One Day, Same Room
About the pain we shared and I now carry alone.
The Red Dead Redemption 2 article was supposed to be the last one.
In many ways it still is. It rounded up everything I’ve been trying to put out for the last few months. Quite a few articles to express feelings I can’t talk about with almost anyone, while also satisfying my desire to talk about things I really love. While it didn’t make a huge impact into the overall state of my mental health, it gave me a small space to talk about my feelings and my thoughts. A few people read them, and some of them even got convinced to try some of the games I talked about, which is nice as most of them are kinda niche and underappreciated (well, not RDR or Cyberpunk, but you know).
But, as is usually the case, some of these people offered advice. Nothing wrong with that per se, but I’ve been surrounded by people smarter than me for the majority of my life. I’ve received plenty of advice, but none of it really helped. One of the points that I tried to explain during these articles is what made me feel better and why I feel so much worse now, but it seems like that point didn’t quite resonate with the few people that have read the articles. So I’m doing one last addendum article, and I’m once again writing about one of my favorite pieces of media. This time, though, I’m not gonna talk about videogames. I’m gonna talk about my favorite episode in House MD, “One Day, One Room”, and why the pain I’ve gone through still sticks with me after so long.
CW: the episode includes a woman who has been raped as the main character.
For those of you that were born after 2000 (you all make me feel very old), House MD is a TV series about Gregory House, a brilliant diagnostician who suffers from both having a crippled leg and from having a terminal case of being a massive asshole. It’s a series of mostly self-contained stories where House and his team have to solve medical cases that have left everyone else stumped. It’s far from flawless — it tends to have very repetitive patterns and after season 4 the series seems to go off track for good, with honestly pretty terrible storylines all around. The rest, on the other hand, is really, really good. The first four seasons are fantastic, with great stories and an incredible main character. House is an ass, but there are reasons behind him being an ass, and the reasons are left open to multiple possible interpretations.
In One Day, One Room, House barely avoids going to jail thanks to his boss, Cuddy. In an attempt at making House a bit less of an ass, Cuddy assigns him to clinic duty. House usually likes interesting cases and clinic duty is the opposite of that, so he’ll do anything he can to avoid it, including paying 50 dollars to every patient that decides to leave instead of getting checked out. The episode starts on a humorous note, with Cuddy challenging House to visit as many patients as he can without touching them in an attempt to make it more interesting for him. So far, relatively standard House shenanigans. Things take a turn for the worse, though, as he receives the results of some patients that got tested for STDs.
Two of the patients came back negative, with House berating them for not taking precautions. The last one, a young woman named Eve, came back positive. As House proceeds to give the same speech he gave the other two patients, Eve breaks down and starts crying. Starting to realize something is wrong he tries to give her the medicine she needs, to which she slaps it out of his hand screaming not to touch her. House’s suspicions are confirmed: she was raped. And he’s not the right person to handle this.
House tries to steer as far away from humanity as possible. An interesting trait for a doctor — someone whose job is saving other people’s lives — , but one he justifies to himself as being interested in the puzzle that are the complicated cases he’s usually assigned. There’s no puzzle to solve here for him, just a young woman who feels her world is crashing down on her. As he walks out of the door he immediately asks Cuddy to have another doctor assigned to her. “She was raped. Do you think I’m the best choice for her?”, he comments before leaving. Cuddy agrees, but Eve doesn’t. She wants House back. When House asks her why, she replies she doesn’t know.
Now, for those who haven’t seen the show, it’s important to make something clear: House is, in many ways, not a good person. This is immediately evident by how she decides to handle Eve. In order to get her to drop him, he decides to go the nuclear route right off the bat: he says she’s trying to take back control after everything was taken from her. In her own words, she’s “raping” him. Something she doesn’t take lightly, as expected. Eve screams at House to get out, to which he just bluntly replies he’ll send in the therapist and walks out. Of course, the story doesn’t end here. Despite House’s comments, Eve still wants him as her doctor, and as soon as the therapist looks away she tries to overdose on the medicine she’s been given, ending up strapped to a hospital bed, House next to her.
