The Alchemy of Words

The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; 

they change the world into words. 

 ~William H. Gass

Guest post by Margo Fowkes

I started writing after Jimmy's brain tumor diagnosis. No diary, gratitude journal or daily pages. Just email updates on how he was feeling and what was happening with his cancer treatment that over time came to include passages on how the four of us were living and finding joy in between his 90 day scans.

When Jimmy died, I stopped writing. What was there to say? We were shattered, broken and using every bit of our energy to find a way to endure without him. 

It was my friends who convinced me to begin again. Laura, who invited me to what is now "our" beloved Tuesday night writing group. Regina, who pointed out that the essays and articles she and I wanted to share with other grieving parents didn't exist, so perhaps I'd "better start writing." And luck, which had me spot a calendar notice in poet Ellen Bass' newsletter about a week long retreat called "Writing as a Pathway Through Grief, Loss, Uncertainty & Change" which introduced me to Laura Davis, who thanks to COVID, became my writing teacher in March 2020 via her Thursday feedback class on Zoom. 

My first pieces on Salt Water went up in June 2017. Since then, I've written almost two hundred more, beautiful proof of the wisdom of Louis L'Amour's advice – "Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on." 

In the early days, I wrote to understand Jimmy's death. Why this happened. How it could have happened. If I could have prevented it. Whether I was the only one. 

I wrote to find my strength, face my weaknesses, mend the broken parts of myself. To learn how to reach. How to stay in the world on the days when every fiber of my being wanted to curl up on the bathroom floor in a fetal position and stay there. 

I wrote to learn how other grieving souls make their way through the world in the face of staggering, unimaginable loss. What works for them. What doesn’t. How they know. 

As time went on, I began writing to remember. The magic and beauty of my days with Jimmy. The laughter and adventures. The tears and late night confidences. The falling down and the getting back up. Why it mattered then. Why it matters still. 

I write to reclaim the joy. To learn how to hold fast to it when the world feels gray and so very unfair. To allow the sweet memories to flood back in and drown out the painful ones. 

I write to let go ... of the worst days, the painful progression of Jimmy's disease and everything it robbed him of, the side effects of treatment, the relentless march to ending we hoped and prayed would never come. Of the hurtful behavior of a small handful of family and friends. To find my way to forgiveness so that I could use Nadia Bolz Weber's bolt cutters and free myself from the misery I was dragging around. 

I write to make sense of the world on the days when nothing does. When life feels rigged and wrong. When the losses keep layering for those of us who have already been robbed of so much. 

I write to face my mistakes, failures, stumbles. All the ways I let Jimmy down. To offer grace to myself for the actions I'm ashamed of, the words I didn't say, the ones I wish I could take back.

I write in the hope that someone else will listen. To connect. To reach out with my words to others who are writing and thinking about life after loss in ways that are similar and ways that are entirely different. To draw close to those whose courage inspires me and to create a verbal boundary of protection against those who are bitter, self-righteous, full of rage. Not by criticizing, provoking or attacking but by making it clear that I have no space for their bluster and bile. That their way is not mine.

I write to reach back to those coming behind me, just as others did for me in the early days. To offer hope to the newly grieving that they, too, can and will find their own way forward. To provide reassurance that whatever they are feeling is natural and so very normal. To make space for their pain and bear witness to their grief. To give them permission to divorce themselves from those who treat them badly and encourage them to say what needs to be said. To ask about how their loved one lived instead of how they died. To say their beloved's name and hear them say Jimmy's in return. I write to heal my wounds and bear the weight of Jimmy's absence. 

To create a life in the aftermath, and on my worst days, to convince myself that I want that life. To remember my son's fierce desire to live and the promise I made him to find a way to go on, even when I don't want to.

I write to conjure my son back to life. To tell his story, remember his courage and kindness and honor his life. To pull the precious moments out of my brain and push aside the memories that burn and punish. To continue learning from him and keep his life woven through mine. To remind myself and the world that I will never stop being his mother. To preserve the beauty of our days together like a dragonfly in amber. To carry him with me for the rest of my days.

James Daniel "Jimmy" Fowkes lost his life to medullablastoma. 

Jimmy was 21 years old when he died.

Margo Fowkes (pronounced “Folks”) is the founder and president of OnTargetConsulting inc. , a firm specializing in helping organizations and individuals act strategically, improve their performance and achieve their business goals. Through her work, Margo helps organizations and leaders create a more compassionate culture by speaking openly about grief and loss in the workplace. 

After the death of her son Jimmy in 2014, Margo created Salt Water, an online community that provides a safe harbor for those who are grieving the death of someone dear to them. 

Inspired by Jimmy’s determination to live a rich, full life despite his circumstances, Salt Water’s articles and other resources focus on healing and building a new life in the aftermath of a devastating loss.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was a German expressionist painter and printmaker. He was one of the founders of the artists group Die Brücke or 'The Bridge', which was a key group leading to the foundation of Expressionism in 20th-century art. He volunteered for army service in the First World War, but soon suffered a breakdown and was discharged. In 1933, his work was branded as degenerate by the Nazis and in 1937, over 600 of his works were sold or destroyed. 

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner died by suicide on June 15, 1938. He was 58 years old when he died.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

May 6, 1880 – June 15, 1938

These Things I Know

 

Written by Jim Yoder, April 29, 2021

Nine years ago this morning, Tammee left us.

We have so many questions. We work so hard to try and know things.
Why didn’t we see something? Why didn’t we realize she was in danger?
Why didn’t she say something? Reach out?
What was she thinking? How was she hurting so badly inside?
What could we have done differently? Would it have mattered?
.
Here’s an idea:

Let’s don’t focus on what we can’t know.
Instead, what if we focus on what we DO know about her?
.
I’ll start:

I know Tammee loved with abandon, loved deeply, and cared deeply.
I know Tammee valued her family, her faith, her friends.
I know Tammee was adventurous, even to a fault. Whether flying airplanes, scuba diving, riding horses, driving motorcycles, she loved speed and exhilaration.
I know Tammee danced always like no one was watching, even though entire dance floors would stop and clear to watch her (which would always then embarrass her greatly).
I know Tammee was impulsive, always choosing immediate action over analysis and planning. I know this caused many wonderful things to happen, and sometimes not so wonderful.
I know Tammee was in great pain and fear 24x7.

When her psychosis and extreme paranoid delusions began 11 years prior to her death, her and everyone’s lives changed drastically, and survival became our driving focus. She suffered on a scale that devastates me to this day, and will forever affect me.
I know Tammee was somehow stronger than anyone I’ve ever known, and it still amazes me.
I know Tammee loved me.
I know Tammee is in heaven.
I know I loved her always, and will love her forever.
These things I know.

Fly free, Tammee Lee! 

Jim Yoder lives in Kansas. He sings in a gospel band, he's a Kansas City Royals fan, and he is a survivor of suicide loss. On April 29, 2012, Jim lost his wife Tammee. Yesterday, Jim shared the note above with his fellow loss survivors. 

The anniversaries of my own two primary suicide losses are in April. As we round the corner from this month into May, what Jim wrote was a beautiful reminder to me that we can move forward holding equal amounts of Grace as grief.

Leaning into the Arms of Grace

Leaning Into the Arms of Grace

El Collie, 1995

 

You learn to tough it out.

You learn to accept.

You learn to surrender.
You learn to lean into the arms of grace

both unseen, from the realms above,
and extended through a human hand.

You get through tattered and torn around the edges.
You get through wondering how you've managed

to make it through this far

You get through hanging on for dear life.
You get through shaken and shuddering

and sheared of everything

but your quivering mind and quaking heart,

and the distant echo of a memory that this was why you came here.

though you think there has been some colossal mistake,

inscrutably, incredibly, something in you knows

that this is precisely what you came here
so valiantly to endure:

this merciless nakedness
of heart and soul.

El Collie Kress

11/4/1947 - 4/17/2002

My mother, El, was 54 years old when she died by suicide.

Tom's Clothes

Written by Kimberly A. Starr

When Tom died, I took the easy way out when it came to his clothes. Within a few weeks of his death, my husband and I packed them all up in Space Bags and took them out to his dad’s house for storage. It was sort of “out of sight, out of mind.” That was just about six years ago.

Around two weeks ago, I decided I was ready to look through his shirts to have them made into a quilt. I texted his dad, and he agreed to bring all the clothes down to our house. When he arrived with them, he told me he was alright with me donating them because, “I have many things to help remind me of Tom.” He also mentioned that “Tom would approve of us donating the items.” I immediately broke down. The idea of donating his clothing had not even been on my radar even though it is a completely reasonable and logical thought. Tom’s dad left all the clothes and told me he was alright with whatever I decided. I am blessed to have a good relationship with him even though we divorced in 2006.

My anxiety was heightened, and I was tearful for a few days as I anticipated touching each of his items and having to decide what to include in the quilt and what to pass on to another medium-built teen.

Finally, yesterday I went through all the Space Bags and Tupperware tubs. There were clothes I hardly remember and others I expected to find and did not. I went through all of the cargo pants and sweatshirt pockets, hoping to find a new piece of his life but did not find anything as hoped. I did take one of his sweatshirts and wrapped the arms around me for a bit. I cried on and off, but I did get through it.

I kept about 25 pieces of clothing including t-shirts, shorts, and sweatshirts to be made into the quilt. I also pulled out a few items to be made into teddy bears for me, my daughter, and a few of Tom’s friends.

This morning, we drove 25 miles to a local charity thrift store and dropped off the bags, as I could not bear to donate it someplace local, and then see someone wearing one of his clothing items around town. I held it together while handing the bags to the attendant, but the tears started again when I returned to the car. My husband pulled away from the donation door, stopped the car, and held my hand until the storm of tears passed.

It was time. Even though it was painful, I feel like a burden has been lifted. And Tom’s dad is right, our family has many other reminders of our beautiful son.

© 2021, Kimberly A.Starr Thank you Kimberly, for being willing to share this very personal and poignant piece of writing with Lighting Up the Sky readers. For suicide loss survivors who choose to let go of some of the material possessions that belonged to the person we have lost, your words are a beautiful reminder that we are not letting go of the memories or the love. 💓

Suicide Prevention. Have the Conversations.

Love, Honor, and Compassion. A Suicide Loss Announcement Done Right

Tommy Bloom Raskin
12/30/1995 - 12/31/2020

'[Tommy] opposed all malicious gossip, 

stopping all such gossipers with a trademark Tommy line:

forgive me, but it’s hard to be a human.'

With suicide loss, making public announcements is often complicated by the stigma attached to suicide. As a suicide loss survivor and as a suicide attempt survivor, I have experienced my own shame around losses and survival. For a long time, I avoided and sidestepped questions. I didn't speak up about needing comfort, and I often pushed it away when it was offered.

Today, I see speaking up as an imperative part of healing. And more so, I refuse to let shame dictate my behavior.

A few days ago, Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin (and his wife Sarah) publicly announced the death of their beloved son, Tommy Bloom Raskin. I am sharing their announcement now. I feel the announcement was done right. It focuses on what is important: Tommy's amazing life, his accomplishments, their compassion for Tommy's struggles with mental illness, and finally - their great love for their son.

With the exception of adjusting sizing of text and removal of a few photos (for spacing reasons) the announcement below is unchanged from that which was posted on Congressman Raskin's website. I hope that in reading the announcement, you might grow in your compassion for survivors of loss, as well as those who have lost their life to suicide.

To Jamie Raskin and the rest of Tommy's friends and loved ones, I extend my heartfelt empathy and condolences. I know I speak not just myself, but for so many of our fellow survivors of suicide loss, when I say that we share your grief. We are deeply saddened that you have now joined our heartbroken club. Your son's life mattered. We know.

Statement of Congressman Jamie Raskin and Sarah Bloom Raskin on the Remarkable Life of Tommy Raskin

Rep. Jamie Raskin

3 days ago·9 min read

TAKOMA PARK, M.D. — Congressman Jamie Raskin and Sarah Bloom Raskin today released the following statement about their son Thomas (Tommy) Bloom Raskin:

“On January 30, 1995, Thomas Bloom Raskin was born to ecstatic parents who saw him enter the world like a blue-eyed cherub, a little angel. Tommy grew up as a strikingly beautiful curly-haired madcap boy beaming with laughter and charm, making mischief, kicking the soccer ball in the goal, acting out scenes from To Kill A Mockingbird with his little sister in his father’s constitutional law class, teaching other children the names of all the Justices on the Supreme Court, hugging strangers on the street, teaching our dogs foreign languages, running up and down the aisle on airplanes giving people high fives, playing jazz piano like a blues great from Bourbon Street, and at 12 writing a detailed brief to his mother explaining why he should not have to do a Bar Mitzvah and citing Due Process liberty interests (appeal rejected).

“Over the years he was enveloped in the love not only of his bedazzled and starstruck parents but of his remarkable and adoring sisters, Hannah the older and Tabitha the younger, a huge pack of cousins, including Jedd, Emily, Maggie, Zacky, Mariah, Phoebe and Lily, Boman and Daisy, and Emmet and spoiled rotten with hugs and kisses and philosophical nourishment from his grandparents Herb and Arlene Bloom, Marcus Raskin, Barbara Raskin, and later Lynn Raskin, the best aunts and uncles a mischievous ragamuffin could ask for, including Erika and Keith, Kenneth and Abby, Mina, Noah and Heather, Eden and Brandon, and Tammy and Gary, and a cast of secondary parents who wrapped him in adoration and wildly precocious conversation like Michael and Donene, Ann and Jimmy, Kate and Hal, Kathleen and Tom, Katharine and David, Judy, Reed and Julia, Dar and Michael, David and Melinda, Angela and Howard, Helen, Sheila, Mitchell, Will and Camille, Phyllis, Shammy,Khalid and Zina.

“With all this love infusing Tommy’s world and soul, girls quickly came to fancy this magical boy who always made time for the loneliest kids in class and frequently made up his own words to describe feelings and parts of toasters — and, to be clear, he took a strong liking to girls too, these omnipresent magical lovely girls he found who always had a profound beauty radiating from within. Tommy was raised on a fine Montgomery County Education, which took him through Takoma Park Elementary School, Pine Crest Elementary School, Eastern Middle School, and Montgomery Blair High School (with a frolicking detour to Ecole Active Bilingue Jeannine Manuel in Paris for one family sabbatical year where he learned French, tried to teach himself Japanese, and insisted on travel adventures through North Africa and the rest of Europe), but his irrepressible love of freedom and strong libertarian impulses made him a skeptic of all institutional bureaucracy and a daring outspoken defender of all outcasts and kids in trouble. Once when third-grade Tommy and his father saw a boy returning to school after a weeklong suspension and his Dad casually remarked, ‘it looks like they let finally let him out of jail,’ Tommy replied, ‘no, you mean they finally let him back into jail.’

“At Blair, Tommy’s adult persona began to take shape: he co-founded Bliss, a life-changing peer-to-peer tutoring program and spent hours tutoring fellow students in Math and English; made wonderful friends he lavished attention on; became Captain of the Forensics Club and a savagely logical and persuasive orator in the Debate and Extemporaneous Speech Club where he had to be constantly reminded by his teammates that the purpose of high school debate tournaments is to score points and not convince people of the truth or change the world. He was active in the Young Dems and recruited dozens to get involved in the 2012 Obama reelection effort. On Prom Night, he threw a dinner party for 24 fellow students, including classmates who had no date that evening, and they all went to prom together as a group. He hated cliques and social snobbery, never had a negative word for anyone but tyrants and despots, and opposed all malicious gossip, stopping all such gossipers with a trademark Tommy line — ‘forgive me, but it’s hard to be a human.’

