Still just a geek, p.56
Still Just a Geek, page 56
People still use “ghost” as a verb, right?
*This is a theme: Anne first, then everything else good in my life after that in some kind of (often shifting) order.
*Is anyone else happy to be sad, that way? Is it just a goth thing? Let’s listen to Siouxsie and the Banshees and talk about it in a candle-lit parlor.
*If you are reading this book in the order of its pages, you already know this. If this is new information to you . . . I am so interested to know why you started here.
*For the first time since the show went off the air, the entire cast of TNG was together on stage at the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo. It was special for a lot of reasons, but the one that meant the most to me was the opportunity I had, in public, to say “I was an asshole sometimes, because I was a teenager, but I loved you then, I love you now, and I’m sorry for those times I was a shit.” LeVar said, “Wil, you could be an asshole, but you were OUR asshole.” Patrick said, “I always respected you as a fellow actor,” and Gates gave me the best space mom hug I’ve ever had. It was a significant moment of healing for me.
*Sadly, no matter what, I won’t be able to play “Young Wil Wheaton” in Young Sheldon. Yes, we’ve talked about it.
*Most of these photos were posted on my Twitter account . . . and were deleted when I closed my account. There are a ton of photos on my Instagram, though, which is @itswilwheaton.
*Reminder that my mental illness is always there, and it can assert itself without warning at any time. Thanks to science, therapy, medicine, and a lot of hard work, I can live with it, manage it, and not let it control me.
*Again, my TNG family will always be my family. But we weren’t peers then. These are my peers, and that makes a big difference. I love them both, but love them differently.
*My sons approve this message.
*Going to throw a trigger warning right here: This might be a bit too vivid a depiction of panic and anxiety, so feel free to skip if such descriptions are tough for you.
Also, the connotations of “I can’t breathe” have so much more power after the events of the summer of 2020, and I realize that, too.
All in all, nothing about this post is fun, but I think it’s an important aspect of the artistic process.
Most of you (hopefully) don’t live with mental illness the way I do, but if you’re putting yourself and/or your art out there, you’ve had to deal with rejection.
And it never. Gets. Easier.
*Not at all delightful.
*Like a bog full of monsters (A+ callback, Wil).
*I like to point out that it’s sometimes important to say it like this: that I live with these things. Because I do live, and am alive, and although they suck, I don’t let them destroy me.
* I’m pretty sure I got mono from kissing, and not from a less-cool reason, like taking a sip from someone else’s soda.
* Not at all fun.
*Yet another thing that can make mental illness so hard—sometimes, you really are just hungry or tired, and not knowing what you’re feeling then can make it so difficult to figure out a course of action in that moment.
*I was writing a lot at the time.
*Of which there were many at the time.
I know it’s tough for some people to think of celebrities as people with problems, but if you don’t understand there are tiers of celebrities, and some of us are The Rock, and some of us are Wil Wheaton, and those two people have very different lives and lifestyles.
*I realize it is exceedingly unlikely anyone reading this sentence in this book, or hearing me say it in the audiobook, is one of these people.
But if, for some incomprehensible reason you are . . .
Please go fuck yourself, then keep fucking yourself, then fuck yourself a little bit more, until we are both sure you have fucked ALL the way off.
Thank you. Sincerely appreciate it.
*It’s never in the bag in show business, but this felt as in the bag as anything I’d auditioned for in my long career.
And then it wasn’t.
*I use this metaphor a lot. It still feels like the perfect way to describe how depression affects me. I’ll go into it more in a later post.
*I try to be graceful about this, but a reality of mental illness is that sometimes, I just get mad at it. Like, I didn’t ask for you to live in my brain, buddy, so quit giving me such a hard time. You’re welcome to leave at any time.
*Most of being an artist in any medium is this, in some way or another.
* I was referencing this experience: http://wilwheaton.net/2016/08/a-little-boat-looking-for-a-harbor/.
*Kaelan took the cover photo for this book, as well as pretty much every publicity shot I’ve used in the last several years. He’s great, and you should hire him at www.kaelanbarowsky.com.
*But Wil, you’re on screen all the time.
Yes, random person. I know.
*It’s incredibly not important, and honestly, you didn’t need to read it at all.
Which makes annotating it doubly not important, and I’ve now wasted your time twice.
*It’s the late seventies. If I had to guess, cocaine was his assistant that day.
*He fucking drank my milkshake.
*But, again, could also have been as high as shit.
