The Mad Hatter: Have I gone mad?
Alice Kingsley: I’m afraid so. You’re entirely bonkers.
But I’ll tell you a secret. All the best people are.

You get into these depressive ruts and you start being critical of your every fault, real or perceived.   Nothing within you is good enough.   Everything is rotten. Yesterday I was tearing myself up inside for not having the nerve to just go ahead and go down to Washington and with my cameras bear witness to history being made.   So just for good measure I took stock of every failure of nerve I ever had in my life, starting with the biggest one of all, that of not being able to tell a certain someone back in 1971 that he had made my heart skip a beat.   By the end of the day I knew exactly what a sniveling coward I had been my entire life.

This came across my Facebook feed this morning…

…and I could see in it everything about me, except the courage part.   Hemingway wasn’t talking about me.   I have the feeling for beauty…it drives me mad sometimes. The truth telling part, yes. Just ask anyone who knows me. The capacity for sacrifice, yes. I can do that. I have done that. I have all of that within me. And I know how vulnerable it makes me.   There are times it still surprises me how vulnerable. That is me. I have all of that. But not the courage. I have no courage.

And then it was like I swear a little voice inside said wait just a minute… You’ve been living as an out gay man nearly all your life.   You came out to yourself when you were 17 years old, accepted yourself for what you are, two years before the shrinks decided homosexuals weren’t mentally ill after all.   You kept it low key for most of the 70s but you never dodged a direct question and never lied to anyone about it, back in a time when you could be, and were, multiple times, fired for being a homosexual.   Remember that day when you were still a teenage boy and you stood in front of the bathroom mirror and said to your reflection “I Am A Homosexual” after you read some crackpot who said admitting it was the worst thing a man could do?   That day forty-seven states still had sodomy laws on their books.   You have spent the past few days…no, weeks…digging up every failure of nerve you ever had.   Now remember all those times when you were blind-sided by a question and you had to make a sudden snap decision about being closeted or not.   Remember how afraid you were?   And you never held back.   What the hell is that if it isn’t courage?

Fear.   Maybe that’s what’s always at the heart of a depression.   Fear of being alone all my life.   Fear of dying alone.   Fear of walking through my one life never knowing a lover’s embrace.   Friends With Benefits is the cheap shelf booze.   Once you’ve tasted the real thing you never settle for faking it.   The best or nothing, as Gottlieb Daimler once said.   Courage.   I’m depressed because I am afraid.   That doesn’t make me a coward.   Anyone with that discipline to tell the truth, and capacity for sacrifice, and feeling for beauty, cannot also be a coward.   It just doesn’t compute.   I forgot lately, all those times when I did what I had to do even though I was scared shitless.   I forgot something I began telling myself in later years when I began looking back on those moments.   T.E. Lawrence once said, “The trick is not minding that it hurts.” But for me the trick was not minding that I’m afraid.

And…a bit bonkers…in the way the best people generally are.

[Edited a tad…]