Legendary Bad Days: A Mental Health Memoir

By Eric Gmeinder

What do you do when the general population recommends outlets for your "mental illness," and those outlets fail you? Write a book, of course! While on hiatus, filmmaker Eric Gmeinder recounts the days and events that changed his life--for the worse! The stressors within include a dysfunctional upbringing; struggles as an autistic person; insecurity about height; abandonment; chronic loneliness; grief; agoraphobia; struggles as an LGBTQ person, and not just from straight people; and world events of the last five years. Full of unexpected turns and with touches of comic relief, this memoir is as quirky, literate, and insightful as it is poignant. It seeks to change the cultural dialogue on "mental illness" by showing it's not always about diagnoses, but about having a sucky life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eric Gmeinder
• Release date: May 22, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463929841

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

This pamphlet recounts the worst days, moments, or times of my life.

Sound morbid? Well, I'm going to recount them anyway, because if I commit suicide, and there is a good chance I will, people will understand why. It had nothing to do with mental illness. It had everything to do with being that guy most people are glad they're not because he had chronically, increasingly bad luck. The kind of person people use as examples when they tell you how much worse you could have it. For almost half of my life now, I have lost more and more things people take for granted. Basically, this pamphlet is potentially my own nonfiction version of 13 Reasons Why.

The title of this pamphlet is taken from Riddick (2013), in which the title character says, There are bad days, and then there are legendary bad days. This was shaping up to be one of those.

I have had more than my share of days where everything that could have gone wrong did, but you won't find them in these pages. Instead, in selecting these, I thought back to almost a decade ago, when I told my father about one of those days where nothing went right and called it the worst day of my life. He said that was wrong: The worst day of your life would be if your arm got chopped off. Thus, these are days that disrupted my day-to-day life as I had known it, and in most cases took years to recover from. In fact, there is only one from which I have fully recovered (and can even laugh about), and two others from which I have partly recovered.

For the record, I don't condone suicide at all except for euthanasia or volunteering in medical experiments. I agree with most people that it's a public health crisis and people do not have the right to deliberately end their own lives for any other reason. The difference is that, instead of getting upset at the suicidal person for being selfish, cowardly or mentally ill, I am upset at the people who caused them to feel so bad. And so should you. As Rose says in Titanic when she and Jack are discussing when they first met, and he saved her from an attempt, I know what you must be thinking. Poor little rich girl. What does she know about love?

No, says Jack, that's not what I was thinking. I was thinking, what could have happened to this girl to make her feel like she had no way out?

Yes, Stevie Wonder, I believe in things I don't understand. And I swear to God: Luck is not superstitious, even if the classic things that supposedly cause it are! There's a reason cartoons have that trope of characters being chronically unable to achieve things, whether it's Charlie Brown kicking the football, Master Roshi raping women, Jon Arbuckle getting dates, or Kenny McCormick staying alive. We can control our luck to a certain extent through our actions, but considering how many people there are with greater social status in the world, to suggest it's entirely within us is toxic positivity. I almost always get fewer results despite having the same will, and some people get far more with the same will.

Should I take my own life because it didn't get better (to paraphrase the gay-rights slogan), I will make a compilation to be played at my funeral. The compilation will be of clips from my documentaries that illustrate the main reasons I killed myself. It will be accompanied by what is widely hailed as one of the saddest pieces of music ever written. The composer may or may not have killed himself just after writing it, but if so, it was for one of the same reasons as me. (If you know your classical music, you'll know which piece it is.) And don't just mourn my loss. Before Tumblr became Trumplr, taking away my incentive to use it, I saw a meme there that said, When I die, I'll go to Heaven because I've spent my time in Hell.

Personally, I think it's better to warn people about suicidal plans so they can intervene. If people didn't freak out whenever someone mentioned suicide, don't you think that would give the suicidal person a chance to be helped, or at least soften the blow caused by their deaths? Robin Williams kept his Parkinson's and cognitive decline a carefully guarded secret, leaving me and millions of other people shocked and depressed when he died by his own hand.

A fair question might be: Why am I writing and self-publishing a pamphlet outing myself as a suicidal person instead of seeing a therapist or calling the National Suicide Hotline? Granted, I can still make a phone appointment with my current therapist, and will before too long. Under my current provider, I can go up to a year without seeing a specific therapist before my case is closed. However, relationships between therapist and patient are supposed to be strictly professional, and if you visit madinamerica.com, you'll find that just because therapists went to graduate school