As usual, I'm right on top of current events. But in this case I'm cutting myself some slack. Robin Williams suicide hit me like a tsunami. I was overwhelmed. He was and will remain one of my favorite actors and human beings.
Y'all know that I suffer from depression. I take medication but those that sit on the edge of The Abyss everyday also know that there are events, etc. that will send you tumbling down - medicated or not. That one of the most brilliant, talented, generous spirits could end his life, pushed me right over the edge, into the void for days. Even now, I feel deep, deep sadness. I feel it for his family, friends and millions of fans like me that couldn't understand, "Why?"
I read this quote posted on a friend's Facebook page ~
“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
―
David Foster Wallace
It's helped me comprehend what Robin Williams may have felt. It makes me sadder to know that those flames were moving ever closer to him and that he believed no one could or would keep them at bay. It also makes me feel better knowing that I don't even have anything smoldering.