The Curious Case of Walter White: My anecdotal review of “Breaking Bad” and my life

So, for the past three years, I’ve been lying to my family. I’ve been lying to my friends. I’ve just been all around deceitful; mainly because I’ve been lying to myself. You see, I’ve been trying to feel better for awhile now, dealing with this thing people call depression and all. For awhile I thought I was doing okay, until I just couldn’t seem to ignore the sound of my desperate voice, constantly chirping disingenuous “I’m doing great!’’’s in response to daily cordialities and greetings

(or the two or three embarrassingly cheesy and transparent, falsely-positive articles I previously posted up here — yikes)

I started watching Breaking Bad for the second time in almost six years. When I first saw it my sophomore year of college, I found it to be hilarious and fun. Jesse’s expletives had a youthful punch to them that I definitely resonated with as an immature and simpleminded 20-something. Skylar White was extremely annoying, Hank Schrader was hilarious, and Gus Fring was — well Gus Fring was and is still a quite frightening character.

But Walter — the infamous Walter White — I found him to be just plain sad, destructive, and monstrous. In college he was cool; a semi-likeable anti hero doing what he needed to do to provide for his family. As with Jesse, I was viewing Walter through a naïve lens; a lens of someone without a care in the world — past say, maybe, staying awake through statistics class. Jesse, I thought was pretty cool; like one of those aimless, care-free, unpretentious skater dudes with rich parents that would’ve been in one of my business classes. I think a part of me didn’t feel too sorry for the boy because he was young, lost, and just trying to find his way, like all us youngsters. But this time around, I realized Jesse was the real victim of the story, besides Walter’s family of course.

If you haven’t seen the show, which first aired on AMC in 2018, I won’t spoil it for you because it’s more than worth watching. But in a nutshell, Breaking Bad is about a middle-aged high school chemistry teacher, Walter White, (expertly played by Bryan Cranston) with money problems, who gets diagnosed with lung cancer and partners up with an old student of his, Jesse Pinkman, (played by the underrated Aaron Paul) to cook meth and earn some extra money to fund his treatment and collect a secret stockpile of cash to leave for his family after he dies. A little extreme, yes, but understandable.

Now, that’s the high-level overview of the show. To me, what the show’s really about is a depressed, aging man living a life he told himself was okay until it wasn’t. As I said before, back in the day I actually empathized for the great Walter White. Today, however, I found it incredibly difficult to even listen to his incessant, damaging lies.

I am by no means a psychiatrist, but I can say with confidence that Walter White was a victim of the unforgiving torment of depression. I wrote down two quotes that never really meant very much to me in college, but now echo in my brain like a high-pitched ring. There was one scene in particular that I feel makes sense to share in this context. The following quote is from Season 2 of the show after Walter “mysteriously” runs away from home after an argument with Skylar, and gets psychoanalyzed by a therapist in response to his so-called manic state. “Why run away?” The therapist asks. “What do you feel you had to run from?” This was Walter’s response, as he stops to glare out the hospital window, stripped down to his hospital gown, socks, and underwear.

“Doctor, my wife is seven months pregnant with a baby we didn’t intend.” Walter begins. “My 15-year-old son has cerebral palsy. I am an extremely overqualified high school chemistry teacher. When I can work, I make $43,700 per year. I have watched all of my colleagues and friends surpass me in every way imaginable and within 18 months, I will be dead. And you ask why I ran?”

How could I have missed this the first time around? I rewound this scene two to three times because it literally gave me chills. It was unsettling to finally, after all these years, acknowledge Walter White’s evolution into a narcissistic, greedy, and self-sabotaging pathological liar. The depths that someone’s pain and anguish can descend because of pure unhappiness is, well, scary to see; even more so when you feel yourself heading down the same path.

Yesterday a good friend of mine and I got on the topic of generational curses. Her and I can easily get on any topic, but this specific one came up after I shared with her how I had managed to screw up yet another dating experience. To me, it was just another failed romantic experience, nothing new. But this situation we both found difficult to make light of. Though I had only known the boy for a month, the way it ended shook me up more than I thought it would. I won’t bore you with the details, but let’s just say I let my emotions — and insecurities — get the best of me and, well, scared the guy off. But this is not an isolated incident. Let’s just say I have an unhealthy habit of mistaking someone’s kindness toward me as affection and a signal they’re interested in me, when sometimes someone being kind doesn’t have to have a motive hiding behind it. At the slightest sign of interest, my heart is as open as a good book. Now while this doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing, when it’s all you ever seem to do, it can be quite toxic to someone who doesn’t open up to the idea of herself; to her own potential; to her own self-worth.

