to say comedy in AEW is genuinely amusing and not cringe-inducing. Dynamite also features wrestling matches with stories rather than wrestling matches as time-filler.

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