“Above all, he began to follow his own piercing moral and intellectual insights looking for answers to problems of injustice, poverty and war. A Bar Mitzvah from Temple Sinai, he taught a Sunday School with Heather Levy for two years at Temple Emmanuel, often substituting his social-struggle analysis of the Exodus story for teachings on the Hebrew alphabet. He ordered and devoured books on the Civil War and Maryland’s history in it, World War II and resistance to Nazism, Jewish history, libertarianism, moral philosophy, the history of the Middle East conflict, peace movements, anything by Gar Alperovitz on the decision to drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and anything by Peter Singer on animal rights. He began to pen these extraordinary essays and articles that now add up to well over 100 as well as write plays and extremely long polemical poems, which he eagerly performed for audiences astounded by his precocious moral vision, utter authenticity of emotion, and beauty of expression.

“At Amherst College, he majored in history, helped lead the Amherst Political Union, intellectually discredited the egregious Dinesh D’Souza who turned to pathetic insults when Tommy destroyed his argument from the audience with a simple question (even before D’Souza was soon to be convicted of federal campaign finance crimes), won the Kellogg Prize, created and performed one-act plays with his social dorm mates, and wrote a compelling senior thesis on the intellectual history of the animal rights movement. Spending his summers voraciously reading and soaking up all the wisdom to be had at his eclectic self-procured internships at the CATO Institute with Doug Bandow, J Street, the Institute for Policy Studies, ARC of Montgomery, Compassion Over Killing, and for Professor Frank Couvares, Tommy became an anti-war activist, a badass autodidact moral philosopher and progressive humanist libertarian, and a passionate vegan who composed imperishable, knock-your-socks-off poetry linking systematic animal cruelty and exploitation to militarism and war culture. He recruited gently and lovingly — but supremely effectively — dozens and dozens of people, including his parents, to the practice of not eating animals, and it will be hard to find anyone his age who has turned more carnivores into vegans than him. (He also cheerfully opposed sectarian holier-than-thou sanctimoniousness among a handful of vegans he met and would say, ‘I’m working for a vegan world, not a vegan club.’) A prolific and exquisitely gifted writer, he came to publish essays and op-eds in the Nation, the Goodmen Project, Anti-War.Com and other outlets. After his Amherst graduation, Tommy went to the Friends Committee on National Legislation to work on stopping the war in Yemen and on Middle East policy, and spent a year publishing more remarkable essays and articles (soon to be available to you) and launching a book of political philosophy offering a sweeping animal rights critique of Locke, Mill and classical liberal social contract theory.

“In 2019 Tommy went to Harvard Law School. He lived up in the attic of the home of Michael Anderson and Donene Williams, his Dad’s beloved law school roommates, and made more remarkable friends. He studied constitutional law with Noah Feldman, criminal law with Carole Steiker, and property with Bruce Mann (Elizabeth Warren’s husband); he loved the systematic thought and debate dynamics of law school but reported it to be like half an education because the moral philosophy component was somehow left out. Rather than read endless lists of long cases, why not have students read clear comprehensive statements of what the law is and then talk about what the law should be? So while zealously promoting his newfound favorite game — Boggle — to rescue his classmates and himself from the stress and anxiety of law school, he also pushed them to engage with social problems and found a strong affinity group in the Effective Altruists. He spent last summer working quite brilliantly as a summer associate at Mercy for Animals and found a knack for actual lawyering.

“This fall Tommy not only took a full complement of his second-year law classes, including Disability Law with Michael Stein which he loved, but, at the suggestion of his beloved Professor Steicker, became a Teaching Assistant with Professor Michael Sandel in his ‘Justice’ Course at Harvard. As a teacher, Tommy devoted great time to teaching his section of the class — working on his astonishing lectures and jokes, and meeting endlessly with his dozen students on Zoom, finding what was precious in their work and teasing it out. He loved his students and they loved him back. Not content with giving half of his teaching salary away to save people with malaria by purchasing mosquito nets with global charities, when the semester was over and after his grades were in and the student evaluations were complete, he made individual donations in each of his students’ names to Oxfam, GiveDirectly and other groups targeting global hunger. When I asked him why he did this, he quoted something that he loved which Father Daniel Berrigan said about Dorothy Day: ‘she lived as though the truth were true.’ Tommy said: ‘I wanted them to see that the truth is true.’

