A Deep Sadness

Tuesday, August 12, 2014

I feel a sadness as deep as the Pacific Ocean is wide.

After work I went to the Eagle for Taco Tuesday.  I left earlier than I was planning to.  I had originally planned to meet up with a few friends.  But I just didn’t feel at all social.  I wanted to sequester myself and just be with my sadness…and nothing else.

While at the Eagle I caught glimpses of the news coverage of Robin Williams’ death.  It saddens me that such a talented man is gone.  It also saddens me that such preventable and unfortunate loss happens so often in our world.  In the last two months there have been three separate instances in which the phenomenon of suicide has appeared in my life.  First there was the disclosure of a recent suicide attempt by someone I personally have been connected to through my work.  Then there was the suicide of someone from the leather community.  I didn’t know him personally but I feel impacted nonetheless due to the people I know who did know him.  And then there is Robin Williams’ death by suicide.  It’s so sad when we lose people and such loss was preventable.

I feel sad too because I don’t think we humans learn very well.  We don’t seem very good at evolving…at least not lately.  I had suicidal thoughts as a teenager.  And looking back I feel it was perfectly understandable…if not even predictable….that I would have such thoughts at that time in my life.  Adolescence is rarely an easy developmental stage in a person’s life.  I had the added challenge of adjusting to a new stepmother, a new half-brother and a father whose emotional health was never ideal.  I have remarked many times how I think it was indeed miraculous that I survived to reach my adulthood.  In my earliest years of life it was my father’s less than optimal choices that put me at risk.  Later, once I was a teenager, it was my own frustration with feeling unseen and unheard that left me too often in a dark state of mind that can be a breeding ground for the dark rumination that can eventually lead a person to feel suicidal.

Decades have passed since I was a teenager.  And yet it’s obvious that the wounds of my earliest years of life were quite deep…and they still pain me to some extent even now.  I’m still working to address those early wounds.  I have made remarkable progress.  But we all have difficult days.  Sometimes they start in a bad way and improve.  Other days begin innocuously enough and then end with such a quality of torpor that you can find yourself wondering how such a feeling of malaise can suddenly seem to creep upon you and absolutely consume you.  Have you ever had a day where everything is moving along so swimmingly well and then suddenly you feel an immense sense of deflation?  I’ve had days like those.  They aren’t fun.

For any person actively walking the path of recovery self-care has to be your number one priority.  There is indeed such a thing as healthy narcissism.  What isn’t healthy is becoming locked into a state of mind in which you never expect to encounter other people who will be sufficiently healthy, stable and authentic enough to want to include in your life on a long term basis.  What is not healthy is getting trapped into a state of gloom.  What isn’t healthy is long-term isolation that goes above and beyond a healthy way of coping.

I don’t feel very social this evening.  So I am choosing to be intimate with my computer.

I believe we have such a problem with suicide in the United States because we are one of the most dysfunctional cultures when it comes to the practice of active listening.  Do you want an example that I believe will document my point?  Consider the words of one Jim Hankle of Arkansas.  Mr. Hankle apparently felt it not inappropriate to speak in an insulting way on Twitter regarding the passing of Robin Williams.  I continually marvel when I encounter people who are elected officials of our government who act like petulant, aloof, cold jerks.  I suppose Mr. Hankle has never been personally affected by the loss of someone through suicide?  Or maybe he has been and he just doesn’t realize it…yet.  I may be forty years old but I sometimes feel a childlike confusion as to how people can be so cold.  I am often inclined to attribute such coldness to unhealed trauma in a person’s own life history.  Some of the meanest people you might ever meet are also some of the most wounded and suffering individuals.

I am happy I never seriously attempted to commit suicide when I was a teenager.  The thought crossed my mind too many times.  But then again I think a number of times greater than zero is far from ideal.  I had another bout in my late twenties when I felt some deep despair.  But I overcame that.  I suspect it becomes more and more difficult to seriously contemplate suicide the later into the prime of your adult life you live because you have invested so much into your own life that throwing it away becomes outrageous.  Then, as you age and eventually become an elder, a new risk presents itself.  I suppose this is the risk associated with feeling irrelevant.  Once your ‘productive years of contributing to society’ are behind you a new challenge presents itself.  What should you do with the time you have left?

This is the question I have been asking myself a lot lately.  As I have noted recently in my writings I now feel myself to be firmly in the second half of my life.  I made that transition last summer…when I made an involuntary journey through something akin to Hell.

The sharpness of my sadness is somehow brought into strong relief by the fact that today is quite possibly one of the nicest summer days we have had all summer here in the Twin Cities.  The trees are green, the sun is beautiful and the humidity is low.  And the world is full of chaos.  I sometimes wonder if the trees across the world witness us humans in some way we cannot yet perceive and wonder how we have not snuffed ourselves out yet.  These images have been filling my mind lately: The decade long clusterf*** of Iraq.  A boy shot to death in the St. Louis area...and a protest erupting thereafter.  John Boehner on vacation from his dutiful avoidance of all meaningful work.  The oceans the hottest they have ever been recorded to be in the month of June. 

Sometimes I want to hide.  But then that would be so dull.  The world needs amazing people….like Robin Williams.

Rest well Robin.