Robbin Williams is unavoidable today, as are the ideas of depression and suicide. Today I am thinking: The often-recommended social practice of withdrawing from drug users, folks with mental illness, or just marginal people generally, is a great way of making things worse. Yes, personal physical safety is always important. Emotional safety --- minding ones triggers and so forth --- is important also, especially for the many of us in some form of recovery or another. But it is not *as* important --- especially smaller emotional risks are, I think, often avoided at the expense of the opportunity they conceal. Thus if I have a friend -- even a casual friend -- in need, and I can *at all* spare the energy without sustaining lasting damage to my own ability to regulate mood, my current position is to help, even when doing so feels a bit edgy --- when theres talk of self-harm, say, or even suicide. Mostly this just means listening and nodding and not jumping in with unhelpful solutions too soon in the conversation (or at all.) But sometimes, more. Once upon a time there was a singularly terrible year wherein six people with whom I was close (friends, partners, and exes) either made serious attempts or serious threats on their own lives. I personally physically intervened in three cases and was doing emotional support on a couple others. And then a few months later I went down -- I found myself cutting up myself with a razor in the bathroom at work, after my supervisor (a well-meaning dudely-dude from Australia) tried to pep-talk me with a line that ended which is why Im riding you harder than Seabiscuit. He didnt mean it the way it came across; but, as they say, there was a lot going on. I left that day and never returned; the smoldering tires of my PTSD, lit long ago, burst into open flame, and I spent three months on a mattress beside a pile of garbage that I couldnt even work the courage to take out to the curb. It was disastrous. But. Several of the people that Id helped earlier were there for me. Not everyone --- not everyone could. But enough. Heres the thing. Yes, helping them with their shit first definitely weakened me. Yes, sometimes, some of that shit was embellished. And yes, this means there was a fraction of wasted energy -- that coefficient of zero-sum turpitude that the wielders of Codependency Theory seize on as proof that humans are intrinsically happier when their social relations are loose and interchangeable. But Im not convinced that there wouldnt have been fewer beating hearts today if I hadnt flushed that fist-sized bag of beige heroin, intercepted that walk to the bridge, stood between her and the waves. And I probably wouldnt be here if several someones hadnt helped me back into the habit of living. Being there may have cost me dearly, but it was so worth it. Even the ones I have drifted away from. Especially the ones I dont speak to anymore. Stars are cherished not for their presence, but for their distance, and that they go on twinkling long after we have ceased to look for them.
Posted on: Wed, 13 Aug 2014 05:54:46 +0000
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