(TW: suicide)
Some days you find you’re the right place, at the right time, with the right self. Yesterday we did “to be or not to be” in class, and it was one of those days where everything comes together and make sense and flows. Amazing. Twenty-five people trying to understand something hard, keyed to each other, arguing with each other, hearing each other. Our essential conclusion: the only thing that saves us from the fear of death, the thing that makes life worth living, that gives one nobility of mind, is art.
A student came up afterward, when the class had emptied out. She’d been gone all the previous week, and showed me a doctor’s note. “I was in the hospital,” she said. “I guess I just got really dehydrated and needed IVs and stuff.” She showed me the IV bruises on her arms, poor thing. Now that we were alone she said, “Look, I didn’t want to say this while everyone was around, but I was actually hospitalized because I tried to kill myself by overdosing on Vicodin.”
Shit. “If I’d known that,” I said, “I probably wouldn’t have done this particular soliloquy.” “No!” she said. “No! This is *exactly* what I needed to hear today. I needed Shakespeare today. It really made things clearer. It’s really reassuring, it encourages me.”
We spoke for a while. I told her my own experience, which was so much the same, from the Vicodin to the psych ward. (“I mean, seriously,” I said. “The absolute worst place to be when you’re depressed is a fucking psych ward, am I right?”) She left encouraged, I think, with my cell number and the knowledge that someone could hear her without sentimentalizing, moralizing, or being afraid. I left with the knowledge that the real work is what makes you more real, and that was the real work. Now everything glitters with gratitude, and there is nothing can happen so bad that thinking can’t make it good.
When things like this happen, I wonder sometimes if they happen because someone needed them.
Most of us struggle—some only occasionally, some on a daily or even hourly basis—with wondering why we are here. What is our purpose? What can we possibly have brought to the world that validates us and makes our existence worthwhile? Who can possibly need us?
It’s this. Yesterday, Prof and the students in that room might just have saved a life. Most of them will never even know. I saved a life once, all unthinking, just reached out and jerked a girl back because a car was coming around the corner too fast. I barely even moved her a foot, but that foot was where the car finished screeching to a halt.
You may’ve saved a life. You may not even know it; in fact, chances are that you don’t. Maybe it was someone you steadied when they tripped, or that time you moved something heavy because it looked like it COULD fall. That time you encouraged a friend to go to the doctor’s for that nasty cough, “just in case.” Or maybe it was a smile or a kind word from you at the needed moment, or that time you patiently listened to some stranger’s story while you were waiting for your coffee, or the day you replied to somebody’s Tumblr post about depression with a “Me too” just to let them know they weren’t alone… Even complaining about your own problems and heartsickness online—to you it feels like shouting into a void, or whining, but to someone else, they see another person in the world who understands, and they know it isn’t just them, that it doesn’t make them a bad person just because they have a problem they can’t fight back.
You may’ve saved a life. Or maybe you haven’t, but one day you will, because you are who you are in a moment when it matters. You are worthwhile beyond your job, beyond your looks, beyond your age or orientation or the stories you write or the people you know.