James Harden, the Houston Rockets, and my life with major depression
On belonging to something when you need it the most.
This isn’t a boo-hoo story about how depressed I am about the Rockets last season (they were amazing), or the season before that. Sports fans who say they are depressed about a game really just mean they are frustrated, angry, or hangry. Or they’re Hawks or Suns fans. Either way, they just need to vent a bit, eat some chicken wings, and drink something like whatever a Mountain Dew Kickstart Ultra is. The feeling will pass by next halftime or next season or when they move away from Phoenix.
But that’s not depression. Depression is a ghost that passes into you one day and changes everything that is true. You wake up unloved, despite how much you are loved. You become completely worthless, despite your immense worth. You can’t stop crying, can’t leave the house, can’t imagine making it past the morning. And nobody can see why you are suffering, because it’s a ghost, and how does anyone see that?
So this isn’t an article about being depressed about sports. It’s an article about being depressed and sports.
In 2016, about 16.2 million — or 6.7 percent — of American adults had at least one major depressive episode. For perspective, 20.4 million people watched an NBA finals game in 2017. There are nearly as many depressed Americans at any given time as there are Cavs vs. Warriors viewers.
I’ve suffered from PTSD and the resulting anxiety and depression since I was 17. More accurately, I’ve fought a scrappy, twenty-three year-long mixed martial arts cage match with my own brain, and for the most part, won. I have an amazing wife and three wonderful kids. I have a dog named Tony! Toni! Toné! Perhaps rarest of all, I’ve been paid well to write.
And yet that ghost. It shows up unexpectedly, two or three years after it last leaves me. Sometimes I can feel it coming: a surge of inappropriately potent adrenaline in the middle of a quiet morning, a sudden fear implanted where there didn’t used to be one. More often, it comes unannounced in the night, like the trucks that spray for mosquitos in Houston, or a dying battery in your kid’s smoke detector.
When depression came for me this time, it was draped in the the coldest and cruelest darkness I’ve ever known. It stayed longer. It rejected all the medicine and direct sunlight and diet (and okay, let’s be honest, I don’t exercise) I could throw at it. I braced myself to be hospitalized, and secretly expected to have turned myself to dust by now. I was not hospitalized, though, and I am not dust.
Instead, I emerged something far more unlikely: an every-game-watching, jersey owning, ticket-buying Houston Rockets fan.
The Beard is not a basketball player. He’s the NBA’s Ziggy Stardust, a spaceman, the alter-ego of the alter-ego of a man named James Harden. He is a dancer. He is literally a Trolli gummy candy, embodied. He is a refrigerator-sized whirling dervish on jet-powered skates. He is a carnivorous dolphin, playing innocently with you for three quarters until he eats you in the fourth. He is both a calculated businessman and a rambunctious, uncontrollable child, green-lit to do whatever he wants because A.) he scores 30 points per game and B.) nobody can stop him.
I gravitated to James Harden because he was wholly authentic at a time when I felt the exact opposite. Jay-Z once said to Oprah: “The worst thing to be is successful as someone else. That’s a very difficult thing to upkeep, and it’s very tiring. I feel sorry for someone who has to walk out the house every day as someone else, and whatever you’ve made is not you, you’re not happy about it, but it’s successful. Just to maintain that level of success has to be very draining and a very sad existence.”
Blammo, Shawn Carter. I’m the author you’ve never heard of behind runaway hits like “IVR in an Omni-Channel World” and “5 Must-Do’s for Delivering Self Service Magic.” Nothing I make is me, yet it’s often successful. I am the pen behind your garden variety high-tech CEOs and CMOs and subject matter experts, spinning their nonsense into more nonsense until somehow, somewhere, someone is convinced of something and a few million dollars change hands. I’ve written hundreds of thousands (millions?) of words of nothing for a living, and the demand never ends.