*Like Gordie.
*Which is how there’s a picture of me on the cover of this book, which my publisher felt was important, and which I can understand a little, but would have hated even considering twenty-five years ago.
*If I feel like it’s going to land well, I’ll follow this up with a joke that goes something like, “I mean, OBVIOUSLY I have a favorite, but I’m never going to let THEM know who is constantly disappointing me.”
It’s dark humor that can come across as a little mean, and, anyway, it isn’t true. But when it lands, it KILLS.
*My character’s motivation.
But, a lot of my motivations was to get the girl in all aspects of my life (until I met Anne and got the girl).
*Vampire + hilarity.
I’m very proud of this portmanteau (as well as being able to use the word “portmanteau”).
*Top ten, for sure.
*I realize, though, you actually might not have heard of him by now, although Friends has had a big resurgence with Millennials and Gen Z over the past few years, and is getting a reunion/reboot as I’m writing this.
*And that we both wanted to be in movies with a chimpanzee, but only one of us would realize that dream.
*It turns out he was right, for about six seasons or so, until it began to turn into something I did not like.
But, you know, there aren’t a lot of shows that last thirty years and retain the punch of the first six seasons, so maybe pull back on the criticism, Wil.
*This is why I’m so grateful I didn’t commit to any tattoos until I was in my thirties.
*I have no idea how this sounded on the show, but in my memory, I can hear the way Matt let the “r” in “Bart” really roll around in his chest, how it went on much longer than it should have, and how goddamn funny it was.
*Editor: Cool!
Me: Oh, we’re still doing this.
*If you’ve noticed I’ve used this metaphor before, go talk to Aaron Sorkin, who reuses his own material all the time and is super-successful.
Yes, I just compared myself to Aaron Sorkin. What of it?
*It’s basically like Donkey Kong, but with a kangaroo.
*I was just too young to realize how lucky I was to hang out with Susan Sarandon. She was a kind and nurturing woman, and she made me feel special. I saw that older men leered at her, and I know she’s a sex symbol to a certain generation. She’s also recently gotten kind of gross, politically, which is a bummer, but when we worked on this movie, she was lovely and wonderful toward me.
*I’ll say it until I’m blue in the face: children actors are actors. If you hire them to be in your movie, treat them like you would another actor.
Unless you’re a complete asshole, and then maybe you shouldn’t be directing anyone (this isn’t a subtweet—I’m just saying in general).
*Which was like a listicle on BuzzFeed, but in TV show mode.
*Here’s the thing: Richard Pryor is a genius. And at one point, in passing, he said he liked Superman. So they asked him to be in the movie, even though it made no sense. I don’t blame Richard Pryor; I blame the writers who just wanted to cash in on a super-talented guy whose star was on the rise.
*I’m glad she said “when you get older,” though. Richard Pryor is not for eleven-year-olds.
*We didn’t know. And growing up then, he was a massive influence for at least two generations.
All my support and love goes to the women he hurt.
*It would have been amazing to have been older when I was on TNG, so I could have related to the cast more.
But if there was one moment I wished I’d been an adult, it was this one: hanging with Susan Sarandon, talking about her musician friend (keep reading), and maybe seeing if they all wanted to hang out.
*This was one of those times I felt like he was tolerating me, which was as good as it ever got with him.
*Around 1987, they expanded their light jazz bullshit to include new age bullshit and adult contemporary bullshit. You had to go to AM talk radio to find more bullshit in one place.
*Oh, how I want to be part of the club again!
*In a book, it’s weird to read this analogy more than once, right? These essays originally appeared months or years apart on my blog, so it made sense to revisit the analogy. And as I noted, I find this analogy to be the one that best describes depression for me.
For you it might be a cloud. It might be a boa constrictor. It might be so many things, and it might feel massive, or it might just nag at you, but know that no matter how you experience depression, it’s real and you deserve whatever help and support you can find to help you get that apron off, get that cloud to blow away, or release that boa back into the wild.
*Yes, even I merit paparazzi. They may not get paid for pictures of me as much as they do others, but someone out there is going to buy them, especially if I do something they can make fun of on TMZ.
I am not a fan.
*I was in New York to promote my upcoming series, The Wil Wheaton Project. Because you only know about it from my mention of it earlier in the text, we can infer how consequential it was in the larger media landscape.
*Life is a metaphor for life, basically.
*This is the photo I described a few essays ago, the one the guy took of me at that Paramount party.
