After a long absence, a friend and former colleague of mine appeared back online this morning. It had been years since we worked together and almost that long since we actually saw each other in person, but our friendship has evolved into a few instant messages a day for the last five years. I know it doesn’t sound like much of a friendship by traditional definitions, but life is busy and time is tight. She has kids and a job and I have a new business and sometimes what you want to happen and what does happen are light years apart. Despite physical separation, we talked about our lives, our jobs, our marriages, our families, and our friends, and I can assure you that I care about this person very much and wish only for her happiness.
She popped online to tell me that she had just gotten out of the hospital after being committed for, well, let’s call it a suicide attempt. Regardless of the what and the why and the how, she decided a few weeks ago that her next best option was to take a full bottle of Valium and go to sleep for a few days, and maybe more. Thankfully, her husband found her and an ambulance was summoned and she was given the medical attention she needed. The longer term treatment to address the underlying issues will surely take time, but I am hopeful (foolishly, perhaps, in light of what other people I know have experienced) that this can be a turning point in her life. In the face of her complete hopelessness, I am touched by a sliver of hope.
One of the first things I thought when she told me was “is everyone I know messed up?” I recognized, almost immediately, that it was an incredibly selfish thought. I was taking something profound and devastating in this woman’s, this friend’s, life and turning it around and making it about myself. Perhaps that is a natural reaction, perhaps not. What I do know is that the answer to that initial question is yes. And so am I.
We are, all of us, messed up. Life is a messy and chaotic and uncertain and ever-changing mixture of joy and pain and regret and hope and anxiety. I have yet to know a person (and by know, I mean really know, not just the sort of know that happens with neighbors or coworkers when discussions are limited to the Bears or the economy) that has always handled it with constant grace and dignity. We create this image of ourselves as we want the world to see us, and, in presenting that image, we deny them the right to really and truly know us. Once that image is in place, we do all that is possible to enforce it, burying our true experiences under a thin veneer of nods and smiles and professionalism.
In the wake of the news that I got this morning, the part that bothers me the most is that even though I know about this imaging problem, I still carry it along. To most people that I know, I am a fairly well-balanced person. I work too hard and sleep too little, perhaps, but that’s about it. For years, the only really personal thing that most people knew about me is that I don’t drink, and the only reason they knew that is because I never let anyone buy me a beer at a company party. That’s it. I left the reasoning for that up to their own imaginations, and I occasionally enjoyed hearing their fanciful guesses as to why that was the case (there was one guess that had me being homeless, another involved someone being killed - neither were true).
While I relished my secretive past with the “I know something you don’t know” glee of a parent on Christmas Eve, in retrospect I was denying my own experience. And in light of this morning’s news, that very experience might have been of use to others who were or who are struggling (and faltering) behind the same crumbling facade as my friend.
Even now as I finish this post, and in full knowledge of the glaring hypocrisy of it all, I am reluctant to share that experience with you. Perhaps it is this forum. Perhaps it is some lingering shame. Or, perhaps, it is that I have the same reluctance to be seen as damaged or bent as everyone else does.
What I will say to any of the people in my life that are reading this and who find themselves struggling is that I have been there, I know how you are feeling, I know what it feels and smells and tastes like. If you are ever looking for someone to talk to at 3am on a Tuesday, I’m probably awake.