Let’s be clear: my work itself isn’t my depression. How I work — and how I view my work — is. As the entire workforce shifted towards working from home and collaborating through online tools, I stopped belonging to something tangible, with water cooler laughter and break room birthday cakes. We began celebrating work birthdays with emojis. We gave each other digital high fives and kudos. I took feedback from the direct reports of direct reports of direct reports, transforming from writer to arbitrator of disparate edits. My skin fell off, and I was just a cold, naked due date. In these new digital digs, I became a series of projects, belonging only to the inputs and outputs of the master plan, the whimsy of the kind of men who buy Tesla Model X’s and can’t see they are just faster Pontiac Aztecs with more production problems plus gull-wing doors.
So Watching James Harden cook became my salvation, the only hope that Gilligan might be rescued from the island. The Beard’s success is his own. He is unapologetically himself. He has a real team, comprised of real people. He has his own unique, elaborate high-five for every single one of them. He has the freedom to make decisions, to wait until the very last second, to fuck the whole thing up if he wants to, and still start the rest of the season. He wears a poplin dress shirt with an actual buckle-on harness, for crying out loud.
Over three seasons of progressively worsening depression, I discovered Calvin Murphy’s suits, Bill Worrell’s “he shot that from Sugarland”-isms, and that Pat Beverly is the man I’d most like to hire to pester my childhood bullies in perpetuity. I discovered my love for Craig Sager, and I genuinely mourned his passing. I finally stopped yelling at the TV and figured out that Charles Barkley is paid to be a pundit. I bought a Harden Jersey, and a chef’s hat, and a fake beard. My older daughter named her guinea pig Dwight Howard, then traded him three years later to my younger daughter in one of life’s ultimate ironies.
Still. I was severely depressed and getting worse. I was literally out of time, with five or six high profile projects competing for my headspace. Nothing of me was mine anymore. So I added the entire Rockets season schedule to my iPhone calendar. I was belonging to something.
Here’s a short, by no means comprehensive list of all the warning flares I overlooked as I spiraled:
I stopped calling and texting friends
I declined social invitations more often, and stopped extending them altogether
My co-workers said I didn’t sound like myself anymore
I began feeling mildly agoraphobic, slightly afraid of even the grocery store
My physical health began suffering, too — inflamed joints, mysterious stomach troubles, etc.
I grew agitated more easily, particularly with my family
I started napping
I stopped buying myself things, or shaving my neck beard.
I lost all interest in discovering and learning
I had no more hopes or dreams for myself
I felt my life had peaked
I became angry and felt disenfranchised
I cried more and more, even at inappropriate times (like hearing a great song)
I became a bourbon connoisseur, at home, all by myself
I stopped feeling like a man
By 2017, the season played on nearly year-round, with the summer league and G-leagues and preseason and post-season. My wife and I joked how the NBA had become my telenovela. I tracked the storylines the same way she tracked Grey’s Anatomy, with Adam Silver and the league’s billionaire owners in place of Shonda Rhimes and Stacey McKee. There were rivalries and betrayals, secret tunnels, trade rumors, and ousted owners. Somehow, the Clippers were more often involved than not, and Trevor Ariza emerged as a possible full-blown gangster. But there was also amazing community service, with teams and players giving back to their communities on a very genuine level — both through their foundations and their own wallets.
James Harden likes Super Target, for example. He takes Houston families in need to Super Target and sends them on the Christmas shopping sprees of their dreams, like the early 90’s gameshow Supermarket Sweep. If I remember it right, one lady put diapers in her cart for Christmas and I cried a little, partly because I was drunk and mostly because we live in world where some people have to ask for diapers and food for Christmas.
In March, I went for my regular therapy visit, sat down, and fell into an entire session-long, guttural, deeply mournful cry that my therapist heard as a death rattle. It consumed me, us, the whole room, reverberated through the bones of everyone in the building, until I could only cry silently, the tears completely gone and nothing left coming out of me except the breath of a ghost. She asked me if I planned to kill myself once I left her office, if she should make a phone call to the hospital to make arrangements to commit me. How do you answer a question you’ve never been asked before, can’t even process? How do you kill yourself when you are already dead? If one hell exists in the afterlife, is it worse than another hell on earth? How, when you are uninsured, the sole provider for your family, and due to pick the kids up from school by 3, do you commit yourself to the hospital instead? I went home, picked up the kids, and held on. The Rockets beat the Mavericks that night, 104–97.
