PODCAST RECOMMENDATION: Mara Wilson on The Hilarious World of Depression
Podcast: The Hilarious World of Depression (hosted by John Moe)
Episode Title: Mara Wilson Had Great Opportunities and Difficult Challenges
Date: September 23, 2019
Tags: OCD, Anxiety, Imposter Syndrome, Grief, Early Parental Loss, 90’s Child-Stars
What’s It About?
This episode has become a go-to recommendation for anyone interested in mental health and 90’s nostalgia so if you find yourself in the middle of that particular Venn diagram then this one is for you! In this episode of The Hilarious World of Depression, host John Moe sits down with Mara Wilson (the precocious child star from movies such as Matilda, Mrs. Doubtfire and Miracle on 34th Street) for an in-depth discussion about anxiety, grief and OCD.
Mara speaks about the emergence of childhood anxiety (“why was no one else worried about the fact that the sun would eventually burn out?”), the development of OCD symptoms (excessive showering and sidewalk jumping rituals) and what it was like to lose her mother to breast cancer at the tender age of eight (while filming Matilda!). Mara reflects on these early experiences as a grown woman with several years of therapy behind her and is full of hard-earned wisdom about how to tackle some of these issues while still moving forward.
Highlights
“Lately I’ve been thinking of my OCD – and my depression – as someone in my head who’s just trying to shock me but ends up coming across as really boring… ‘you suck and everybody hates you!’… ‘what if you do something terrible like burn the house down!’…it’s like this teenage edge-lord in my brain. Like, why are you making me think that? That’s stupid.” (1:00 – 2:00min)
“Mental illness is not an excuse but it is an explanation… and people are going to be far more understanding than you think.” (22:45 – 23:00min)
“There’s a common allegory [about grief] where there’s a ball in a box… so, there’s this ball bouncing around a box that has a [grief] button, and sometimes the ball is going to push that button. And, at first, the box is very small – so it feels like the ball is constantly pressing the button – but over time the box gets bigger, and bigger, so there’s more space for the ball to jump around… but it’s still going to hit the button sometimes. And you don’t always know… that’s the thing about grief is you don’t know when it’s going to sneak up on you or what will trigger those feelings.” (31:30 – 32:52min)
Rating:
