stephen scott day

“We always talk about white people with mental health. However, this film takes us on a journey that makes us think about other people...“

I was sitting on my patio with my hands cuffed behind my back trying to answer all the questions the police were asking me as I watched my mother crying in the doorway. There were a few cops inside, searching my room, probably for other weapons or maybe drugs or whatever. They confiscated my step-dads shotgun, which was a gift recently given to him by his dad. I was barefoot and in my boxers in the back of the cop car for the forty-five minute drive to the emergency psychiatric ward. On the ride there and for the next few days I could not stop thinking about how scared my mom and family must be. My mom jumped on my back when she saw me hovering over the gun, she had to hear me damning my existence, her own son. My four day stay gave me more than enough time to reflect on my actions and my feelings that lead me to them. I met people with a variety of different illnesses. I heard stories of internal and external adversity, and I heard it straight from the mouths of the people it affected so regularly. These experiences began to reveal the bigger and nearly hidden picture of people facing the issues of mental health and the systems put in place to help them and how ineffective those systems can be and how mysterious these problems are.

Months before all this I was living in Austin, TX. I lived in a one bedroom apartment by myself. All my friends and family were back in Los Angeles. I made a couple friends there in Austin but wasn’t hanging out with them very often. I was a real estate agent, Uber driver and Postmates driver. None of my jobs really had co-workers. Instead my jobs meant interacting with new people every day for brief periods of time. It wasn’t long into this lifestyle that I started feeling the effects of isolation. I became debilitatingly depressed. I found myself drinking and smoking in excess. I spent night after night by myself, crying and wishing I didn’t exist. I wished for a button to press that would quietly, unobtrusively delete me from history. I valued the end of my terrible numbness more than I did the well being of my friends and family. That is to say I stopped caring about who might weep for my death.

I got a therapist and shortly after that I moved back to LA. Things were better but I was still a bit shook. There were a couple months I was feeling particularly lost and anxious and that’s when the whole shotgun and trip to the psych ward thing happened.

I’m here now writing this (on my way to the beach for my cousin’s birthday), so you know I made it out of all this shit alive. I can confidently say that I’ve amassed enough of an emotional/psychological toolset to keep me out of those super low lows. I still have lows because like anyone reading this, I am a human. Unlike before, I now see no low worth my resignation to life.

The biggest set of tools I have can be categorized as “sense of belonging”. Humans are inherently social beings, whether or not we need tons of alone time. When a group of people have a common goal that they’re genuinely enthusiastic about, there is a deep fulfillment that makes it near impossible for depression to rear its ugly head. I got a job with co-workers who I loved to be around. I doubled down on my art and months later I was doing what I loved for a living. I began spending more time with people pursuing the same things as I was. It’s good to have any kind of extreme intimacy but the most potent kind is with someone that you share goals with. Find a tribe to hunt with and you’ll seldom be tempted to escape existence.

There’s a handful of things that helped me through those dark times, but there are a couple really important sources I’d like to share:

Tim Ferriss’ “Some Practical Thoughts on Suicide” http://tim.blog/2015/05/06/how-to-commit-suicide/

Sebastian Junger’s “TRIBE” https://www.amazon.com/Tribe-Homecoming-Belonging-Sebastian-Junger/dp/1455566381

For the longest time I’ve suspected there to be a huge disconnect between the way humans have evolved to live and the way modern, developed (and mostly Western) society has been designed. Though I’ve seen plenty of films dealing with isolation and depression, none have really addressed directly the things that made my experiences so excruciating. Out of my experiences I’ve made a film reflecting the causes of my sickness and the values that have helped me overcome it. It’s called “A Short Introduction to Love and Purpose”. Though there are many more facets to what I went through, I made sure that the film embodied the most important things: isolation, feeling hopeless, and not being able to recognize that same thing in anyone other than yourself.

