Reality Bites...and that's okay!

The world, myself included, was shocked by Robin Williams' suicide. News reports revealed he had privately struggled with depression and the early stages of Parkinson's disease.  What he chose to show the public, of course, was quite different. To the public he was a comedian, an actor, and a celebrity. How could this funny man have such a drastically different private life we found ourselves asking in the aftermath of Williams' death.

I have thought about Williams' suicide a lot since I first heard about it.  I believe it is indicative of a larger problem in society.  Specifically, what we choose to reflect outwardly often contradicts our internal selves. Think about it. How many times does anyone answer the question,"How are you doing? " with an honest answer? How many times do we project to others something that is far from the truth? The problem, then, is that there is a real tendency to start to think everyone has it better or that there is something shameful about not always having your shit together. We create cognitive dissonance within ourselves by projecting an image instead of our authentic selves. This in itself can crush one's soul. It becomes even more dangerous when a person fails to recognize that others are doing the same thing because in that instance the person begins to think, incorrectly, that she is the only one who is faking and that there is something wrong with her.

As someone who has stared into the dark abyss of soul crushing depression, it is not helpful to feel like it has to be hid from the world. Suck it up. Life isn't so bad. You have so much to be thankful for. These comments are not helpful to someone with clinical depression and trivialize the absolute blackness that this mental illness cloaks the soul with. It also sends the subtle message that others don't want to truly hear about it which only serves to reinforce depression's dark wingmen--isolation and rejection. Telling someone to count their blessings is like telling a blind starving man without a fishing pole to be happy there are millions of fish in the ocean. It does little to abate the hopelessness because a person with depression, much like a blind man who is starving, can't even see the fish in the ocean, much less see how he can catch some even if there are fish out there. What inevitably happens, though, is that people get irritated and annoyed with a depressed person because we don't want authenticity. Deep down, we want to maintain the illusion that we are all happy because the hard truth is too scary to face--the truth that many of our relationships are built on a foundation of sand.  Eventually this sick disease results in a self-fulfilling prophecy as the depressed person does find herself isolated and alone.

I dream of a world where authenticity will prevail over image; where truth will reign over self-created falsehoods; where reality is lauded over fiction even if it's fucking painful; and where faults are valued over perfection because mistakes and failures are nothing to be ashamed of. I dream of a world where we will stop putting up walls of illusion around us because if we keep doing so we will one day wake up to realize we have created our own prisons. Some of us, like perhaps Robin Williams, have already realized this. I dream of a world where it is okay to be depressed if that is our genuine state of mind and that we don't have to hide behind a smile simply because others can't be bothered with the truth. Reality may be stranger than fiction and it sure is a helluva lot more raw, too. But I guess in my weird, often unpopular world, I would prefer to know a few people for who they really are than to know millions of people for what they are not.