Today I'm just scrolling through the Internet and I see that Robin Williams has died.
He was 63, suffering from depression, it looks like a suicide. Them's the facts.
There's this one quote, that I wouldn't necessarily apply to everyone who suffers from depression, because it's not true for everyone. It's not even true for me.
"The loneliest people are the kindest, the saddest people smile the brightest, the most damaged people are the wisest. All because they do not wish to see anyone suffer the way they do." -Anonymous
Robin Williams was funny. He was the Genie, he was the dude in Flubber whose name I don't remember because my experience in watching Flubber was to see the funny green blobs dancing around on the basketball court. He was Peter Pan. He was John Keating. He was funny and real and he was always smiling or joking or laughing. He was funny in real life and in front of the camera.
And yet he suffered from depression.
A lot of people don't understand depression. A lot of people believe it is just feeling sad all the time. There's plenty of sadness, believe me- but there's more, and also less. It's lethargy. It's nothingness. I don't feel the spirit, but I also don't feel tempted to do anything bad. I just kind of exist. And when you go on for long enough, just existing, it begins to get awfully dull, and you wish, maybe a little bit, that you could stop existing because just existing is painfully boring and because you can feel a sharp edge of hurt under the nothing.
And if you have depression, you know this. You know that it sucks. You know that it is a daily effort to get out of bed, to drag yourself to work or school or to do anything you need to do. You want to be with people, but you also find them mildly irritating, like glasses that won't stay clean or summer allergies. You want to be alone, but the silence can be very loud. You want to sleep, but when you want to sleep your mind buzzes with things you could be doing, things you should have done, things you regret, things you fear. When you want to be awake, your brain is dead and foggy and you just have to sleep.
It is a fight. I take a very small amount of medication each day. I probably need more, because I still have days that feel like endless fog. I also take anxiety medication, which relaxes the strung-up bits out so that I don't worry about them and I can focus on the things I need to do, like eating breakfast and going to class and remembering to shower at least every two days.
It is a fight, and it's not a fun one, like the rumble in The Outsiders. It's not like Super Mario Brothers Brawl or Melee. There's no snazzy dancing, like West Side Story. The only way I can think of to explain it, without offending veterans by comparing it to the trench warfare of World War One, is to tell you to imagine a Zelda game. I always think of Oracle of Seasons when I think of this analogy, as it's the first Zelda game my brother ever owned and I was super into it, I thought it was just the coolest thing ever.
So imagine a Zelda game. Link walks into a dungeon and discovers one Like-Like in the first room. For unexperienced video gamers, a Like-Like looks like a fancy, milky-pink Jell-O mold that has been made by filling two Bundt cake pans with Jello and stacking them on top of one another. When they've set, imagine them becoming very vaguely sentient, sentient enough to recognize that human (or half-elven) flesh is tasty, and that wood is also tasty, because Like-Likes eat your wooden shield. It's very annoying.
Link, or you as you are playing said video game, kills the Like-Like and moves on. No rupees, no hearts.
Next room, there are two Like-Likes. In the next room there are four, and then there are eight, and then there are sixteen, and then there are thirty-two. Soon you are deep into the dungeon, surrounded by Like-Likes. Your health is getting pretty low and your shield was eaten a long, long time ago. You get a heart every now and then, but not nearly often enough. Just enough to keep you from dying. The video game makes that incredibly annoying beeping sound to remind you that you need more health.
You start thinking, "Hey, I should have met a mini-boss before now. And where are all the fun puzzles? Where are my treasure chests? What's the dungeon item going to be? Do I get any keys? And where, for the love of Zelda, is the map?"
There is no mini-boss. There is no boss. There are no puzzles, no treasure chests, no dungeon items, no keys. And especially no map. You are on some eternal grid-like dungeon map pattern, and you have just enough health to stay alive but not nearly enough to keep you healthy or to let you shoot laser beams out of your sword. It's just endless rooms of Like-Likes, who sometimes skitter towards you with malevolent intent but who sometimes just wander sheepishly around with nothing to do or say, just Jell-O-ing around as they have always done. Not really threatening, not that hard to deal with individually. There's just a lot of them.
And then, you know, if you decide that you want to turn around and leave this dungeon, some awful, awful person has taken the save point out of your game and has hacked into the code so that you are trapped in the dungeon of ever-multiplying Jell-O monsters forever.
You have to keep going. If you don't keep going, you'll die. And after room after room of swinging your trusty wooden sword into Jell-O monsters, getting one heart for maybe every fifteen you kill... it gets dreadfully boring. Just the sword button, over and over. One thumb on the D-pad. Move around, kill the Like-Likes. Nothing else. No Roc's feather, no boomerang, no arrows, no magic, no seeds, nothing.
Suddenly dying, in the video game, doesn't look like quite so bad a thing anymore, you know? At least there will be no Jell-O monsters if you die. Your hand will not have carpal tunnel. You can take a break to go to the bathroom, you can eat some food, you can do your laundry. You know, productive stuff.
Robin Williams and I are both Link, in our own ways. He's got a cool sword that probably has "I'm not that kind of lawyer" or "Jafar, Jafar, he's our man; if he can't do it, GREAT!" written on it. My sword is also cool, and it probably has a Pokeball on the hilt. And my shield looks like a dictionary. Yeah.
But we are both stuck in this Zelda-esque dungeon, surrounded by millions of milky pink Jell-O monsters, and we can't get out.
Robin Williams fought, and he lost. I don't mean to make light of his experiences by comparing them to video games. I'm just making a terrible metaphor to try and make sense of it for myself. Because Robin Williams died, and he probably committed suicide because of his depression, and if I haven't made it abundantly clear in this blog, I have had suicidal thoughts. I would really like to not commit suicide, in general. But there are some days where it's just like, "Well, I don't want to die, you know. I just want to stop living, right?" And for a long time I thought I might even do it, you know. It wouldn't have been very hard. It would cost about fifteen dollars for me to kill myself, fifteen dollars being the cost of a bottle of a hundred pills of ibuprofen. It would be a lot harder to obtain a handgun than it would be to down a bottle of ibuprofen, you know? (Maybe not in America.)
I'm sorry. That was morbid. But my point is, I'm still fighting. And Robin Williams was fighting, and there are a lot of people I know who fight, who struggle to keep going because some days it doesn't feel worth it to slay the milky pink Jell-O monsters anymore. It would be easier to let them eat our shields and lay down quietly and die. It would be so easy. In many ways, depression is when dying becomes easier than living. I'm not afraid to die. I lost that fear over this past year. I'm afraid of being alone, and I'm afraid of being unloved, for sure. But I'm not afraid to die, because there are still times when I think I might welcome it.
Robin Williams was 63 when he died. That is sixty-three whole years of life, sixty-three years of work and suffering and pain, and a few bright spots of joy here and there. The saddest people smile the brightest, remember? Robin Williams had a very bright smile. He was so brave, for so long, and I only hope that I can continue to be that brave. I'm 21. I am exactly one-third of his age. If I live until sixty-three without giving in to the Jell-O monsters, then I will pat myself heartily on the back, and maybe buy a shot glass and fill it with root beer or something and take root beer shots. You know, something like that.
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