Waiting for the Punch

by Marc Maron

  Marc

  Unipolar? What the fuck is unipolar?

  Rob

  Not bipolar. Bipolar would be like manic depression. When you’re unipolar you’re like, “Please let me be bipolar. I’d do anything.” You’d kill for another pole.

  Marc

  Another pole, except for the one you want to hang yourself from.

  Rob

  Exactly. That was my experience. Those things can go hand in hand, but I found even though I was going to therapy, talk therapy, I was exercising, I had started to get a job, I was just really trying to truly be responsible, but it’s just like the bottom fell out and I very much wanted to die. Fantasized exclusively about suicide, so people who cared about me said, “Maybe you should try medication,” and I thought, “No, I would never do that. Only a weakling would do that.” You know, you fix it, you can get out of it yourself.

  What I tried to do is take myself out of myself. Like you, for example, if you were like, “Hey, Rob, I’m feeling XYZ and I’d like to blow my brains out,” I would do anything within my power to help you, whereas I wouldn’t do that for myself, which is crazy. I really tried to think of myself like, “All right, don’t be you.” I tried to be as objective as possible and I tried to understand that the things that my brain was telling me were crazy, so I did get on medication and the fact of the matter is, it made me able to feel every emotion rather than just one nightmare, the “blow your brains out” one. Now I can still feel sad or upset, but I can also get happy, proud, horny, hungry. Those are the other poles. The horny pole.

  The thing is I think people might not understand is that real super-clinical depression isn’t just a mood, it’s like a feeling. Your penis shuts off. I mean, I didn’t use it for a month. Before, I was like, “What’s the problem?” A beautiful woman could be like, “What do you think of these?” And these are her naked breasts she’s shoving in my face. I’d be like, “Get them out of my face.”

  Didn’t eat at all, had diarrhea all the time, and couldn’t sleep at all. The physical symptoms were bananas.

  Since then I’ve had jobs, great big corporate jobs, relationships, been physically healthy. You’d be like, “Hey, Rob, I could hire him to do this thing or accomplish this task or talk to him in a cogent fashion about an issue.” As opposed to, say, “He could fill that corner with diarrhea and tears.”

  PATRICK STICKLES

  I lived a certain way throughout my entire life and kind of just had the vaguest of feelings that I was a weird freak. I knew I was a freak in some way and somehow other from society. I didn’t really understand how. I knew it had made trouble for me and would continue to make trouble for me throughout my life. When I got to be about twenty-six years old, I came to understand that I was a manic-depressive.

  It’s kind of a skeleton in my family’s closet. I think I might be the first one to come out of that closet. Looking at just the history of my own life and the people that I was close to, I entered into a phase where it just became too clear to ignore. I was like, “Oh, shoot, I’ve been really depressed.”

  I always knew that I was depressed and I’d been on antidepressants for many years at that point, but I was like, “Gee, this is wild, because last week I was the saddest, mopeyest guy in the world and now I stay up all night every night and I never stop talking. Isn’t that a little strange that just so recently I was this way and now I’m this way?”

  It came to be too much to ignore and then I was like, “Okay, so I’m a manic-depressive. This is going to be a hell of a ride. Let’s do it.” At the height of my mania I ripped my entire life apart and I did everything that I could to destroy every institution in my life and several of them I destroyed irreparably. I could look back on it now as saying it was my mania that gave me the strength to destroy these walls I had built up around myself and get myself out of situations that were toxic to me, when in my depression I would be too chicken shit to do the work of it and endure the trauma of dismantling my life in that way. To look back on it now, I could have done things a lot differently and a lot of people would have been a lot happier, including and especially myself.

  Anyway, the point is that it was, like, kind of a game to me at that point and I was just invulnerable and everything I was doing seemed to be brilliant to me. Then people were trying to warn me, “If you really think this is what you’re going through, you’re going to pay for this at some point.” I was like, “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” I felt like I could fly.

  They were right. In March of last year I hit the wall for real and basically didn’t get out of bed until December. Even when I was able to do that, I got out of bed but I could barely talk. In the trauma of going through this and the terror of not knowing what’s going on in your brain, I listened to a lot of the wrong people and I took a lot of treatment for it that I’ve come to see now was a very big mistake.

  The goal of these doctors when dealing with a manic-depressive person is they feel like this person is potentially dangerous, so we’ve got to find the part of their brain that makes them dangerous and turn it off. They did it. They turned that part of my brain off in a big way. With drugs.

  They didn’t electrocute me like they did to try and cure the homosexuality of the teenage Lou Reed. I asked for the meds. I was the decider ultimately, but I was so desperate for any kind of solution and they told me that they had one. What they didn’t tell me was that when they turn off the part of your brain that makes you this dangerous person, they turn off everything else about you that makes you who you are. They take your sexuality away from you. They take away your ability to generate abstractions.

  The depression that I went through last year was the worst thing that I ever experienced by far. The thing that was really terrifying about it was not that I looked into the future and felt, like, an unspeakable dread because I had felt that dread my entire life. I felt the dread but I lacked the ability to articulate it.