As they try to talk, it becomes clear that House feels very misplaced in the role Eve is demanding of him. She doesn’t seem to want to talk about what happened to her and would rather talk about mundane things like where they went to college. House keeps asking her why she wants him specifically, to which she keeps replying she doesn’t know. House tries asking for suggestions from his colleagues, who (as is usually the case) give wildly different opinions. Some of them want him to reassure her, others to make her feel like the world hasn’t stopped. Eventually, Eve asks him if anything terrible has ever happened to him.
After some back and forth with his colleagues he comes back to her and replies that, when he was a kid and his parents were away for work or vacations, he was left with his grandmother. A person who believed in discipline a bit too much, and made sure he paid the price every time he misbehaved. When Eve starts to question whether the story is true or not, House replies “It’s true for somebody”. The answer doesn’t satisfy Eve, who wants House to be honest with her.
When it comes to beliefs and ideologies, House and Eve are polar opposites. Eve is religious because she needs to believe there’s an ultimate consequence for life, while House is as atheist as they come. She doesn’t think everything is rational, while he believes there’s always a reason or an explanation that puts everything together. As they start to talk about their different ideologies Eve comments that “you’re enjoying this conversation”. House cracks a smirk. “It’s the type of conversation I do well”. When it comes to the “personal stuff”, as Eve puts it, House doesn’t feel as confident. There are no answers, and if there are no answers why talk about it? Eve, on the other hand, wants to base her moment-to-moment life in who she has in front of her. Life is a series of rooms, as she puts it, and the people in those rooms add up to what life ends up being.
Eventually, House finds out Eve is pregnant. House insists on terminating the baby, which Eve is predictably against as a religious person. After a while he decides to bring her out for a walk, heading to a park where they have one last talk. House keeps confronting Eve on her religious views, trying to convince her to get an abortion. Little by little, however, the side of House that he doesn’t like to show starts to emerge. Eve asks if he thinks the man who did this to her feels guilty. When House evades the question and she asks him why he just answers questions with other questions he says that he doesn’t care what that person’s feeling, but rather what she’s feeling. Which brings him to ask the question once again: “Why did you choose me?”.
Eve starts tearing up, looking at him in the eyes. “There’s something about you”, she says. “It’s like you’re hurt too”. House understands that this is not something he can solve with a brilliant intuition or some dangerous (and unauthorized) but necessary medical procedure, as he usually does. There’s a human being in front of him that feels the same pain he’s hiding, and she wants to share that bond. He looks down for a second before saying that it was true. It wasn’t his grandmother, but it was true. It was his dad. House looks like he’s about to say something else, but stops. Eve doesn’t need to hear anything else. “I’d like to tell you what happened to me now”, she says with a heavy sigh. “I’d like to hear it”, he replies.
Later, while he’s in the break room with his best friend Wilson, Cuddy comes in and House says Eve agreed to terminate the baby. She claims she’s gonna be okay, but House doesn’t seem to agree. When Cuddy replies that her talking about what happened is a huge step forward for Eve and that House did good, he lets it all out. “And everyone will tell you that’s what we gotta make her do. We gotta help her, right? Except we can’t. We drag out her story, and tell each other we’ll help her heal, feel real good about ourselves. But maybe all we’ve done is make a girl cry”. Wilson asks him why he decided to help her if that’s what he thinks, and he stares down for a second. “Because… I don’t know”. He walks out to the notes of Grey Room by Damien Rice, replying to Wilson asking him if he’s gonna follow up on her with “one day, one room”.
House doesn’t reject emotions because they’re not rational. He hates them because he doesn’t want to deal with the pain that comes from them. He doesn’t like knowing there’s no answer, and that sometimes you will get hurt and healing might require more than vicodin pills. His horrible attitude towards others is his way of shielding himself from the world. His way to not get hurt. The brain loves doing this, especially when you’re depressed (House is depressed in case it wasn’t obvious) — it will create a wall to hide behind, so you can’t get hurt too badly. Locking up emotions and feelings that are too complicated behind a barrier so that getting wounded will hurt just a bit less. And yet, this is also how we lose the beautiful part of life. House spends most of his story looking for answers elsewhere, and it’s often implied (or, later on, explicitly shown) that, while other people carry on with their life, he’s stuck in place, unable to be happy again. House is, if nothing else, a really good representation of depression.