Two weeks later, at a Great Clips exactly like the Great Clips in the strip center near the laundromat and the liquor store and the coffee chain you’re envisioning, I decided I was going to die. My three kids were getting hair cuts: my oldest daughter, a bang trim; my younger daughter, a shorter, layered cut, and my son, the mane of a beautiful blonde lion if lions could surf. The antidepressant I had been prescribed was making things worse, and the moonlighter who called himself my psychiatrist was in Costa Rica with no backup plan for who would handle emergencies. In the van on the way home, I whispered to my wife: I think this is the last day the kids will ever see me. We drove through McDonald’s for a Diet Coke, something benign to cut through the malignancy. I lowered my head and cried in the drive-thru line, and my my kids laughed, couldn’t see my face, thought I was making silly sounds and joined along. That night, the Rockets beat the Timberwolves 129–120. Harden scored 34 points with 12 assists. It was their 26th win in 28 games, and I had watched them all.
What can I say about the importance of belonging, of finding even the single smallest thing to cling onto when you need it most, and holding onto it with all your might? I’ll spare you the obvious sports analogies of perseverance through a losing streak, or not giving up even when your down 25 points in the 4th.
My wife rallied and called all my friends, the people I needed the most but couldn’t reach out to on my own anymore. They formed a team that made sure I was never alone when I was too afraid. They took me for walks. They brought me art supplies, cried with me, listened, and shared their own brave stories of suffering and meds and being hospitalized and bedridden and downtrodden. They told me how they healed, and bought me the books that had been the most meaningful to them. They called in favors to get me into better doctors, who gave me a more accurate diagnosis, more effective medication, more responsive care, and true compassion. Along with my family, they encouraged me to take time off of work to heal, despite the financial ramifications. They reminded me that mental health comes before everything else in life. They brought me back to life.
And so did James Harden and the Houston Rockets. On the worst mornings, I reminded myself there was a game that night, or the next night, or the night after that, and I made that my shining light. I literally lit a James Harden candle every night during the playoffs, and took it with me when a friend and I would watch the game together. It still sits front and center in my TV room, an inspiration and an homage, a meditation and a quiet prayer all in one. When the wax is finally depleted, I will pour more. It’s as much about rooting for Harden and for the Rockets as it is about rooting for myself: a reminder that when I had nothing else, I held on literally from game to game. It’s a reminder that I am still here, that I matter, and that I can recreate my own life to be anything I want to be (short of an NBA baller). It’s a reminder that, when you have nothing else, you must find your equivalent of the Houston Rockets: something each week to look forward to, even when you can’t get out of bed. We can all be Ziggy Stardust. We can all be Trolli gummy candies.
I’m still not working, and our savings will be gone soon. But I know I can never go back to what I left: my brain in a bunker all day, relegated to the solitary confinement of writing about things I don’t care about in order to have a nicer car, host better birthday parties, enroll the kids in two dance classes instead of one. I have to reinvent myself, reconnect with the world, and become my own equivalent of a poplin shirt with a built-in holster. I can work again one day. I can dream of sitting court side. I can cook, goddamnit. I belong, and so do you.
With nothing but love, light, and gratitude to all the 2015–2018 Rockets players, coaching and support staff, and crew, including (but not limited to):
James Harden
Chris Paul
Trevor Ariza
Pat Beverly
Clint Capela
Corey Brewer
Bobby Brown
Gerald Green
Luc Mbah a Moute
Zhou Qi
Marcus Thornton
Terrence Jones
Ty Lawson
K.J. McDaniels
Jason Terry
Donatas Motiejunas
P.J. Tucker
Ryan Anderson
Eric Gordon
Lou Williams
Michael Beasley
Montrezl Harrel
Sam Dekker
Dwight Howard
Leslie Alexander
Tilman Fertita
Daryl Morey
Mike D’Antoni
Kevin McHale
J.B. Bickerstaff