* By now, you know who they are, and they know who they are, so I’m not going to spell it out again.
*I told the executives at the network I was going to invent “network goons” as a comedic foil in the show, like “well, the network goons say we can’t do this, so we’re doing it,” that sort of thing.
I thought they were on board, and understood the joke, until one of them literally complained to one of my producers that I was calling them goons, and that I didn’t appreciate them at all. That’s when I knew we were in trouble.
Unsurprisingly, this show lasted twelve episodes and we parted ways. Syfy wanted someone else, or at least they wanted me to be someone else (who also had my audience and social media influence), and they were never really on board with the show I thought we’d all agreed to do.
I want to be clear: I really did like the people I worked with and for. The executive who was responsible for us—the Head Goon, I guess—single-handedly saved Syfy a few years ago, and he was always a straight shooter with me, which I appreciated.
But somewhere above him, there were other Network Goons who were never really on board with me, and trying to work with them, to work together, was impossible. They clearly saw me as working *for* them, as their trained dancing bear on roller skates, when I saw myself as more of a juggling monkey who wore the cutest little vest . . . but had its independence.
When I got the call that the show wasn’t being extended beyond twelve episodes, I expected to feel disappointed, as if I had failed yet again, but I was honestly relieved I wasn’t going to have weekly conference calls where some Boomer lectured me on the right way to use Twitter. (A real thing I said: “Respectfully, I have a pretty good idea how to use Twitter.” What I didn’t say was “and more people follow me on Twitter than watch your highest-rated show, so maybe sit this one out.”)
So it turned out that the Network Goons were not just a joke I tried to lean into, they were actual, real people, and they weren’t great. Still, on balance, it was a good experience, and we had a ton of fun doing it.
*That’s over forty years of Wil Wheaton in one sentence.
*This is also a “Let’s Define Wil Wheaton” sentence (although, in both cases, I’m getting better at dealing with).
*And that’s, like, a level 7 spell.
*Holy shit, this is one of the most important things in the world: having someone listen to you.
If you can just have someone hear you and empathize, lots of times, you’ll find you have the answer to whatever question is plaguing you.
Just make sure that, when someone else comes with the need to talk, you listen to them, too.
*From pretty much every standard, I’m living a charmed life.
*See?
*Which you can watch on Monday Night Raw Exposed Nerves and Emotions.
*And, as of today, we still have a long way to go.
*I’ve raised two children. This is not normal behavior, and it should have been a big red flag to my parents that something was going on with me that needed some serious attention.
One of my mother’s go-to excuses when I asked her why she never stood up for me was “I didn’t know,” followed by some reason she was now the aggrieved party in the conversation.
Here’s the thing: Like I said, I’ve raised two kids and I’ve lived with Anne for twenty-five years. NOTHING happens in our house that we both don’t know about, either because we witnessed it, or because we communicated about it. If my mother truly didn’t know what was happening to me, or what I was going through, it’s because she made a choice to ignore it.
*Because, you know, hormones were starting to add their own flavor to the cocktail that made Wil Wheaton.
*As a parent, I do my best not to make everything about me when my kids are in a crisis.
*I’m going to rip another hole in space-time and punch most of those adults in the nuts.
*Most of the world was. A lot of the world still is.
*There is a gossamer line between “blame” and “hold accountable” that I struggle to find. When I wrote this speech, I was still in denial about the reality of my father’s abuse and my mother’s gaslighting. I remember writing this speech, knowing this part of it wasn’t true, knowing I had to protect my parents’ feelings, to continue the Perfect Family fiction they’d drilled into my head for as long as I could remember.
If I were being honest, I would have written:
Mom, I know you’re going to hear or read this, and I know this is going to upset you, but the way you and Dad treated me contributed to my depression and anxiety. Every time I tried to talk to you about this, you denied all of it, and you made my trauma all about you. That hurt a lot, but it doesn’t make any of it less true.
I sincerely believe that you are the hero of your story, that you love your children with all of your heart, and that you believe you would never do anything to hurt any of us.
Mom, that’s a lie you tell yourself, at least about me. And if there was ever going to be a healthy relationship between us, I needed you to be honest with yourself, and with me. You chose the lie, and that breaks my heart.
I was seven when you put me to work. I was nine when I started begging you to let me be a kid. You always told me that you gave up your career for me, and that made me feel so guilty. It put so much responsibility into my little hands and on my little shoulders. You made me responsible for your feelings and your happiness.
