This morning I woke to the sound of a mother’s voice, telling the story of her son’s teenage suicide. Her fragile words came floating through the magic waves of public radio, during an hour devoted to the topic of depression. Most of the time, the topic of depression is, in a word, depressing. But before I could even ask who on earth made the creative decision to do a radio show about depression, I was arrested by the mother’s words as she spoke of her son’s habits and behavior.
A boy who stayed home from school, never ate right, never slept right. Had friends and favor, popularity and talent, but never felt he belonged. He would stay up through the night and do nothing at all, only making each of his problems worse. From the outside, he had it all. And from the inside it didn’t matter.
I never wanted to die though. Only to escape.
I was stunned. Despite what has become a famously sharp memory, I had all but forgotten the way those years felt. I sat up and threw off my blanket. I thought not just of the endless teenage affliction the woman in the radio was describing, but of all the wasted tears to do with jealousy, romance, longing, fear, and nostalgia. I thought of how I obsessed over my girlfriend, and how I wished I wouldn’t. I thought of standing in my driveway, looking at the garage door and hating my mother because I missed her so much. I thought of the mornings I’d drive toward school and simply keep driving. Toward and through places I had never seen. I wanted to take a deep breath and feel relieved that such feelings are gone from within, but a guilty air hung over me. I knew that close by, thousands of individuals continue to wade through such dread and emptiness. Despite the quality of their wealth and talent. Or those that love them, as they wait for them to grow up.
As I entered the room of my graduate seminar this afternoon, I was asked if I was depressed by a group of individuals that had already agreed they were each depressed.
“No, I’m not,” I said. But you’re in love, one rebutted with a purposefully resentful smile. “I’ve been depressed and in love before,” I sighed, “they aren’t mutually exclusive you know…we’re all suffering.” And just then, another graduate entered the room and said in an uncharacteristically authoritative voice, suffering, is just a word. I quietly stared at her and carefully pondered my increasingly late response.
Relatives may not believe it, but over the years I’ve become far more capable of letting people speak and speak ridiculously. It isn’t that people don’t continue to be wrong and very wrong, it’s that there are in fact so many of them, myself included, that correcting them each is a problem beyond the grasp of any one man. So lately, I’ve been using the muscle that allows me to nod quiet and act compliant. The poor woman that espoused her well-intentioned belief in the fiction of suffering had no idea that for one afternoon my heart had been softened by an hour of heart-wrenching local radio. She had no idea that the diplomat in me had been rendered useless by the gallons of hurt and memories I had so recently soaked in. She only meant to encourage some positive thinking.
“No. No it’s not just a word.”
And for a few seconds, several people gave me that age-old face that usually accompanies the phrase looks like Mr. Poopy Pants woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. But I didn’t care. I rose and smiled, walking toward the vending machine for some fruit snacks, and on my way gently thinking that, was for seventeen-year-old me, and for some lady’s dead son, and for the kid staring at the corner in the suburbs.
Before I returned, all were enveloped in small pockets of laughter, and everyone seemed as happy as I was when I walked in the first time. For the moment it seemed, depression had been forgotten by everyone but me, happy and in love as I may be. No longer thinking of the past, I thought of the present, and how many people were soaking in their own tears. And of the future, in which people I know and don’t know will involuntarily involve themselves with inexplicable pain, as suffering continues to leap from the page, flowing through the threads of human history. Out of wordhood, toward agony incarnate.
Pain is like water. In small amounts it’s meaningless, transparent, and utterly defeatable. In larger quantities, it’s the worst sort of force. And otherwise, it sustains us. But more importantly, it’s everywhere. And at some point, we all get wet.