Mental Health Is Hard to Talk About

And I want to talk about it anyway.

Trigger warning: this essay does mention suicide. If you or anyone you know is in need of confidential emotional support, please call The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255 in the US.

A long time ago, I wrote a story. It’s about a young man who goes home for the holidays and gets a call from an old friend, telling him that the coffee shop where their band used to play was closing down. “They’re tearing down our childhood,” his friend says. “They’re turning it into a fucking Starbucks.” The story is about what happens when the first-person narrator goes to the farewell party for the coffee shop, where his friend yearns for them to play some of their long-forgotten songs together. But what it’s really about—the tension that rides underneath the entire narrative for this character—is depression.

At one point, the narrator reveals just how difficult things had gotten for him: 

The year before, winter’s darkness seemed to come earlier than usual in New England. The sky would already be draining of its color by four in the afternoon. That was the time of day I would bike to work. As I pedaled down Mass Ave into Harvard Square, I began to imagine how easy it would be to jerk the handlebars hard to the left, slanting all the way across the right lane and headlong into the path of the inbound Number 1 bus. Every time I got to a certain stretch of the road, past The Plough and Stars where the lanes narrowed and the skinny apartment buildings got taller and appeared to tilt over the sidewalks, I thought of this and my arms would shake and I would see the details of my impending death—a wide-eyed bus driver, a quick spray of blood, a tangle of iron—ghosting out ahead of me. 

There’s a reason the details are so vivid, and it’s not because I’m an extremely imaginative fiction writer. It’s because I was that character, and in some ways, I still am. 

I’ve lived with anxiety and depression for most of my adult life. It’s hard to admit, but it’s true: I’ve even gone so far as to wonder what it would be like to end my life. That’s a scary thing to reckon with. And in so many ways, it makes no sense. I have a wonderful life. My wife is brilliant and beautiful, as are our two daughters. We’re all healthy. We live very comfortably, on account of my wife being extremely skilled and capable at her job. So why is it that I go through these phases? Where I have so many thoughts running through my head it feels like there’s a dozen different voices in there screaming at full volume. And I would do just about anything to simply make them stop.

It’s tempting to make a joke here, about toddlers. About the sound and the fury of two children under 6. But I suppose that’s because I feel pretty exposed right now, as though I’m somehow opening up my skin and showing you the ugly insides. 

I’ve always had a busy mind, and while I’ve tried various meditation and mindfulness practices to calm it down, the truth is, that busy mind often works for me. Clearly, as evidenced by the very name of this newsletter, I like ideas. I’m curious. I like thinking. But sometimes, when my brain gets going on a thought, it just goes and goes. It’s like a hamster on a wheel. Sometimes it hustles so hard, my face goes on screen saver. My younger daughter might be asking me help her put her shoes on, and yet I’m so lost in my head that she has to make the request two or three times before I even hear her. 

Anxiety is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome.” And yet haven’t we all been feeling that this past year? Hasn’t Covid given society a sort of collective anxiety, dropping a fog of uncertainty on all of us that’s only just now starting to lift in some parts of the world? I suppose I’m projecting to a degree, and I want to tread lightly here, because again, I am safe. I have remained healthy, during a time when 3.43 million people have died worldwide from this virus. A lot of people have it a lot worse off than me. We all have our problems, our losses, our moments big and small that we’re never going to get back. 

I don’t want to complain, and that’s another place where anxiety gets unwieldly; it often makes me ashamed, like I shouldn’t be feeling this way. Who the hell am I to feel this way? Is it some sort of luxury I have, to even be able to be this open and vulnerable about it? Is it partially because of the color of my skin that I can show this perceived weakness? Is it also because I’m not in the work force right now, because I made the choice to be what most people refer to as a stay-at-home dad, and therefore I don’t have to worry about being flagged as some sort of mental health risk? Is that even a thing? The questions come fast and scattered, and these are just the easy ones, the ones I’m comfortable sharing. I don’t really want to get into everything that enters my mind when anxiety turns the corner into depression and really shows its fangs. 

I will say that it’s an awful feeling. There’s a hopelessness. Thick clouds, even on sunny days. And while it manifests in different ways for different people, for me, depression can be so overwhelming that it’s easy to feel like nobody understands and nobody ever will understand. That’s not true. There are a lot of people who struggle with depression. At last count by the World Health Organization, in 2017, 264 million people, or over 3% of the global population, reported having depression. (It’s important to note that many mental health disorders are never reported, especially in developing countries or in communities where there is significant stigma associated with such illness). I can’t even fathom all of those individual stories. All those people hurting in different ways.  

A few months ago, I was reading David Chang’s memoir, Eat A Peach. I’m a big fan of Chang, having eaten at the original Momofuku over a decade ago in NYC, and being so blown away by the pork buns and the tuna tartare and the overall vibe of the place that thereafter I went seeking out all the cooking and cultural instruction he offered up. I followed him across Mind of a Chef and Ugly Delicious. Eat A Peach is phenomenal; it’s incisive, funny, and filled with insights about Chang’s struggles, both those that feel universal, and also those that are uniquely his and born of his particular upbringing as the son of Korean immigrants. Relatively early in the memoir, he lets it slip, almost casually, what he was going through before he opened that first restaurant. “I wanted to die,” he writes. “I would ride my Gary Fisher bike all over Manhattan, weaving in and out of traffic and blowing through stoplights as if I were the only person on the street.” 

That line stopped me cold. I had been going through a really rough patch, feeling down in more ways than I can even begin to detail, and suddenly I was back on that bike again, barreling down Mass Ave, wondering if I still wanted to do like Chang had wanted to do, and “make it look like an accident.” 

A day later, I told my wife what I was going through. The day after that, I made an appointment with a therapist. 

There is no end to the story. There is me working on it. There are great moments and there are extremely hard moments. There is the gap between what I logically know and what I feel inside; sometimes I can use the tools I’ve learned in therapy to traverse it, and sometimes I cannot. 

I do know this: I am not alone. I was texting with a friend the other night I was surprised to find out that he too had gone through his own struggles with anxiety and depression. And then another friend shared about her struggles a few days later. 

It’s hard to talk about. If you’ve gone through—or are going through—anything akin to these struggles, please know that you too are not alone. And if you’re a friend or family member to anyone who might be going through a hard time, I know it can be hard for you too. You might not know if and when you want to reach out to them. Even if you do reach out, they may not be in the mental space where they can talk about it. Or the physical space. They may at that moment have two kids hanging off of them. They may be in the thick of some other crucial job that needs to get done.

But they may also just really need to know that you’re there.  

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