“We have barely been able to scratch the surface here, but you have a sense of our son. Tommy Raskin had a perfect heart, a perfect soul, a riotously outrageous and relentless sense of humor, and a dazzling radiant mind. He began to be tortured later in his 20s by a blindingly painful and merciless ‘disease called depression,’ as Tabitha put it on Facebook over the weekend, a kind of relentless torture in the brain for him, and despite very fine doctors and a loving family and friendship network of hundreds who adored him beyond words and whom he adored too, the pain became overwhelming and unyielding and unbearable at last for our dear boy, this young man of surpassing promise to our broken world.

“On the last hellish brutal day of that godawful miserable year of 2020, when hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions of people all over the world died alone in bed in the darkness from an invisible killer disease ravaging their bodies and minds, we also lost our dear, dear, beloved son, Hannah and Tabitha’s beloved irreplaceable brother, a radiant light in this broken world.

“He left us this farewell note on New Year’s Eve day: ‘Please forgive me. My illness won today. Please look after each other, the animals, and the global poor for me. All my love, Tommy.’”

Click here to find the announcement on Congressman Raskin's Website.

Click here to find the Tommy Raskin Memorial Fund for People and Animals.

Allie Brosh Is My Hero

One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.

- Jack Kerouac

Writers like me, don't look for writers like me. We are everywhere. I am a small potato compared to many of the incredible writers who share their stories via blogs. 

Writers like me look for writers that are far more interesting than ourselves.  I want to read writers who are funny, expository, and forthright. It is a mix that is sometimes hard to accomplish. Often I'll sacrifice one thing in order to achieve the others. But, occasionally I run across someone who puts things into just the right words. 

Enter Allie Brosh. Allie is a New York Times best selling author whose renown arose from the personal essays and illustrations that she shared on her blog, Hyperbole and a Half. She voices a plethora of topics, but particularly poignant are the posts dedicated to depression and her own suicidality. 

Allie began writing for her blog in 2009, but in 2014 she stopped publicly sharing her writing. One reason for the break was that she was struggling with her own depression, and then her sister died by suicide. At the same time that Allie was trying to manage her own challenges with mental illness, she became a survivor of suicide loss. 

The pressure suicide loss survivors feel to 'move on' or to heal within a specific amount of time, is both unreasonable and unfair. But Allie Brosh was willing to set her financial success and fame aside. She waited until she was ready to step into the spotlight once again. 

Two of Allie's older posts, Adventures in Depression, and Depression Part 2, are among my favorites. Below, I will share Depression Part 2, because I particularly enjoyed that post. 

I hope Allie's writing makes you laugh. Even if it doesn't, it's worth the read. Much of what she describes is universal. [A few things stood out to me as particularly important. I highlighted those sentences using red text.] 

Laugh or not, I hope you take something from her post that leaves you understanding depression a little more. Or, if you personally experience depression, I hope this post leaves you feeling more understood.

 

Depression Part 2

Allie Brosh

I remember being endlessly entertained by the adventures of my toys. Some days they died repeated, violent deaths, other days they traveled to space or discussed my swim lessons and how I absolutely should be allowed in the deep end of the pool, especially since I was such a talented doggy-paddler.

I didn't understand why it was fun for me, it just was.

But as I grew older, it became harder and harder to access that expansive imaginary space that made my toys fun. I remember looking at them and feeling sort of frustrated and confused that things weren't the same.

I played out all the same story lines that had been fun before, but the meaning had disappeared. Horse's Big Space Adventure transformed into holding a plastic horse in the air, hoping it would somehow be enjoyable for me. Prehistoric Crazy-Bus Death Ride was just smashing a toy bus full of dinosaurs into the wall while feeling sort of bored and unfulfilled.  I could no longer connect to my toys in a way that allowed me to participate in the experience.

Depression feels almost exactly like that, except about everything.

