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Why Therapy Isn’t Enough, I Need A Revolution
My depression and CPTSD are symptoms of a sick society.
Content warning: suicidal ideation.
“Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die,” my date asked me.
The answer flashed through my mind immediately–flashbacks to the stark white walls, cold air, and unseasoned food of the emergency rooms I’d visited over several battles with suicidal ideation. “I have a secret hunch that one day I will die by my own hand,” I thought as I looked across the table at the candle flame flickering in her glowing brown eyes. But I knew I couldn’t tell her that. It would ruin the mood. I don’t remember how I answered the question, only that I didn’t tell the truth.
For the past year or so, I’ve learned to mask the truth about my feelings, lest I end up in a hospital gown again. It’s a recently acquired skill for me, because for much of my life, I’ve been largely transparent about my feelings–despite the many voices in my life who’ve tried to tell me that it’s inappropriate for a man to feel so much, so often, so deeply, and to be open about those feelings.
I capitulated to masking my feelings in one of my emergency room stays.
During that episode, I knew I had to lie to the nurse practitioner the next time he inquired about how I was feeling. I’d been feeling like the world is a slave ship. That’s why I was in the emergency room in the first place: because I was overwhelmed by the understanding that my personal predicament was part of a larger tapestry of historical forces that weren’t going to change any time soon.
I couldn’t pay my bills. Every pay period, the rent left my account in the red. I have school and medical debt that make it difficult to buy a car. Every other week there was news of some attack on Black people–banning Black history, racist mass shooting in a grocery store, police killing an unarmed civilian for fitting the description. The constant infighting in social movements had finally come to my door, disillusioning my faith in our ability to push social progress forward. And the strange weather events happening in LA in recent years, like the longer and colder and wetter winters, kept pushing the threat of ecological breakdown to the forefront of my mind.
