Content Warning... This post deals with the topics of depression, substance use disorder, and suicide. If those are things that you don’t want to be exposed to, right now, don’t feel pressure to keep reading.
If you ever feel like you need help, or just someone to talk to, you can call 988 for the Suicide And Crisis Lifeline, or text “HOME” to 741741. The number for the Substance Abuse And Mental Health Services Administration is 1-800-662-HELP (4357).
You CAN get better, and you are worthy of love from other people, and most importantly, yourself.
Why live?
You live to prove them wrong. You live to give yourself another chance to do the right thing. To get better. To make the world better, even if it’s in some small way that won’t matter in the billion year grand scheme of things. Putting a spider outside instead of smashing it. Holding the door open for someone you don’t know. Tallying one more mark in the Good Column.
You live because there are others that can’t. People no longer here that we knew — that we loved. Strangers in our own town and continents away. You live because of all the other lives that lived before and led to you. You, a breathing statistical impossibility, laughing in the face of the infinite cosmos.
You live because you’re worth it. And you may not feel worthy at times, but feelings change. Just because you may be hungry or tired now, doesn’t mean you’re always going to feel that way. Feeling wet or itchy changes. And just because you feel one way, does not make it so! You know that thing where you push your arms out in a door way and then step out and your arms rise up? It feels like your arms are floating, but they aren’t. There are no invisible balloons or spirits lifting your arms.
Depression speaks to you in your own voice and all it does is lie.
This year is thirty years since Kurt Cobain died by suicide. People are posting tributes, and even his own daughter that never really got to know him, wrote a missive to mark the trage-versary. And part of it bugged me...
And I’m not saying that she has to grieve in a specific way, or she needs to process her trauma differently — I mean, I can see that she is trying to make some sort of meaning out of all of it. Of what was done to her. She could be trying to learn a lesson that may or may not be there to learn. But the line is:
“He gifted me a lesson in death that can only come through the LIVED experience of losing someone. It’s the gift of knowing for certain, when we love ourselves & those around us with compassion, with openness, with grace, the more meaningful our time here inherently becomes.”
Dude, isn’t there another way that “lesson” can be learned? Don’t you usually have a pet that dies, or a grandparent, or you are at least old enough to have lived with and formed memories of a parent before they pass?
I know it’s an instinct to want to believe your parents are good people and raised you the best they could, but sometimes they’re shit, and you are allowed to feel that way. Someone trying to teach you that lesson in that way is an asshole! Ask any therapist — you are allowed to believe that other people have been shitty to you, and say it to yourself. Don’t hold onto a lie.
If I wasn’t around to raise my daughter, I’d kick my own ass. Every step along the way of her growing up, I can’t believe how lucky I am that I get to experience this. Smiles and laughter and support and tears and occupying silence together. And it’s not all sunshine and lollipops every moment of every day, but I can, when I am enveloped in darkness, steal away a bit of myself — hold it up above, out of the waters of despair I’m drowning in — that can smile and be content. Because I can recognize and appreciate the gift that it truly is to be able to love my daughter.
Even Courtney Love publicly called out Cobain when she read out parts of the suicide letter at the vigil. And that was her truth. Her grieving process. Through tears, to ask those fans to call him an Asshole and Fucker.
I know what it’s like to be in that darkness — to feel like you have no other option. But I also don’t suffer from the same chronic illness that he did, so there’s that whole dimension added to it, some might excuse. Well, Mike McCready from Pearl Jam has Crohn’s and fell into substance use disorder, and he’s come through the other side. Tons of people have. It’s not like Cobain didn’t have the resources — the Recovery Capital — to get the kind of help that most people who have overcome such things without such advantages, could only dream of.
I don’t know... Maybe it would have hurt his image if he got clean and lived. After all, he was so cool and punk and didn’t care about fame and what people thought about him. How authentic of a depressed genius can you be if you aren’t utterly miserable? Forever teetering on the razor’s edge of apathy and agony.
Also, being a Dad is inherently about being Not Cool, so...
Having a music career that has ups and downs, and making music long enough to have your fans get up to grab beer when you “play something off the new album” could have been something he wanted to avoid. The Neil Young line he referenced “Better to burn out than fade away” seems like a clear nod to Cobain’s being aware of his legacy and how he feared his future.
His death solidified him in a mythic, tortured artist hunk of amber to be preserved for generations instead of the possibility of becoming a has-been. Cursed to play “Teen Spirit” ad infinitum at county fairs across the country. Fans and critics forever pondering if he had another Nevermind in him when sales numbers and relevance would eventually slip.
Now, I don’t like to be negative, but sometimes those negative feelings inside us cause us to lash out at others. Not knowing what to do with the darkness — staring into the abyss — sometimes it takes over. And so you need to take a break. Breathe. Re-center yourself. Remind yourself of what is Real and what is just in your head.
Growing up, I was one of those smart, Gifted and Talented kids. And that can be a trap, because being smart about one thing can trick you into thinking that you should be smart about other stuff, too. Hubristic cognitive bias.
Being smart means you don’t need any help. Brain problems are all in your head, so they can be solved just like working through an equation, right?
But you can’t think your way out of depression any more than you can breathe your way out of asthma. Using a broken thing won’t make it fix itself. You need medication, therapy — you have to work at it in the right way, which if you don’t know what that is, you have to find the people that can help you.
As long as you’re here — as long as you’re alive! — there is hope. The variable for change is there. There is always another tomorrow as long as you open your eyes in the morning.
Don’t be like Kurt. Be better. Who doesn’t want to be able to say to anyone that’ll listen that you’re better than Kurt Cobain? You can do that, right now! Be better. Get better. Don’t give up.
Every moment you’re alive is an opportunity to improve. Staying alive is being the embodiment of hope. As soon as you close your book, the story is over. No sequels. No movie adaptations. So don’t close the book on yourself, because you don’t know what is going to be on the next page or the page after that. As a matter of fact, it’s your book, so write what you want on those pages.