#skullburn

“There’s one more thing I wanted to touch on before we have to leave,” Catherine said. “Something you wrote in your new book The City that I thought to be profound and one of the most interesting passages I’ve read in a book in quite some time.”

     “Sure,” I went.

     “You wrote, and again, I just love this, but you wrote, “I wonder how many people would actually get together with one another, actually attempt to be with one another and have a romantic relationship with one another or a friendship or even make the acquaintance of others if we were all turned inside out and all the broken parts and scars, all that emotional ugliness and baggage we come with, and make no mistake about it, all of us come with the some kind of trauma tattooed on our hearts and stitched under our skin, were displayed for the world to see instead of hidden away like a secret.

     “You continued with, “I wonder how many of us would actually choose to even acknowledge the most broken among us. Those with the permanent marks of emotional abuse and trauma. Those whose hearts seem permanently sad and broken. I wonder how many of us would actually take the very bad into their lives and try to love it even after they saw it scarred on another person no matter how beautiful that person was physically. My guess is I doubt many of us would choose that. I don’t know anyone who would. But since we’re not actually made to wear our emotions on our sleeves, every single day, people mindlessly court these walking time bombs into their lives like somehow their inherit goodness and coolness and status is good enough to fix what’s taken years to break. The audacity and the arrogance of those lucky enough to have never been brought to their knees over and over and over again by the will of someone else. Someone who says they love them at night. The biggest lie in our lives is the lie that somehow we’re in control. That somehow we get to control the way someone else feels about us in the end. We can try by being good to them and fair to them and honest with them but in the end, we’re at their mercy the moment we start to pull the curtain back for them. It’s too bad people don’t come with airbags and danger warnings. It’s too bad people have the worst times once they’ve actually gotten to know the people they thought they loved before they really knew them.”

     And Catherine stopped and she went, “Just wow. I mean, what a statement about the emotional realm of the human existence. As dark as that comes across, part of me is awe struck by its beauty and the truths it contains.”

     “Wow,” I went. “So I did impress you a little bit. Thanks, I guess.”

     “I really loved it. So thank you.”

     “Ya know, a lot of people have asked me about the often times depressing nature that’s bred from my characters creating these very volatile and extreme environment’s where narcissism, addiction, deviant sexual behavior, and violence are the norm and I’m always like, Look around you. Take a damn second and look around you. I mean, how incredibly selfish and naïve to view life through the prism of “it hasn’t happened to me so therefore it doesn’t exist let alone it’s a problem.” I’m not some unhappy, grumpy all the time, downer in my daily life but I’m also viewing life through a timeline that has a real beginning and a real end. The most depressing thing in my life so far has been the confirmation of death when I was a little boy and that it’s a very real thing and that nobody escapes it and the people who criticize my literary world and the actions of the characters within it are doing so knowing that one day, they will be dead and that death is depressing and death is sad and traumatic for those close to you who will have to suffer through yours.”

     “Obviously, we’ve talked about you personally and some of your struggles. When I read this, I knew it was written by someone whose experienced trauma and depression. But what’s the exact point here?”

     “Well of course I’ve experienced those things in my life. Like you hinted at, you can’t write that without having lived with and through those things. You can try but it won’t work and it’ll come off as generic. But I think the larger idea there, in what you read to the listeners, is the way we think about and how we handle all forms of depression, emotional trauma, and psychological trauma. You do not have to fight in a war to experience the brutality of post traumatic stress disorder. So many people are silently suffering out there every day and what do we do as a society? We give them pep talks, we tell them to snap out of it and be stronger, we call them crazy and insane and we think of them as undesirable. That’s what we do to the people who have the guts to actually make it known that they’re emotionally fragile and whose ups and downs are already frightening and extreme. In my life, I’ve shattered my left arm twice and it’s been rebuilt twice. I’ve broken both collarbones and an ankle and my left wrist. When I suffered those injuries, I was babied, I was given time off from life in general, and people, strangers even, they had so much sympathy for me. But never in my life has any physical ailment hurt more and taken longer to heal than the few times I’ve experienced forms of severe mental and emotional trauma. And it’s not easy to talk about cos nobody wants to be the downer person or the sob story. No one does. So what happens? We keep it in, we start believing we’re weaker than others, and we finally feel ashamed about it and we lose the hope that it will ever end which turns some people over to the belief that the pain will never stop.”

     “Very good points,” said Catherine.

     “From the time we can walk, we’re taught that driving a car is a privilege and that it’s lethal and that’s why we have to take classes and pass tests and even go through a trial period before we get the right to operate a vehicle. I have no problem with that. Cars can kill. But it’s a fact that there are nearly four thousand more deaths from suicide a year than deaths from automobile accidents. To me, that number is staggering when you think about how there’s no real education about depression or signs that you might be depressed. There’s no real emotional trauma support out there until someone fucking explodes and who ever knows what that explosion will entail or what it will be aimed at. Yet we treat it like it’s a choice. And we send people who are experiencing the worst kind of suffering to their graves in shame.”

      “I agree,” said Catherine. “We absolutely have not dealt with mental illness the right way in this country.”

     “And I just thought what if we were turned inside out and what if we knew the extent of the emotional and psychological damage the people we had to choose to be with had suffered through before we met them and what that would say about us through our choices since we base so much on the psychical appearance of our significant others and peer groups even though it’s almost always the inner demons of someone in the relationship that devastates it and breaks it. People should pursue these thoughts daily and really think about how many people around them are fucking hurting and suffering so badly. Nobody will ever be able to fix another person but hopefully all of us let those we love know that if they’re going through some heavy, fucked up shit, we’ll be there to help them fix themselves if that’s what they really want. And that’s the best we can do on a human level. Just fucking help and never run away. I know from experience that running away will not make you feel better. I mean how good has it ever felt when you’ve been abandoned?”