Which brings us to the part that hurts. The people that have read my previous articles asked me many times why I can’t just find other people to help me. So, if you’ll indulge me just a bit longer, I’d like to tell you my own story. Specifically the story of the person that I used to call my best friend.
We met for the first time around 2019, I believe. She entered our small group of depressed losers after getting invited. Just a group of five-six people that shared a common hobby (fighting games) and being depressed. I wasn’t sure at first, since she was the only person I’d never interacted with before, but she made it very easy to talk to her. At some point I left the group — depression is a bitch and all that. She stayed, though. We’d talk every day, sometimes for hours. Mostly me gushing about whatever obsession I was going through at the moment or crying about whatever was making me depressed, but she always made me feel like she listened. Which isn’t to say other people didn’t listen, of course, but this routes back to what I said at the beginning; people love to give advice, and I don’t need that. I’ve heard plenty of advice. None of it worked. I only understood why at the end of 2022.
That’s the period my ex-best friend transitioned. I’ve known my fair share of depressed people over the years — again, pain makes for a strong bond — , but I’d never seen someone rise back up like she did. It was like talking to a completely different person. After years of knowing her as a depressed and demotivated person she turned into one of the happiest people I know. And she wanted to share that happiness. She talked to me in a way that made me feel understood. There was no judgment in the way she replied to my cries, no intent on trying to “fix” what I was doing wrong, no attempt at hiding feelings for fear of showing too much attachment. When I broke down, she picked me back up. Despite the fact I was still a broken mess and she wasn’t, our bond was stronger than ever.
The breaking point was a discussion we had during the start of 2023. We were looking back at the past years and she opened up about how I had stressed her out in the past through my constant isolation and her trying to make sure I could still make it. And yet she never held it against me. The words she said still stay with me to this day.
“We were just two broken people doing our best, but we’ve both gotten a bit better, so let’s keep doing that”.
In one moment I felt all the defenses my brain had set up crash and fall. All the emotions that I’d kept locked for so long broke out — some negative, but most positive. Extremely positive. I felt appreciated. Loved. Genuinely loved by a person that had finally found her way and decided to use that energy to make me feel valued. The emotions I felt in those few months were the equivalent of over ten years of repressing the feelings I didn’t want to deal with, and it all came from one person. One person that didn’t feel the need to tell me what I was doing wrong or what I should be doing to fix myself. One person that just decided to tell me “I love you”. The answer was actually that simple.
Or not. Unfortunately a bond forged through pain is a double edged sword; once the pain is gone, so is the bond. She eventually found other people that made her world function in ways I couldn’t, or maybe I was simply too much to deal with. I’m not gonna make assumptions for her on this. Point is, that bond eventually died out, and she wasn’t willing to share that love with me any longer. The genuine happiness that I felt in those months evaporated, leaving space to the worst depression crash in the 12 years I’ve been dealing with this. All the other feelings that got out — the really bad ones — had nothing to stop them now, and I spent many nights crying on the floor waiting for the moment to end it.
But I didn’t. I went close, and probably should have, but I didn’t. And now the wall is back up. I haven’t been able to cry properly for over a year now. My brain won’t let me. It doesn’t want to feel that kind of pain anymore. It’d rather live in this state of constant but tolerable misery than expose itself to that heartbreaking level of pain again. So when people tell me to go to the therapist, lose weight, find new people and try all these things I’ve already tried all I can think about is how it all went horribly wrong with the one person I felt truly, genuinely understood me. And maybe I don’t want the wall to break down again. Maybe I don’t want to get burned like that again. Maybe I just want my best friend back, even if I know that’s never gonna happen.
But I do know that it’s never gonna happen. That friendship will never be the same. So I just gotta keep going and hope to find someone else that can fill that hole. Because I’ve been stuck in that room, trying to find a way out, and I haven’t been able to. Because nothing else has made me feel like those few months have. Because I’m living a life that feels meaningless and fake, and I need to know that at some point it’ll change. Because I want to desperately believe that, one day, I will be in a different room with a different person that will be willing to share that same bond.
Because… I don’t know.
