Me, Matt Walsh, Robin Williams and the Ever-Stalking Pain.

Matt Walsh. I have to admit that the name sends shivers down my spine. He writes so many words about topics I really care about and so much of the time he is wrong. Dead wrong. So absolutely, insanely, obnoxiously wrong and with such an insufferable certainly of his own rightness (it’s right there in his subtitle “Absolute Truths”) that when I see his name pop up on my Facebook feed - which it does with annoying regularity - I get angry before I have even seen what he wrote. 

That goes double for today. Robin Williams Didn’t Die From a Disease, He Died From His Choice. How’s that for a topic. How’s that for the most narrow-minded, stupid, dumb-headed thing you have ever seen written in your life. I only saw the title and I started foaming at the mouth. “HOW DARE HE!?!!!” I have spend my entire adult life trying to use my own experience to teach people about depression. It is not a moral failing. It is a disease. It is something you do not get to choose whether you have or whether you survive. 

I wasn’t going to begin to pollute my mind and my unusually stable mood today by reading his drivel. It would only give him a click and make me mad and . . . well, I am sure you understand. But I am me. And so I read it.

And I realize that this damned depression issue is so complicated. So hard. So  . . . incomprehensible that even the best of us are bound to make mistakes. And even the worst of us are bound to get some things right.

For instance, Matt Walsh. 

He is wrong. Let me say that first. Robin Williams died of a horrible disease. A disease so horrible that it makes your death look like your own weak-willed, negative-thinking, morally-weak fault. He died of a disease that disguises itself as will and that sucks more than I can possibly say.

But . . . 

How we talk about it matters and if we talk about a suicide as a relief (which it unequivocally is, “devoutly to be wish'd”) we will encourage others to seek that relief. I am certain Robin William’s suicide was the final bump that pushed others into that dark night. And for that reason it may not be morally justifiable to talk about it that way - to show our compassion and devotion to the people who are in those depths. Because we don’t want them to die. And if we don’t want them to die we cannot tell them in any way that death will be a relief.

But, if we are going to blame the innocent in order to save them, let us be clear about that as well. Our desire to stop suicide is all about us. It has nothing to do with the people who wish to kill themselves. We don’t want suicide to happen because we would miss them and all the things that they would bring to this world - the joy and beauty and creation that every human life has the potential to bring - we also fear our own suffering - the suffering we would experience at their loss. And we feel, rightly or wrongly, that their suffering, because it does not feel real to us, because it seems like it shouldn’t exist, we feel that our suffering trumps their suffering. We feel that they are unjustified in causing us grief, no matter how sharp and painful their own grief, their own suffering, is. We believe that the depressed should suffer so that we do not have to. 

Of course, we also believe that if they will just hang on then everything will be ok and they will feel, as Matt Walsh suggests, JOY and that joy will drive away the depression and life will be worth having lived. And for many people that is probably true. Many people will have an episode of depression or a period of depression and then it will get better.

Unfortunately Matt Walsh is also wrong about joy and depression being mutually exclusive. They are not. And for those of us whose depression is a lifelong affliction and not just a passing illness that interconnection is part of the problem. My children are my greatest joy. I adore them. I delight in them. They are my hope and my anchor. They are also my greatest burden and my deepest pain. My fears for their health and happiness and my inability to give them perfect lives have, at times, threatened to swallow me up and destroy us all. And it has been right at those moments of greatest delight - with those sweet bodies curled up against my heart - that the pain of my fear and doubt often is the sharpest. 

And it is sharp not because I am weak or sinful or morally evil. It is sharp because the neurological pathways in my brain are askew. Because something gets lost in translation between here and there.

And, to be honest, Matt Walsh is also correct that suicide is a choice. The suicidal man or woman or child must act in order for it to happen. But that someone who is acting has, in the depths of depression, been stripped of a significant amount of information that would make that choice a real choice. I cannot begin to explain to you how depression feels when you are deep in it. When I am not in it it makes no sense to ME. It is not normal. It is not typical. It is not free or rational or sane. 

And I fight it. 

Every day I fight it.

I take medications and do weekly therapy sessions and I have been hospitalized and I have told people I love things about myself I wish I never had to tell anybody - horrible things - things that if they know they can help me avoid. 

