Filmmaker Woody Allen has hinted in both interviews and films (case in point: his latest, To Rome With Love) that he equates retirement with death. He is continuing to make movies well into his seventies, he says, so that he doesn’t have too much time on his hands to sit and wait for the inevitable.
He might describe the life of man in nature in the words of Thomas Hobbes: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” In other words, Allen figures there’s a lot to be unhappy about in life, so it’s best not to spend too much time thinking about it.
All this is to say that I should have gotten a job in the summer I turned 16.
Instead, I sat around at home. I watched movies. It was About Schmidt, a 2002 film starring Jack Nicholson, that set me off. In the movie, Warren Schmidt retired from his career as an actuary. Soon after, his wife died. He had little to do but mope around the house, feeling useless as he tried in vain to prevent his daughter from marrying a waterbed salesman.
It got to me. I was young, and my life was a good one. But somehow, watching Warren Schmidt wonder how he was going to spend the final sad years of his life hit a nerve.
That summer, I got depressed. It hung over me every day, from when I woke up until I went to bed.
I didn’t expect it to happen to me. I couldn’t really name the source of it, either. I felt stupid about it. What did I have to be depressed about? How were my problems unique or worthy? I didn’t talk about it.
I understand now that what I felt that summer was a relatively mild version of what a lot of students here at Mac go through. I wasn’t suicidal, and once school started up again, I got better. That’s not the case for everyone.
McMaster’s Student Wellness Centre is trying to “stomp out stigma” around depression this week. Its events will present statistics gathered by the Wellness Centre to make the case that depression is serious problem affecting a significant chunk of the student population.
It’s a great and necessary campaign. But I’ve got a word of caution.
Among the statistics, words like “anxious,” “overwhelmed” and “stressed” will get mixed up with more severe ones like “hopeless” and “suicidal.” Truth is, we students are supposed to get a little bummed out when we bite off more schoolwork than we can chew. We complain about being overworked to our friends. We work through it, learn something, and then blow off steam on a free weekend.
Depression is something else entirely. It’s isolating. It’s frightening. Piles of homework might not help it, but depression is deeper than the plight of your average struggling student.
You don’t need a good reason to be depressed. That it’s happening while school weighs you down doesn’t make you weak. Like any illness, I’ve learned, depression can take you by surprise, and you might not know where it came from.
Take it from me, or Woody Allen or Thomas Hobbes or Warren Schmidt; life’s a bitch. So don’t be hard on yourself.
I should preface by saying that this isn’t a cry for help. Nor is it an otherwise lackluster student’s lament. Instead it is a realization that the summer sun is fleeting, and in its wake is a perpetual cycle of work, school, work, school, work and school some more.
Maybe I’m just tired of it. Maybe I’m sick of the monotony. Or maybe I’m just both sick and tired of the lie of academia that as students, we are not supposed to struggle or complain. We are supposed to sit in the large classes, recognized only by our number, and enjoy the luxury of a university education that is reserved for a select few. We are told marks are only important as we choose to make them; the same could be said of social experiences. All of the opportunities, all of the activities and all of the groups – they are but a small portion of the privilege that is a “student’s life.”
And yet, I cannot help but feel something is very wrong in this current climate of academic culture. Despite the apparent pleasures, there is an underbelly that is rarely discussed. Behind the picture-perfect, poster-child students and the stratospherically high GPA’s is an environment that stigmatizes the smallest imperfection. Schadenfreude has replaced empathy. Hyper competitiveness pits student against student. Weaknesses are exploited, successes are lauded above all else, and the failures of others are a source of celebration.
Don’t get me wrong. A new age of natural selection in academia is all fine and dandy, but where does it leave the students who are trampled by competition? Where do those with arguably unstable personalities find themselves?
Alone. Forlorn. And waltzing around with ideas reserved for the end of times. Or, at least I was.
To some, there is a thing called ancient history – events that happened so long ago they are worth being forgot. But sometimes, it’s hard to forget. Some memories are triggered by the slightest provocation, hidden by thousands of daily jokes and smiles.
Even though my eyes were closed, I recall everything from that night just like it was my first kiss. The way the water from the showerhead masked my cries. The amount of time I could hold my breath. The lingering whispers of doubt. The cold metal against my skin.
To this day, I remember when I told my parents about the first time I planned to take my own life. With a pained look on his face, my father wearily sighed. To no avail, I tried to get the attention of my mother, who simply gazed off into the distance. Although I couldn’t read her lips, it seemed she was mouthing, “My son, my son.”
At the same time she was shaking her head, stuck in an infinite loop between now and forever. I helplessly stared at them – my parents, my caregivers – while my father waffled about to find the right words. He stuttered once. Twice.
Despite having lived in my house for years, it felt foreign. As I sat there with hands that grappled against the air that seemed to be suffocating me, it felt as though my house was not my home.
Was it my fault? Was I just incorrigibly inept? I wasn’t sure, and at the time, I took that as a confirmation that I was. The grades. The disappointment. All of it was my undoing, a testament of my limitations. Others could balance school and athletics. Some even worked. And here I was struggling with just academics. In my head, I was less than pathetic.
I remember my mother’s botched attempt at reassurance, the feeling of overarching meaningless, and the days I never wished to face, days I couldn’t believe had happened. But above all else, I remember the stern voice of my father, who spent five minutes in a quiet search of wisdom. “I promise,” he whispered, “it gets better. It always does.”