  When I was younger and I would get depressed I was still able to make my art and stuff. I could write a little poem and I could get a little bit of the bad stuff out. Encourage myself a little bit. In taking away the part of me that made all those problems for everybody when I was manic …

  They killed the poet in me.

  They took away my ability to make the unique connections that I can make. I’m not saying that I have this one-in-a-billion brain or anything. But people have a neuro-network, they have stored all this information and make connections between them. My brain was just like the dustiest old library. Maybe there’s all this information in there, but on the medication, it’s all in a big pile and it’s all under a foot of dust and it’s useless.

  BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN

  People always talk about how women have a body clock, but I think that men have one too. When they get into their early thirties and mid-thirties, you start thinking about, “Okay, where’s the rest of my life? And why don’t I have one? Shouldn’t I have one? Haven’t I figured out all the big problems?”

  That’s when you realize, when it finally lands on you, you realize, “Oh my God, I’m back to zero in this area and this has nothing to do with the craft that I have, with this fortress I have built for myself for thirty some years. In this other area, I’m completely naked in the desert. There is no fortress. It doesn’t exist.” Suddenly, when you realize that, you realize how adrift you are and you realize that life plays a nasty little joke on you in that you can become quite mature and quite successful and quite developed in one area and become completely retarded in another part of your personality.

  DAVE FOLEY—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR

  I see crazy eyes now and I’m out of it immediately. I can tell if someone’s crazy from like two or three blocks away. I grew up with a father who has borderline personality disorder. The more you try, the more they hate you.

  I’ve grown up watching my dad treat my mom like shit, then being like a young man who considers himself a feminist. I was the one to prove tha
t men could be something different from what my father was. All this dynamic feeding into me, just going, “Okay, I can take it. All right, just one more day. All right, if I just figure this out, then she’ll be happy and she’ll love me and we’ll both be happy.” That transitions to “Okay, one more day and if I can just figure this out, I can leave and she won’t kill herself and I won’t be responsible for her killing herself.” Then it gets sicker and sicker, you know?

  I remember driving in my car on the way to work one day and it was actually a Barenaked Ladies song that came on my stereo, a Steven Page song called, “Break Your Heart.” This song comes on and I suddenly just burst out in tears as I’m driving and I have to pull off the road and just sit at the side of the road just weeping and that’s where I go, “Okay, this is a sign, I think that I’m not happy.” I think I’m so unhappy I can’t drive safely. I got us into therapy and that eventually led to things starting to improve, which of course led to her taking off with the kids.

  ROB DELANEY

  When I was in the throes of suicidal depression, I didn’t pray for myself but I did sort of say, “This is so fucking horrible that if I get better from this I really hope that I get the opportunity to help other people through this.” I think there’s a selfishness, not a disgusting, evil-based selfishness, that comes with suicidal thoughts and stuff, but there’s a selfishness that is egotism and you think, “All my problems are so much worse.” It’s like egotism in reverse, so to speak, and you think that you’re so special and important and your problems are so unique, that you’re among the one one-thousandth of a percent of people who should do this. I don’t buy that. I don’t think anybody’s special-good or special-bad, and I think we’re sort of all in it together.

  I remember when I was in the halfway house a kid slit his wrists. He didn’t die, but we had to take him to the hospital. They had me go with him because I had been there for a little while and I was kind of his big brother. I remember being in the emergency room with people in the middle of the night in LA, so people come in with crazy gunshots and everything, and just being like, “This is what I feel like inside.” So it was like equilibrium. It was like a normal person slipping into the Dead Sea for a floaty bath.

  Life is going to kick your fucking face in and you’re going to get depressed, you’re going to get upset, you’re going to get sad, and that’s okay. When you get to that you can transcend it and be like, “Oh, I don’t have to be miserable.” Horrible things are happening everywhere all the time, and there’s a statistical likelihood that I will die of stomach cancer or in a car accident, let’s enjoy ourselves while we’ve got it. I realized as I said it, this might not sound uplifting, but I believe it. Life is super hard. Once we achieve peace with that knowledge, then happiness can then be possible.

  KURT METZGER—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR

  My grandmother killed herself—my mom’s mom—in a pretty fucked-up way. A really fucked-up way.

  She cut her own throat. By the way, getting the full story of this, I had to piece it together, because my mom and my aunts will never tell me this shit.

  Apparently, my mom’s like twelve, my grandmother cut her own throat in the kitchen. My mom comes home from school. Her mom’s gone. There’s just a pool of blood in the kitchen, which she and her sister had to clean up. Then I think my grandfather just married this other woman and felt like a good guy because he got the kids a new mom or some shit. You know, some miserable fucking 1950s, 1960s shit.

  BOB SAGET—COMEDIAN, ACTOR, WRITER

  I was at The Comedy Store the night a comic killed himself. Steve Lubetkin. He was a friend of mine, like an actual friend of mine. I don’t like it when I see those kind of things from friends. I become the narcissist. It’s like, what right does he have to upset me by killing himself when I value life? I just, I get really, really angry. I don’t care how nuts they are. Take your goddamned medication, get a family member, and fucking stay alive.