But even with every effort and precaution and medication and therapist and faith and hope that monster comes -- it comes without warning. It comes when I am active and healthy and accomplished and strong and eating well and sleeping well, and it comes when I am sick and weak and failing miserably in all that I do. It comes with its own perverted reason. It comes and it drags me down and if I weren’t a naturally fearful, lazy, perfectionist I would be long, long gone. But I won’t attempt to kill myself until I am certain it will work. (I hate being a failure.) And I am generally just too tired and too scared to pull it off. Something I have often hated myself for. 

So my failures save me. My failures. Not my virtues. Again and again. Because I know again and again and again and again that pain is coming back. It is stalking me. Waiting for the right moment to pounce. And every time it is worse. Every time I know a little bit more that I am never getting away. I will suffer this anguish of soul until I die, with maybe a few passing days, or weeks, or months, or, dare I hope, years of respite, until that blissful moment when it is all over - when I slip into oblivion (or, if God is real, into the blissful rest of eternity). And until then my brain will keep play tricks on me and lie to me and show me truths none of us want to see . . . and I will beg for death again and again and again.

And hopefully I will stay afraid and proud and lazy.

And death will sneak away. For the moment.

And I will live.

In pain.

For the people I love. 

For as long as I can.

The Moral Message of Frozen

Is Frozen a trojan horse sneaking a message of gay rights into our innocent children's heads?

I think it is possible. And hurrah for that!

The idea first occurred to me this afternoon when my Facebook feed alerted me to a post by Kathryn Skaggs, the blogger behind A Well-Behaved Mormon Woman.  Although I had seen, and enjoyed, the film and listened to thousands of hours of music and information about the film, courtesy of my 6-year-old, and had heard about 'the gay spouse in the sauna' and even given thought about how powerful "Let it Go" can be as a coming-out anthem, I had not given much thought to the film's 'gayness'.  I think this is most likely because the film is not inherently gay.  It is the story of the relationship between two sisters, and their parents, and fear, with a little comment on the complete insanity of the normal Disney princess marriage.  None of those issues have much to do with the gay agenda.

Except. They all have to do with what it means to be a human being in 2014 in the dominant western culture.  They have to do with how we think about how people who are different should be treated and how the past ways of dealing with people who were different (in race, ability, sexuality, education, culture, gender, etc, etc) - by shaming, or hiding, or segregating, or re-training - were not effective in removing the "problems" and did not make society better.  Which means that there is a better way of dealing with the "problems."

Frozen is about the gay agenda because the gay agenda isn't about gayness.  It is about people-ness.  It is about who counts as a human being with human rights attached to them.

Frozen feels like a trojan horse to Skaggs because she has already accepted the premise that human difference is not, in and of itself, a problem.  I am willing to bet that she feels that the treatment of blacks before the civil rights movement was wrong and shameful. I am sure she believes that people with disabilities should be treated with human dignity and not shoved into institutions.  She may even believe that people have the right to believe whatever religion (or not) they choose to believe and that people with different thoughts and ideas should still be able to share those thoughts and ideas.  She is, I am willing to bet, a product of the current, dominant social belief in the inherent dignity of human beings.

What scares her is that she is wise enough to understand that those beliefs lead directly to the belief that gay men and women have an inherent right, because they are human beings, not to be treated differently.  They have the right not to be shamed or hidden. And they have the right to have their most meaningful relationships - as partners and parents - recognized and protected in the same way hers are. Not because they are gay.  Because they are human.  She sees that the morality of Frozen - which is good - opens the door to gay marriage  . . .

And there is the rub.  Because gay marriage is, in Ms. Skaggs' worldview, bad. A priori, bad. No amount of evidence or proof could prove it otherwise.  Therefore Frozen has to be bad, even though it feels good, even though the principles underlying the film are principles that she believes in - she is clever enough to see that her own principles - outside of that one rule that gay marriage (and gayness itself) are bad - outside that, her own principles lead her to the same conclusion that I have reached, and the majority of Americans have reached - that gay people are, above all, people and they have the same rights from and responsibilities to the community as any of us do.  Skaggs already supports the principles that underlie the movement toward gay marriage in this country.  And because she has always believe that gay marriage is wrong and bad and dark and evil she sees evil in something that she herself innately reacts to as good.