At first, though, the invulnerability that accompanied the detachment was exhilarating. At least as exhilarating as something can be without involving real emotions.

The beginning of my depression had been nothing but feelings, so the emotional deadening that followed was a welcome relief.  I had always wanted to not give a fuck about anything. I viewed feelings as a weakness — annoying obstacles on my quest for total power over myself. And I finally didn't have to feel them anymore.

But my experiences slowly flattened and blended together until it became obvious that there's a huge difference between not giving a fuck and not being able to give a fuck. Cognitively, you might know that different things are happening to you, but they don't feel very different.

Which leads to horrible, soul-decaying boredom.

I tried to get out more, but most fun activities just left me existentially confused or frustrated with my inability to enjoy them.

Months oozed by, and I gradually came to accept that maybe enjoyment was not a thing I got to feel anymore. I didn't want anyone to know, though. I was still sort of uncomfortable about how bored and detached I felt around other people, and I was still holding out hope that the whole thing would spontaneously work itself out. As long as I could manage to not alienate anyone, everything might be okay!

However, I could no longer rely on genuine emotion to generate facial expressions, and when you have to spend every social interaction consciously manipulating your face into shapes that are only approximately the right ones, alienating people is inevitable.

Everyone noticed.

It's weird for people who still have feelings to be around depressed people. They try to help you have feelings again so things can go back to normal, and it's frustrating for them when that doesn't happen. From their perspective, it seems like there has got to be some untapped source of happiness within you that you've simply lost track of, and if you could just see how beautiful things are...

At first, I'd try to explain that it's not really negativity or sadness anymore, it's more just this detached, meaningless fog where you can't feel anything about anything — even the things you love, even fun things — and you're horribly bored and lonely, but since you've lost your ability to connect with any of the things that would normally make you feel less bored and lonely, you're stuck in the boring, lonely, meaningless void without anything to distract you from how boring, lonely, and meaningless it is.

But people want to help. So they try harder to make you feel hopeful and positive about the situation. You explain it again, hoping they'll try a less hope-centric approach, but re-explaining your total inability to experience joy inevitably sounds kind of negative; like maybe you WANT to be depressed. The positivity starts coming out in a spray — a giant, desperate happiness sprinkler pointed directly at your face. And it keeps going like that until you're having this weird argument where you're trying to convince the person that you are far too hopeless for hope just so they'll give up on their optimism crusade and let you go back to feeling bored and lonely by yourself.

And that's the most frustrating thing about depression. It isn't always something you can fight back against with hope. It isn't even something — it's nothing. And you can't combat nothing. You can't fill it up. You can't cover it. It's just there, pulling the meaning out of everything. That being the case, all the hopeful, proactive solutions start to sound completely insane in contrast to the scope of the problem.

It would be like having a bunch of dead fish, but no one around you will acknowledge that the fish are dead. Instead, they offer to help you look for the fish or try to help you figure out why they disappeared.

The problem might not even have a solution. But you aren't necessarily looking for solutions. You're maybe just looking for someone to say "sorry about how dead your fish are" or "wow, those are super dead. I still like you, though."

I started spending more time alone.

Perhaps it was because I lacked the emotional depth necessary to panic, or maybe my predicament didn't feel dramatic enough to make me suspicious, but I somehow managed to convince myself that everything was still under my control right up until I noticed myself wishing that nothing loved me so I wouldn't feel obligated to keep existing.

It's a strange moment when you realize that you don't want to be alive anymore. If I had feelings, I'm sure I would have felt surprised. I have spent the vast majority of my life actively attempting to survive. Ever since my most distant single-celled ancestor squiggled into existence, there has been an unbroken chain of things that wanted to stick around.

Yet there I was, casually wishing that I could stop existing in the same way you'd want to leave an empty room or mute an unbearably repetitive noise.

That wasn't the worst part, though. The worst part was deciding to keep going.