After it all, I like to pretend that I am stronger. I could even say that I am wiser too. But I’m not. For a while, I let my depression get the better of me, and I became a victim of my own suffering.
Yet in due course, I realized that my father was right. Even though the following days were filled with uneasy footsteps that echoed a song of regret, I remember that it – the pain, the heartache, the unquestionable distress – eventually stopped. When it did, I experienced the spicy taste of peppers, my first true love, a passion for writing, the beauty of a Polish cathedral, the soothing call of an Imam in Turkey, the confusion of an abstract painting, the exhilaration of cliff diving, the salty kiss of an ocean, the unbridled carnal urgency of sex, and a whole blur of other memories that bring both joy and happiness to me now. In short, I experienced life like I never thought I would again.
I tell this story not in search of therapy. I’ve dealt with my own demons already. Instead, I write with the hopes that I can inspire you – whoever you are and wherever you live – to believe that you are not alone. Now I certainly do not think I can ever truly understand what you’re going through, and I will not presume to make a blanket statement about what is best for you. I will not tell you that the sun will rise tomorrow. Nor will I tell you that it will set today. In the end, I will not pretend to know you.
But while it is perhaps foolish to hope that these words will reach anyone, and it is probably even more so to assume that they could help in any way, I want you to know that no matter what has happened and no matter how you feel, you are fantastic. You are unique. And I love everything about you.
Ryan Prance
The Silhouette
Wasted Wednesdays, thirsty Thursdays, wicked weekends and some pretty miserable Monday mornings were recurring parts of my first-year university experience. I was having fun, and, quite frankly, I was living the healthiest I had lived. Ever.
I won’t beat around the bush and say that I had been completely mentally healthy up until that point. In fact, I was far from it. One might think that the talk of suicide and depression rising in young males is simply nothing but some convoluted statistics. Sadly, I regret to inform you that this is not the case. I am one of those young males, and that doesn’t exactly make life easy.
I didn’t have many friends in high school, let alone too many people who talked to me or even gave me notice. I was essentially an outsider because I was reserved and did not express the same type of bone-headed masculinity that the other guys at my high school so exuberantly put on for the world. I wasn’t a social butterfly, but you can’t say that someone deserves to be ignored or belittled because they aren’t extremely extroverted. In a similar way, I was criticized for not behaving the way a “man” was to behave.
Nevertheless, high school graduation finally came with a feeling that was akin to being released from jail, and I never looked back. People tell you that university is a place to recreate yourself, and I took that to heart. Gone was the person who sat at home on Friday nights re-reading George Orwell’s 1984 for fun, that person spent too much time feeling scared and alone and needed to be removed. Point blank, I stopped feeling sorry for myself. Indeed, it’s quite a surprise the things a person will do when they give themselves no sympathy.
Move-in day came, and I knew what I had to do: give people a different impression of myself. In all honesty, it wasn’t hard. A little cheeriness went a long way, or so it seemed.
I made friends instantly, and with a blink of an eye, my life completely changed. Over the weeks and months that passed I found that I had actually built a stable of people – friends – who I hung out with regularly. I actually felt included in something for once in my life, and man, did it feel amazing. I was going out regularly, doing well in school, and doing much better with the opposite sex than I had used to. Nonetheless, while it maybe an overused expression, all that glitters is not gold.
Sure, one could say that it does not sound like I created any sort of problem for myself – after all, I’m sure some people reading this may have torn the page in half when I said I was able to go out regularly and do well in school.
However, I always held on to this feeling that, since I was a “man” now, I could not bear to let these new people see the sad little person inside me that used to spend Friday nights alone. Thus, I pushed my feelings down and away from everyone.
Ultimately, this created a tension inside me that that was akin to shaking a beer can; too much pressure was bubbling and I was ready to burst. Somehow I felt as if people would not accept me for the emotional faults that I carried deep in my thoughts.
On the outside I carried myself pretty well, and I could not bear to ruin my recent rise in my social life by revealing things that I thought would cause people to judge me. In actuality, there were people who may have actually cared, but there was this overwhelming feeling that releasing my emotions would only result in emotional embarrassment
I was depressed and already on anti-depressants before I came to university, and I felt as if those around me, even though we spent a lot of time together, would lose respect for me, see me as a weak person for my past history of emotional trials or any sort of indication, whether spoken or non-spoken, of the damage that lingered in me.
Despite this, I just kept stuffing it all deep down inside, never trusting anyone because I felt that, because I was supposed to be a “man” – someone completely in control of their emotions and life – I could not open up.
I was never much of one to care for the lone gun-slinger image, but it seemed as though that I trapped myself into this fantasy world in which I had to keep up this strong outward masculine identity that bordered on something like that. Not as some sort of bone-headed, beer-chugging, sex-crazed young male like some of my contemporaries, who think that constitutes maturity or manhood, but rather that I had to hold it together as person who seemed to not have problems.
All in all, turns out that the only weakness I had was that I just couldn’t speak up about my emotions, and I am not the only young male that has dealt with this problem and will deal with it in the future. It is an issue too often ignored in society. Take it from me, when you have faith in no one, you wind up having no one to depend on.
