There’s a quote that recently surfaced from an interview that Jim Carrey did with TIFF about four years ago. The topic involved brought into light Carrey’s own struggles with mental health & finding identity, even at his current age of sixty years old. Jim talks about the characters he’s played over the years & states that this menagerie of characters also includes his best known one “Jim Carrey.” He then goes on to say something that really struck me. He asked the interviewer if they knew the different between sadness & depression. The interviewers shrugged. Carrey the said the following:
“People talk about depression all the time. The difference between depression & sadness is sadness is just from happenstance-whatever happened or didn’t happen for you, or grief, or whatever it is. Depression is your body saying “f*ck you, I don’t want to be this character anymore, I don’t want to hold up this avatar that you’ve created in the world. It’s too much for me.”
You should think of the word ‘depressed’ as ‘deep rest.’ Your body needs to be depressed. It needs deep rest from the character that you’ve been trying to play.”
I know that quote is a little blunt & I’m sure stirs up interesting thoughts or emotions for yourself. Whether you agree or disagree with Jim’s point of view is beside the point here. I’d like to invite you to follow me down the rabbit hole of my own thoughts regarding the quote at hand.
I remember the first time depression hit me, I think I was around seventeen at the time. I felt crazy, truly I felt like I was going mad, my mood would swing randomly, I would dive into emotional lulls fairly often, & could never seem to climb back out into the light. My parents, God bless them, didn’t know what to do with me so they sent me to their company therapist at the time. A wildly artistic woman, my first therapist introduced me to the works of Kahlil Gibran, an American-Lebanese artist, writer, poet, & philosopher, an author I love & frequent even to this day. She specifically wanted me to read the segment of Gibran’s book The Prophet called “On Children.” In the book a prophet arrives in a village & basically hosts a Q&A session for the town to come & grill him on his philosophies, this is what she had me read.
And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children.
And he said:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
Her point in prescribing this passage was that I had not embraced my own thoughts, beliefs, & feelings. I was going off of my heritage, which we all do naturally. I wanted so badly to fit in as the ideal midwestern good ole boy that I’d completely neglected the actually person residing in my body. Furthermore, I hadn’t just ignored him, I’d straight up avoided him.
I’m a lover of media, as an art form, I feel it to be truly limitless. I love film, invigorating stories & novels, video games with compelling narratives, & music the makes me feel something in a profound manner. I still do to this day. I’m not saying these things are bad or that these things hindered my personal growth, I actually think I’m hinting at the opposite. You see media, in addition to my escapism into characters played on a stage or the role I assumed of the “country star,” allowed me to try on different hats. It allowed me to make connections with my true self in ways that it took me far too long to realize. Media was giving me the vicarious experiences I needed to chisel away the marble covering the man underneath.
Through these new & differing stories I began to embrace the thrill of curiosity. I wanted to know & feel more, I wanted to experience more & see the world through more eyes than had preciously been offered to me. I became obsessed with experiencing food first. Those that know me will tell you I proudly wear the obnoxious moniker of “foodie,” but I am. I’m always astounded by the ways in which culture shapes food, the way science shapes food, the way art shapes food, the way history shapes food. If you’ve ever been on a trip with me you can also attest to the fact that I tend to build my travel around food. There’s so much that a plate of food can say in just a single bite.
From food naturally followed drink, in addition to the aforementioned, travel. With each new experience I gained insight, with gained insight I gained empathy & compassion. The marble continued to get chiseled away.
I dove head first into my curiosity, it allowed me to find the facets of myself that I love & taught me how to manage & confront the parts I find less desirable. So too did curiosity & experience allow me to pilfer through the box of passions & pull the things that spoke to me, leaving the rest behind. That’s a journey that’s an ongoing process for sure!
You see in the past I’d become so ingrained in the miasma of what was in vogue that I abandoned some of the brightest parts of my being. I gave into what society wanted me to be, what my community wanted me to be, what my family wanted me to be, what the media wanted me to be that I became so convinced I couldn’t find success as an artist unless I forced myself into the preconceived boxes I’d been presented with. I’d looked at the world around me & found, white CIS male aspects aside, that my voice, my authentic voice, was one neither worth celebrating nor promoting. I thank God that I’ve since cast those feelings aside.
We are creatures of habit, us humans. We get so stuck in our ways that we forget just how massive the world is & how varied & diverse life can be when it’s allowed to flourish without the constraints of expectation. This is why I urge people to travel, this is why I urge people to make friends with people different than them, this is why I urge people to experience cuisine & media that may seem foreign or taboo to you because at the end of the day we’re all human & the veins of humanity run deep. Hell, you may even be surprised what you uncover about yourself along the way!
I hope you have an incredible week, I challenge you to go out & try something new this weekend; read a new type of book, watch a movie that follows someone whose life is drastically different from your own, be bold & unafraid to change your opinions or perspectives when presented with new information or lifestyles that aren’t reflective of your own experiences. After all, how boring a stagnant life would be?
Much love to you all,
-C