depression

You Will Never Be Enough

/ Stuart Danker / 21 Comments

All your life you’ve been told you’re not enough. You’re too soft. Too short. Too broke.

And you believe it too, because people like David Chappelle, Barack Obama, and Muhammad Ali exist, people who would dance circles (quite literally in Ali’s case) around their problems. You’ll never be like them. Those people are special.

Yet, you try. You join the Toastmasters Club. You read How To Win Friends And Influence People. You even join the service industry, thinking it’ll help you with your social skills, but the only thing you learn from that stint is how to cut hair.

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All I Can Do Is Live Life Three Minutes At A Time

/ Stuart Danker / 31 Comments

There was a time when I wrote depressing stuff like this on the regular, much to the dismay of the people around me.

A downer, they called me. As if I’d forced them to live with my angst. They also threw out other adjectives like cringe, annoying, and lame.

Perhaps my biggest crime wasn’t the cringe or the regular servings of depresso. Perhaps it was taking their words to heart and not writing anything negative for years after that.

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It’s Okay To Hurt

/ Stuart Danker / 23 Comments

You’ve always felt different from a young age. You grew up being told you weren’t enough.  These would be the voices of a permanent gloom, a cloud that would follow you for the rest of your life.

Yet you try outrunning your cloud. You pick up self-help books. You play motivational podcasts on repeat. You adopt the billionaires’ morning routines. But nothing changes. You’re still you. Only now you take cold showers and meditate as soon as you wake up.

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Sometimes You Just Gotta Sit With Your Pain

/ Stuart Danker / 83 Comments
Man looking

Photo: Jonathan Rados

One step forward, three steps backwards. Sometimes that’s just how life be like.

I eat healthy. I exercise. I’ve found a full-time job. I seem to have everything I need. Yet something just seems wrong.

I keep looking back to see if there’s a particular event I can put the blame on, but this dark cloud hovering over my head seems to have followed me for as long as I can remember.

We all grow out of things like these, don’t we? Isn’t angst supposed to be like asthma? Something debilitating at the moment that you forget once enough time passes?

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Sometimes It Feels Like I’m Going Through Life Hungover

/ Stuart Danker / 25 Comments
Hangover Sleeping - Maria Teneva

Photo: Maria Teneva

Let me take you back to somewhere in 2006 when I had to lead a two-hour class, totally hungover, while having to yell above the pitter-patter of rain on the zinc roof of our hairdressing academy.

Wait, did I throw you too deep into the action? Need some context? Perhaps I could take you back a few hours earlier, to when I walked into the academy smelling like a distillery, and throwing up into the first wastepaper basket I saw.

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