If you guys haven't heard this story, here's the background info. I'm not here to do a news report because that's already been done. I'm here to talk about why this is hitting me even harder than most teen suicide stories do.
The thing is, I didn't know anything about this before I heard that he died. It wasn't that I had seen him all over the internet and then found out he died. I just saw an article that was like, "Laser Cat teen dies at 17" and I clicked on it and that was the first time I saw his picture. And immediately my heart broke, because as soon as I saw this kid I noticed three things:
1. I would probably want to hang out with this kid
2. He has the same sense of humor as me - that could have been me
3. Maybe even more, he has the same sense of humor as my 15-year-old brother-in-law, Mike. That one stung the most because when Draven Rodriguez was 15, nobody had any idea this was going to happen to him when he was 17.
And so I was already feeling like this hit close to home, because this kid was just so beautifully weird, the kind of person that makes me feel like it's okay for somebody weird like me to exist in this world. And then I got to reading about the kid:
"“I want people to remember my personality and not just my face.”"
"Rodriguez and Wilkinson posed together with their furry friends in one
photo for the school year book, complete with a note about a cause dear
to both of them: rescue animals."
"he went out of his way to make friends with people from all corners of
the country – both online and off – via youth-leadership conferences and
just around his hometown."
"He posted photos this month of himself after working with area kids on an anti-bullying project"
That last one stabbed my heart the hardest. Here was a kid working to save other kids from feeling unworthy, trying to keep other kids alive and believing in themselves. And somehow, even though he surrounded himself in that message and passed it on to other people, it wasn't enough to keep him alive.
My first impulse is to cry out, "Beautiful baby boy, how could you not believe that we need you in this world? How in the world did you become convinced that it would be better if you weren't here, when it's so obvious that you shined a light everywhere you went?"
But even before I ask those questions, I know the answer. I've struggled for years to keep myself alive. Even before I was old enough to consciously feel suicidal, I can remember having thoughts of "wanting to sleep forever". I believed, and still mostly believe, that I am inherently a bad person. I've tried harder and harder to be good to make up for all the "bad" I feel I must be doing.
So someone could probably write a pretty blurb about me, that we'll call "Description A": that I devoted my life to helping children with disabilities, and that I loved animals, and I wore shirts with dinosaurs and Pokemon on them even as an adult because it makes people smile, and I knew the entire dance to "Thriller", and I got married last fall in a ceremony that made septuagenarian lesbians weep with joy because I had so many opportunities they didn't.
Somebody would probably read that and think it sounds lovable and charming.
But that person wouldn't see this, which we'll call "Description B": the people who've told me I was a loser, the people who have made it abundantly clear that they never want to see me again, the jobs I've been fired from, or quit because I was having a nervous breakdown, the kids in school who outright TOLD me to kill myself, the fact that my mother was schizophrenic and probably most people think schizophrenic people shouldn't have kids, ESPECIALLY if they need food stamps to feed them. There are entire political movements formed around the idea that I shouldn't have been born.
When I look at myself, the only thing I can see is Description B.
I am only able to even see what Description A looks like because my friends and family have repeated it to me over and over again, trying desperately to get it into my head. It took me years of therapy to even accept that there is a Description A. So now I can see it, sort of, in the distance, if I squint. But there are maybe a dozen people trying to get me to see Description A, and many, many more who would look at me and only see Description B.
So when we read the news reports about somebody like Draven Rodriguez, we hear Description A. We hear about the rescue animals and helping neighborhood kids and his amazing sense of humor, and we see that he was only 17 and he had so much time left to do beautiful things in the world. And of course we're like "Why? Why does this happen to such great kids? Why does this happen to any kids at all?"
And I know, because I've been in that place so many times, what was going through Draven's head in the last moments of his life: Description B. Whatever bad things he'd heard about himself in his life, even if they were old or not that accurate or came from people he didn't like anyway? Those were the only things he could hear that night.
Because we're outside his head, we have the luxury of seeing Description A. And even though it's hard for me to see mine, here's what I want every one of you (especially you teenagers and young adults) to understand: You have a Description A.
You do. I promise. Even if you just flunked all your classes and you're a compulsive hoarder and you need to lose 50 pounds and your roommates think you're annoying, there is something about you that shines. Maybe you have a great sense of humor or you're really creative or compassionate. (My experience is that compassionate people are often the most vulnerable to depression, because we feel all the pain in the world. It hurts, but it's exactly why you're so important.) Maybe you're queer and everyone around you thinks it's bad to be queer, but there's other queer people who desperately want to find you so they can have a friend. Maybe you have panic attacks everytime someone is mean to a kid, and that's exactly the reason you're so important to the kids in your life. (That last might be directed at myself.)
Find somebody who believes in your Description A and ask them what's in it. (If you can't find anyone, that doesn't mean it's not there, it just means you're around the wrong people and you'll have to figure it out yourself, or get a good therapist if you can.) Write it down and try to believe it. You won't, at first. Just find some reason to hang in there - something as small as "I want to live to see the spring" or "I haven't beaten Pokemon Y yet" or "my cat needs me" - and keep trying to believe Description A. And hey, whatever thing you've decided to stay alive for? Put that in there, even if it seems stupid. It's a clue to what's really important in your heart.
I don't really know how to wind this to an inspiring conclusion, because depression is an ongoing struggle, not a Morgan Freeman movie. But just know that the people in your life who only want to tell you how bad you are, aren't the people you should listen to.
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