Let it be known that I was slowly going crazy. Like Gnarls Barkley sings, "I've tried everything but suicide... but it's crossed my mind". There are many types of crazy. Depression was my personal vice, and between ages thirteen and sixteen, I considered suicide. Or rather, I realized it was possible for me to take my own life in one of my manic states. I didn't want to, but sometimes I would much rather be unconscious than to suffer through the pains of a day (whatever they were as an 8th grader (unwell by matchbox 20)). My junior year I had a sobering realization. A trifecta of in-depth study of evolution in my biology class, the death of a senior at my school on the highway that ran right by my house, and the reading of highly philosophical papers in my AP English class, made something horrifically apparent. One day I would die. The thought of dying was something so awfully abstract that it taxed me heavily. I no longer paid attention in class, or did homework, or even laughed at jokes.
No where was my depression more apparent than in my biology class. I loved that class, in part due to an amazing teacher. His cynicism of everyday life was rather refreshing, for some reason. His life story was also amazing but sobering. Originally planning to go to Med School, he wound up as a tutor, and eventually a high school teacher. He had once been married, as he explained during the first week of school, with a pet dog, but now he was single with two ferrets (I thought that was a good trade-off). He listened to awesome music, I'm pretty sure he occasionally did marijuana, and above all else, he was a really good teacher.
But my love for the teacher could in no way cancel my brain wanting to fail when it had to consider evolution. I guess its not something you really think about, but by believing in evoltion, which I did, you kind of had to give up believing in an afterlife. True I never really thought about these things, which in a way protected me. I had occasionally wound up at a question that could not be answered when I was younger, and I had spent, at most, a few days, pondering life after death. These episodes had been traumatic enough, but now I found myself not being able to escape the horror of the thoughts circling my own mortality.
One day in class, I guess I was less reactive than usual. I enjoyed joking around, since joking, in my eyes, was the only way to escape my thoughts. But I had no sarcasm to offer on this day. Mr. Daly pulled me up to the front of class while everyone was working on a lab and asked me if I was alright. I answered weakly, and I couldn't even work up the nerve to look him in the eyes. Life was getting impossible for me. What's the point of existing, if eventually you will not at all? The answer to this was that life means nothing, and in turn, it really mattered not what at all I did because in a million years, no one would remember me anyway. I viewed everything in my life, every object, every person, as the random action of a random universe. Nothing mattered, and therefore, my interactions with such objects shouldn't have mattered. I stopped enjoying other people's company, and as a result I stopped talking with people almost entirely.
Mr. Daly made me miss out on my lunch to talk with him right after class. I didn't know how I was going to vocalize the fact that death was depressing me, because it seems that everyone knows its coming, yet no one suffers from this knowledge. Mr. Daly was an atheist, and I pondered if he had to deal with this. His view on life was definitely not nihilistic, which was refreshing. But at the depths of my death driven depression I wasn't sure if I could ever get out alive.
At his desk he asked me if he should call my parents, and I couldn't be decisive, because nothing mattered to me. Unable to get simple answers out of me, he dragged me into a closed room and sat me down at a table. That entire day I had been moving slowly. I have a theory that the lack of dopamine found in people with depression also slows down their movements. I looked down at the cheap wooden desk, I rotated slowly in my chair, and my mind began to race. What should I say? I'm not a very eloquent person, and I suddenly found myself, for the first time, finding someone I could actually talk to.
The burden of having to keep secrets to yourself was unbearable. They weren't secrets so much as blasphemous revelations. Death is such a thing. I would gladly tell someone, I would love to talk it out with someone, if only to talk about the things I couldn't escape from. But I couldn't let that burden someone else. I imagined the pain I had felt, the months of mental turmoil. To cause that to someone else would have been immoral.
For the first time in days I finally looked someone in the eyes, and I talked, and I talked, and then I started to cry. "I don't understand why I'm so sad, I just am. I haven't been happy in the last two months".
He asked me if I ever felt like dying. It was such a vague question really. I shook my head, but I guess not convincingly. He began to tell me the story of the girl that had committed suicide at our school. I remember the week it happened. I had been a sophomore. It had been last year. I didn't know her, and no one I knew seemed to know her. But it had been serious, and that, as well as the suicide of an 8th grader at one of the feeder schools, had motivated people to start a club, called Erika's Lighthouse, to try and educate people about mental depression. Mr. Daly was the teacher in charge of the group, and the high schooler who had killed herself had been in his class. I managed to say, "I'm sorry", several times during the story, because even though my own emotions had pretty much vacated my head, I still felt painfully potent empathy of people around me. I told him I wouldn't commit suicide, if only to spare him from watching two of his students take their own lives, but I guess that wasn't a convincing enough argument. I asked him not to tell my parents, because I managed to appear happy at home. But he called them anyway without my knowledge.
I could look people straight in the eyes, see their smiling faces, and start to cry. "Do you realize, someday, your friends, will die? (The Flaming Lips, Mr. Daly's favorite band). Immortality has been a battle for humans ever since the realization that once someone stops breathing they don't come back. Even the two-thirds god Gilgamesh had to battle this weighty subject, and his sole victory is fame, since his story is still read, 3,000 years later, by bitter school students. There is no way to win this battle. You can't just decide to live forever. Only incredibly simplistic things will last. Like starfish. They can live forever. But they are also hydrovascularly powered. My only solution was to NOT think about it. I devised a clever system. Every time I thought about death, I would snap a scrunchi against my wrist. Why think about death and cry when I could instead think about the oddities and peculiarities of life? Months of nihilistic thought had ravaged my mind, leaving me painfully devoid of any intellectual life. Junior year was my year of death. The following summer I was reborn. Like a baby I was amazed by everything and the simple beauty of life. Colors, shapes, human interactions, vocal intonations, telephones, rolley shoes-- everything was like a miracle to me.
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