Anyways, my friend didn’t take to this latest heartbreak of mine very well and decided it was time to give it to me straight. “Based off of what you’ve told me in the past,” she started. “You need to stop passing these occurrences off as if they’re isolated and insignificant.” She shared a concept with me called generational curses, or toxic tendencies that are passed down from parent to child like a genetic disease. This came after I was honest with her about how worried I was my mother was so depressed I feared she would suddenly run away one day, leaving our family behind. Coincidentally, before the dating conversation, her and I had been chatting casually about how different our lives could be living somewhere else, far away, in another city, or another state, for that matter. Moving away — in addition to the incredibly unexpected and unjustifiable impulse to trade-in my perfectly functional 3-year-old car — had been my latest obsession, as of late. While it’s perfectly normal for a 25-year-old to want to leave the nest, and covet all the sexy, sporty cars on the road, the pace at which it all suddenly seems to be coming over me worries me. And this idea of generational curses, and the fact that I know my mother is suffering from chronic depression and has been for years; especially since my grandmother (her mother) passed away last spring, the day before Mother’s Day — ponder on all this realization really took me back for a minute. How substantially overwhelming someone’s perceived shortcomings can drive them to do completely irrational things is nothing to be taken lightly, my friend warned. Turns out, she’s right.

I also recently started listening to this podcast — The Hilarious World of Depression. It’s a “show about clinical depression… with laughs”, hosted by award-winning author, John Moe. I’m not a podcast person, but I decided to try this, as I got tired of being tired, and wanted to immerse myself in familiar territory, without drowning myself in it. What I enjoy about this podcast is it speaks to me in a way most people in my life just can’t (to my depression) and makes me smile a little. For 30 minutes at a time, I actually feel like I’ll make it out of this depression thing alive, because, hey, all these other people with much more severe cases have.

So far, the first episode is my favorite. The guest for that episode was comedian Peter Sagal, who shared his story of overcoming a lifelong battle with depression and hitting rock bottom after a nasty divorce, and also becoming estranged from his two daughters. He talked about how therapy felt pointless, as all you do is sit and share everything that had gone wrong with you that week and then before you know it your hour is up and your therapist doesn’t waste anytime letting you know it. Then you suffer until the next appointment, and the process repeats and repeats, sometimes without much resolution; increasing the probability of you not improving. I’d like to acknowledge and applaud, though, the hard work of mental health professionals. Mental illness — in this case depression — is no easy fix.

Sagal then goes on to talk about a method he has found to be very helpful on his quest to sanity, happiness and, at the very least, contentment. He referenced a study conducted by Susan Nolen Hoeksema and a few other scientists where research was done to evaluate the frequency and content of nightmares in relation to the 1989 San Francisco earthquake. Often, when it comes to depression, there are people who cope by ruminating, and people who get by on distracting, Sagal says. The results of the survey found that a lot of the ruminators showed symptoms of depression and PTSD, whereas the distractors did not and eventually got on with their lives.

“The problem is that ruminators often cut themselves off from other people, so they become an echo chamber for their own negative thoughts and they’re not forced to deal with the cognitive complexity of interacting with others. So, (according) to a number of studies, the distractors tend do better. It can take some time, but over time they end up feeling better. And the wound may still hurt when you stop and think about it, but not as much as if you were just sitting in a cold room by yourself, in the dark, ruminating.”

For Sagal, continuing to earn a living off his ability to make people laugh was how he chose to distract himself. Hm, doesn’t seem like too expensive of a price to pay for some peace of mind.

For me, I concluded that lately the sudden desire to buy another car and run away is my way of distracting and that it didn’t have to be thought of as a bad thing. Every kid has to grow up someday. The same applies for another failed attempt at pursuing getting to know someone new. Just because it didn’t work out doesn’t make me a horrible or unlikeable person. Instead of dwelling on something I have no control over, because of some hellish chemical imbalance in my brain, I can do my best to try lessen the blow of that “imbalance” with something far more stronger, that actually makes me feel good. The kicker though is that, that the distractor has to work to the benefit of my happiness and not against it.

I’m not pretending to relate to some man; a fictional character, that I don’t know and will never in my life meet, struggling with a terminal illness, worried about providing for his family during his illness and long after he’s gone. But I won’t be dishonest and say that as a young adult, 30 years Walter White’s junior, I don’t fear becoming as desolate and hopeless as he eventually became, all because he’d one day just up and gave up; failing to realize that he was worth more than wasting his talent on some horrible drug.

The honest to God truth is, if you don’t get to the sickness before it gets to you, it’ll not only destroy you from the inside out but everything that you know and love, too. Walter White wanted a quick fix, which ultimately made him no different than his most satisfied inebriated customers. But eventually he started to get high off his own supply, and I’m not talking about the drugs. He let his dissatisfaction with his current situation — because that’s all it was, a situation — cheat him out of an opportunity to fight for what he deserved — a little self-forgiveness. If you end up watching the show, you’ll know what I mean.

So, what do I think happened to Walter White? He pulled the trigger and tied the noose too soon to realize that happiness and self-acceptance is not a quick fix, but a journey.