I hope that at the very least the film could be an insight into one of the many ways depression takes a hold of people every day, and that if anyone facing these things themselves sees this film they can find some sort of catharsis or hope in getting through their darker times. https://vimeo.com/217615235

I’ve been developing a music video with my friend Esther and today I got this text message from her:

Let me tell you why I live for deadlines...

1. See the Man Behind the Curtain

They take your ambitions and goals off their pedestal. Deadlines say “This thing is achievable, the problems before it can be solved, and so there shouldn’t be any reason why you can’t have it done by this date.” Deadlines demystify your goals. Setting them means you’ve acknowledged the attainability of the things you set out to do.

Let me put it this way: You don’t attempt impossible things, you attempt difficult things.

The time frame you give yourself is based on your assessment of your abilities and resources. There’s a right way to set deadlines, and there’s a wrong way. Your method for establishing time frames must cater to you, so the better you know yourself, the more effective your deadlines become.

The right way to set a deadline is to estimate as accurately as possible the amount of time it would take to complete something, and then slightly shorten that time frame. Giving yourself slightly less time than you would prefer is an effective strategy, because it creates an invaluable state of mind: urgency.

2. Smarter-Harder Hours > Longer Hours

Deadlines invoke urgency, which puts you under pressure. Using pressure in the right way can enhance your performance.

Dr. Kelly McGonigal, author of The Upside of Stress:

“When you have a challenge response, the brain and body actually sift into a state that gives you more access to your resources. You know your heart might still be pounding, but your blood vessels are going to relax and open up so you get more blood flow to your muscles and to your brain. Your brain shifts into a state — it’s actually better at paying attention to everything in your environment rather than sort of being laser-focused like you might be in a fight-or-flight response on what’s going wrong or what’s dangerous. When you have a challenge response, all of your senses open to all the information that’s available to you, which means that you’re basically smarter under stress.”

Operating at 75% will render the quality of your accomplishments 75% of what they could be, no matter how long you take. You may as well put yourself in a position of operating at 100%, and get that 100% level of quality in your accomplishments. So not only are you doing things quicker, you’re doing them better.

3. Resource Snowball Effect

I don’t want to work with people who don’t get things done. Finding good collaborators is a tricky game, and can end up wasting a lot of your time. We all hit our slumps, and productivity can’t always be at 100%, so feeling someone out takes time. You have to see how high their highs are, and how low their lows are. One of the worst things is when you totally click with someone, but somewhere down the road you find out they’re not too keen on putting in the work. This will most likely happened to you if it hasn’t already. Be prepared, because not everyone has the same priorities as you.

There’s a cool trick to finding good collaborators, which is looking back on their body of work. If they have a few completed pieces of work spread out over some years, forget them, move on. If their body of work is too big for you to even skim through one afternoon, you may have a keeper on your hands.

Now look at the appeal of someone prolific from the other side:

So you’re hitting your deadlines, you’re getting things done. This makes an impression on the people around you, especially your potential collaborators. People want to work with people who make things happen and get things done. People want to give their resources to people who will make proper use of those resources. This doesn’t mean you’ll have a crack team knocking at your door, or billionaire angel investor calling you up just because you’ve finished something. But in some form or another, doors will open.

As you and your work get better, so do your options. This is the crazy snowball effect of getting things done; each accomplishment is a hook cast into your lake of resources.

To clarify some misunderstandings about deadlines...

Deadlines are not the end. If you don’t have the desired outcome by the deadline you’ve given yourself, it’s up to you to decide where you go from there. Do you move on to the next step and finesse later? Maybe this aspect isn’t important enough in the grand scheme of things, and what you have will do. If it really is very pressing to correct or finish, deadlines can always be extended. They are not dogma, they are tools to organize your efforts.

Deadlines do not compromise quality-- people do. Like I said before, when you reach a deadline with undesirable results, the next course of action is up to you. You don’t have to settle on anything, you may just need to set a new deadline.