Which gives me hope.  Ms. Skaggs' grandchildren, who saw Frozen because their grandmother took them, are growing up in a world that embraces difference and diversity.  They are being influence by Frozen and every other movie and book and show and song that is written with the underlying belief that to be human means to be true and honest and unafraid of difference.  And because they grow up in this culture they are likely to know and care about people who are of different races, who are gay, who are disabled, who have a mental illness and aren't ashamed to admit it. Because they grow up in this world they will, hopefully, see the beauty and ability inside their own differences and they will not be ashamed. They will embrace themselves and each other. And the world will be just that much better because they do.

It is interesting that much of Skaggs' critique (and the critiques of others) focuses on the song, "Let it Go". Yet none of them pause to think that this song takes place in the middle of the story - not at the end.  Elsa hasn't finished her journey in this song.  This is a song of starting, and starting well, but so imperfectly.  Elsa does need other people.  She cannot - and she does not - live out her life alone in an ice palace.  Elsa was incredibly damaged by her parents.  They were terrified and they taught her to be terrified - and so she never learned to use and shape her powers for good.  Those powers were treated like a curse and they became a curse.  But the cure for that was NOT that she left (though that was a necessary start).  It was when she came back.  When she fixed the problems she had created and learned to live with herself and with her kingdom.

Gay marriage is a good thing because it brings the amazing abilities and personalities of gay people and their families back into society.  It demands responsibility from all of us. And it rewards all of us with stronger - fuller - richer and better communities.  And so, if Frozen is a story about bringing the different into the light and then bringing it home - it is about gay marriage.  And it is a great thing!

Learning to Speak

When I was pregnant with my firstborn daughter I stumbled upon an article describing the Infant Language Project at the University of Delaware. I had dabbled in anthropological linguistics in graduate school - working for a year as the assistant in the newly opened Native American Languages collection of the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History (now the Sam Noble Museum) - and my husband received his master's degree in computational linguistics from Indiana University (essentially, figuring out how to "teach" computers to understand and use normal human languages) - so the study of how and why humans learned (and learn) to speak was of great interest to both of us.

Daughter - aged 2 - Exploring Language
Dressed in Signing Time DVD and
UD Infant Language Project
T-Shirt

We signed our unborn baby up as a research subject right away. Three or four times a year for six years my daughter - and after her, my son - would play games or watch videos or complete puzzles designed to track, examine and, hopefully, one-day, explain the miracle that is the development of this spectacularly mundane and essentially human gift of language.

Any parent can tell you that watching a child develop language is amazing.  They babble meaningless babbles that begin to take on the shape and structure of language - without the meaning - until, delightfully, meaning connects - "Da" or "Baba" or "Agu" becomes not just a sound but a signal for "Daddy" or "Grandma" or  "Water".  And it happens fast - one word, ten words, 50, 100. My daughter, who is 6 years old, probably knows something in the range of 24,000 words and uses about 2000 of those words regularly and comfortably. It is not rare that my son or daughter will use a word, correctly I should add, that I cannot fathom how they came to know. "How do you know that?" I ask them. But they cannot tell me. No-one can tell me.

Language is amazing!

But in the middle of all the amazing  - in the middle of the learning and the joy - all the speaking and shouting and singing and expressing - we grown ups start doing something important, but also dangerous: We start fixing. We start bounding. A gentle shush in church or at a movie, or when someone else is speaking. A nudge toward a better pronunciation or proscribed grammar. "Not 'done', dear, 'did'." And then we worry about propriety, "We don't use that word." "That word is bad!" And then we, the grown ups, just don't have time for all the language flowing at us - all the enthusiastic storytelling and event reporting and arguments that novice speakers, there tongues so newly loosened, cannot seem to stop pouring forth. "BE QUIET!" We shout. And, grudgingly and briefly, silence reigns.

This pruning is necessary. A great communicator has learned to use words and silence, to modulate their tone, topic and vocabulary for the audience at hand.  What happens, though, when a child grows up to believe that words - especially their own words - aren't beautiful and powerful and valuable, but risky and useless and unwanted? What happens when a voice goes silent?

Stay tuned to find out.