  PAUL GILMARTIN—COMEDIAN, ACTOR, TELEVISION HOST

  I come from a long line of Irish-Catholic alcoholics that were high functioning. Then one day we try to kill ourselves.

  My dad tried to kill himself when he was in his sixties. He was an insurance executive. Literally, had the Don Draper office, you know, with the bar. Didn’t show up for a business meeting, and he had tried to open his wrists in a New York hotel. This was in ’92, and they committed him to Bellevue. The psychiatrist would only let him out of Bellevue if he would check himself directly into rehab. Christmas Eve of ’92, we picked my dad up at O’Hare Airport and drove him to a rehab.

  Here’s the degree of denial in my family, there was only a pay phone in the hallway at Bellevue, so we’re trying to get ahold of my dad. You’re basically trying to get other mental patients to pick up the phone and go find somebody they don’t know. After two days, we managed to get ahold of my dad. I said, “Dad, it’s Paul. How are you?” My dad goes, “Oh, fine!”

  ALLIE BROSH

  On New Year’s Eve, my sister drove her car in front of a train, and that’s how it ended.

  Marc

  Had she been suicidal before?

  Allie

  She had. She had made a couple attempts. The way my mom referred to it was, like, practice suicides where she would do something, but it was clear that she wanted to have an out just in case she changed her mind.

  We always sort of feared it, but it never felt like it was really gonna happen.

  She kept going off of the medication. She had a really hard time accepting that she needed the medication because she didn’t like to see herself as somebody sick.

  She had recently tried to change up her medications, and it just wasn’t working. It was a couple months where she was just totally—didn’t have any emotional variation whatsoever, just felt bored and detached all the time. I talked to her on the phone a few times because I’ve also been suicidally depressed. We were able to talk a little bit about it, but I didn’t feel like anything I could’ve said really would’ve helped much at that point.

  It just brought up a lot of weird stuff. I was pretty horribly depressed at that time period as well, so I was having a hard time figuring out my emotions around it. It brings up this whole thing where my parents knew that I had been suicidal at some point. Suddenly, there was this weird conversation when I first got home for the funeral. My dad gripped me by my shoulders and looked at me in the face, just crying, saying, “You can’t kill yourself. You can’t do this. You’re all we have left.” There was also this pressure. It’s sort of a fucked-up moment because my immediate thought was, “Well, fuck! Now what am I going to use to comfort myself when things get bad? Now I’m not allowed to! Now there’s this weird thing of my dad’s sobbing face holding me by the shoulders.”

  There have only been a few—maybe just the one time where I really, seriously considered doing it. Other times, it’s just comforting to me.

  AMAZING JOHNATHAN—COMEDIAN, MAGICIAN

  I never think about suicide ever, but I was just kind of contemplating, like when I got divorced, I was sitting there with a gun in my mouth. It wasn’t loaded, but I just wanted to feel the drama.

  ALLIE BROSH

  The way that I work through things is that I just talk them to death. Like when I’m stuck psychologically at a point where I just kept replaying the scene of what my sister’s last moments must have been like—just over and over and over, obsessively for days and weeks.

  My brain immediately goes to the most morbid, horrifying way that it could’ve played out, and repeats that scene. I’m obviously stuck at some point and I need to move past it.

  One interesting thing I found out is that when people were expressing sympathy to me—I get all these e-mails and stuff, messages, and phone calls from people, being like, “I’m so sorry that this happened.” I noticed myself feeling almost guilty, like I don’t deserve this. I don’t deserve your pity. I don’t deserve this. I looked back at my sister and my relationship. We weren’t es
pecially close growing up. I mean, we had resolved our differences pretty much, at this point, but from an outside perspective, I felt like, “Oh, I shouldn’t be as sad as I’m feeling because we were a little bit distant.” I was feeling all this genuine grief but I wouldn’t let myself experience it because it was like, “You don’t deserve to feel that. You weren’t close enough to her to feel that,” so I didn’t let myself go with it. I was just stuck until I could talk it out and realize that that’s what’s happening, like, “No, I really am feeling these things. I really did love her.” That was one of the interesting things that happened. I didn’t expect myself to react that way.

  I couldn’t cry actually. I didn’t cry until maybe two weeks after it had happened. I was so depressed and so emotionally dead inside that I couldn’t. It was really frustrating to me because I saw myself not crying. I felt awful inside. For not crying. I said, “This is not a normal—this is what a psychopath would be like if they were having this experience.”

  Finally, at the funeral, I was able to cry and it felt really good to have it come out. It came out all at once. It just hit me like—I was going to say, “like a train,” but that’s inappropriate.

  When you’re really depressed, you don’t feel like you can take anything beyond the particular brand of misery that you’re already experiencing, and 2013 was just sort of a fuck of a year for me. I also had a personal cancer scare, major surgery. Just a ton of stuff happened. I got in this almost victim mind-set of “I’m experiencing this horrible thing and then everything is happening on top of it. That shouldn’t happen. That’s not fair,” but there’s no universal justice system, right? There’s nothing governing whether that can happen or not.

  Marc

  Do you want me to confirm?