Greinke Article

I get Sports Illustrated in the mail somehow, some way for free. Just one of those things I must have gotten along with some purchase I made along the line somewhere. Anyways, it had a nice article, but brief article, about Kansas City Royals pitcher Zach Greinke, who has turned it all around, and at 25 is the most dominant pitcher in baseball.

He walked away from the game a few years ago because depression and anxiety was too much for him to handle. He needed time away to clear his head. At the time the wonderful old stigma of depression showed it's ugly head, and Greinke was made to look weak, and was unmercifully judged because of his need for time away. Society pressured him to feel guilty about taking time for himself, to clear his head (do ya see any parallels here???).

The article is much too short, mainly because the magazine industry is going the way of the newspaper. Nobody wants to invest in a long meaningful article, but Greinke's story deserved much, much more of a look in-depth. And not so much a character study of Greinke, but of how he overcame, and I'm sure still battles, with all of his issues.

One snippet in the piece describes Greinke's mind racing out of control during a session in the bullpen. He couldn't concentrate, and there were a million places he'd have rather been than where he was -- pitching in the majors, every little kid's dream (and by the way he is engaged to an ex-Dallas Cowboys cheerleader). None of these surface things were enough though, there was something deeper. He had lost his passion, and his drive, and if in the end time away from baseball led him down a different path, then so be it, but, it led him to re-assess everything and change his thinking.

It brings up the brilliance and passion that lie in everyone with depression who I have ever met. It can be evidenced in Kurt Cobain, David Foster Wallace, Hemingway, Lincoln, and so many more. But for me, the same catalyst for our breakdowns is there in all of us, and it has nothing to do with intellect or anything like that -- it comes down to passion.

The people I have met in group, in the hospital, and along my path all have a special gift that is really hard to realize in the crazy swarm of everyday life. That gift is that it's fairly easy for us to find deeper meaning in things, or search for deeper meaning in things than it is for the "snap out of it" people out there. Sometimes it's a huge burden because the surface IS the surface sometimes, and a lot of times things need to be taken at face value. There isn't always deeper meaning.

But beyond that passion is the root word for compassion. In that, compassion is a total giving up of self, which can be extremely beautiful, and also can be extremely painful. I remember during my worst moments, that I want to be one of those non-feeling people who just treads water through life. I would have traded anything for that.

And now I see how incredibly fucked that way of thinking was, but, at the time, the pain was so unbelievably crippling, that I wanted to be that person who drinks away my worries, I didn't want to care about politics, or people in other countries and those less fortunate than me. I didn't want my palms to sweat when I watched a close Tigers/Royals game in April, or tear my Michigan jersey off and throw it down the hallway because they threw another interception. That was all part of caring too damed much, and I wanted it to stop...forever, FOR-EV-ER.

But that's me. The parts of me that I love, and it's what temporarily died in me last Spring. I didn't love the parts of me that became obsessed with "supposed to" living, but that began to rule me. Kristin (aka Tinny) and I used to travel like maniacs. We were going to Toronto one weekend a month for what seemed like four years. Our travel (my favorite thing in the world) was incredibly compromised because I was being driven by somebody, something else.

I'm trying to find my essential self, and I'm close. It's a lifelong process though. You work at it every day, you read, or journal, or come here and write, or talk it out with people. It takes work, but the rewards are so great in the end, and they just get better. There is no finish line in life, because it's not a race.