When I say that deciding to not kill myself was the worst part, I should clarify that I don't mean it in a retrospective sense. From where I am now, it seems like a solid enough decision. But at the time, it felt like I had been dragging myself through the most miserable, endless wasteland, and — far in the distance — I had seen the promising glimmer of a slightly less miserable wasteland. And for just a moment, I thought maybe I'd be able to stop and rest. But as soon as I arrived at the border of the less miserable wasteland, I found out that I'd have to turn around and walk back the other way.

Soon afterward, I discovered that there's no tactful or comfortable way to inform other people that you might be suicidal. And there's definitely no way to ask for help casually.

I didn't want it to be a big deal. However, it's an alarming subject. Trying to be nonchalant about it just makes it weird for everyone.

I was also extremely ill-prepared for the position of comforting people. The things that seemed reassuring at the time weren't necessarily comforting for others.

I had so very few feelings, and everyone else had so many, and it felt like they were having all of them in front of me at once. I didn't really know what to do, so I agreed to see a doctor so that everyone would stop having all of their feelings at me.

The next few weeks were a haze of talking to relentlessly hopeful people about my feelings that didn't exist so I could be prescribed medication that might help me have them again.

And every direction was bullshit for a really long time, especially up. The absurdity of working so hard to continue doing something you don't like can be overwhelming. And the longer it takes to feel different, the more it starts to seem like everything might actually be hopeless bullshit.

My feelings did start to return eventually. But not all of them came back, and they didn't arrive symmetrically.

I had not been able to care for a very long time, and when I finally started being able to care about things again, I HATED them. But hatred is technically a feeling, and my brain latched onto it like a child learning a new word.

Hating everything made all the positivity and hope feel even more unpalatable. The syrupy, over-simplified optimism started to feel almost offensive.

Thankfully, I rediscovered crying just before I got sick of hating things.  I call this emotion "crying" and not "sadness" because that's all it really was. Just crying for the sake of crying. My brain had partially learned how to be sad again, but it took the feeling out for a joy ride before it had learned how to use the brakes or steer.

At some point during this phase, I was crying on the kitchen floor for no reason. As was common practice during bouts of floor-crying, I was staring straight ahead at nothing in particular and feeling sort of weird about myself. Then, through the film of tears and nothingness, I spotted a tiny, shriveled piece of corn under the refrigerator.

I don't claim to know why this happened, but when I saw the piece of corn, something snapped. And then that thing twisted through a few permutations of logic that I don't understand, and produced the most confusing bout of uncontrollable, debilitating laughter that I have ever experienced.

I had absolutely no idea what was going on.

My brain had apparently been storing every unfelt scrap of happiness from the last nineteen months, and it had impulsively decided to unleash all of it at once in what would appear to be an act of vengeance.

That piece of corn is the funniest thing I have ever seen, and I cannot explain to anyone why it's funny. I don't even know why. If someone ever asks me "what was the exact moment where things started to feel slightly less shitty?" instead of telling a nice, heartwarming story about the support of the people who loved and believed in me, I'm going to have to tell them about the piece of corn. And then I'm going to have to try to explain that no, really, it was funny. Because, see, the way the corn was sitting on the floor... it was so alone... and it was just sitting there! And no matter how I explain it, I'll get the same, confused look. So maybe I'll try to show them the piece of corn - to see if they get it. They won't. Things will get even weirder.

Anyway, I wanted to end this on a hopeful, positive note, but, seeing as how my sense of hope and positivity is still shrouded in a thick layer of feeling like hope and positivity are bullshit, I'll just say this: Nobody can guarantee that it's going to be okay, but — and I don't know if this will be comforting to anyone else — the possibility exists that there's a piece of corn on a floor somewhere that will make you just as confused about why you are laughing as you have ever been about why you are depressed. 

And even if everything still seems like hopeless bullshit, maybe it's just pointless bullshit or weird bullshit or possibly not even bullshit.

I don't know. 

But when you're concerned that the miserable, boring wasteland in front of you might stretch all the way into forever, not knowing feels strangely hope-like. 

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*All of the illustrations (and accompanying words) in Depression Part 2 are copyrighted by Allie Brosh. Please don't copy or share without attribution.