More Than Empathy:
A short reflection on a lifelong buzz in my head
When I was little, I dreaded night, especially summer nights. They seemed to go on forever in Virginia.
I remember the dry song of cicadas, filling the hot blind air with their requiem. I would stare at the maple tree just outside my window and wonder if I was the last person awake in the entire world. All I wanted to do was fall asleep and wake up again and go to the pool with my big brother.

My mom would pack us lunch each day. Fresh bread and cheese. A peach and plum. A juice-box. My brother and I would sit at the red benches or on the freshly cut grass and eat together. The hot sun overhead. It was the best time of the day. But it also started a ticking clock in my head.
How much longer till the sun goes down? How long till bed?
Night was always just around the corner, sneering at me.
***
“What are you doing?” asked my brother.
Click. Click. Click.
“Mark, what’s that noise?”
“I’m clicking my tongue to the top of my mouth.”
“It’s keeping me up.”
Click. Click. Click.
“Will you stop?”
“I’m trying to count my thoughts.”

I sat up on the pull-out couch in my grandparent’s house in Florida. Thoughts racing. Everyone was fast asleep. I was thinking about things–what I’d eat for breakfast the next day, if the sand would be good for making sandcastles, if death was kind of like a big sleep. There was never an off switch for my brain.
***
Tick. Tick. Tick.
Fast forward ten years. I was sitting in an office in McLean, Virginia, distracting myself by looking at the spines of dusty hardcovers on a mahogany bookshelf. There was a clock ticking on the table.
“Have you always had these feelings?” said the peculiar man in front of me.
“I guess. Maybe not as strongly.”
“Well, it seems plain as day that you’re depressed. You’ve been for a while.”
I didn’t need someone getting paid $300 an hour to tell me that. A fear of sleep as a three-year old and nights spent counting my thoughts as a six-year old were pretty good signs that something was rotten in Denmark. I was very familiar with the thing. He just gave the thing a name: depression.
My parents had encouraged me to go see a psychiatrist six weeks after my best friend wrapped his car around a tree. The night of the accident, I beat my fists into the ceramic wall of my bathroom while in the shower. They bled and I cried and yelled for him to come back. My girlfriend and friends were downstairs fast asleep in my bedroom. That was my first panic attack. Or at least, it was the first time that thing was given a name: panic attack.
I quit a bunch of things that year. Basketball. Church. School dances. But I didn’t disappear completely. I still showed up to class, got all A’s, went to parties and shows, drank with friends, and generally lived life with vigor. But I would take pills to sleep. And hated being alone in my room. In fact, I moved upstairs to my childhood bedroom for months. It was the only place I felt secure.

***
In December of 2006, I was driving home from Charlottesville, Virginia–where I was enrolled at the University of Virginia–at least once a week. It was right before finals and I had scheduled a brutal course-load for my first semester of college. I couldn’t stop having panic attacks. Multiple a day. I would hide in my room and suffer through them alone and then force myself to go meet friends out at parties. If I felt one rising up while out, I would sneak back to my dorm room. What they saw was starkly different than how I felt.

My dad encouraged me to study business and economics. Studying for these exams was enough to push me over the edge. Supply and demand and competition and consumption. It all made my stomach turn. My intro to buddhism class brought no calm to my life. I would chain smoke cigarettes on the way to it every Tuesday.
I was also taking a poetry class and a film class. In the latter, we studied Martin Scorsese’s body of work. I bought all of the films that were on our curriculum: Mean Streets, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, Gangs of New York, and The Departed. Despite the fact that his protagonists suffered from depression, anxiety, schizophrenia (you name it), I felt safe while watching them, bundled up in blankets on my couch at home. It was a temporary escape from my brain. And a reminder that I wasn’t alone.
Literature and the arts kept me at the University of Virginia. I never took a business course after that first semester. I chose John Keats and Marty Scorsese instead.

***
“Dude, put these in. You’ll be fine.” My friend was handing me his earbuds and turned on a song on his I-Pod, as the cars whooshed by.
We Are the Champions by Queen.
We were in a cab, and the colors of Barcelona were on fire. I felt the slow rise of panic creeping up my chest.
“How long does this take to hit?”
My friend laughed back at me.
I was terrified. But the melody of a familiar song with a dumb chorus lifted me up.
Everything was on fire when we reached Park Güell. We walked up the stairs and the patterns melted together. We spent the day watching birds, drinking boxed wine, and picking up petals of flowers from off the dirt; I spent the day looking inward. I liked what I saw. It wasn’t just dark and heavy and scary. It was at times. But it was other things, too. It was light and powerful and dynamic. It was everything existing at once. It was me, in all of my complexity, dancing and flowing and being in that moment, on a blue and green rock, traveling through space.
***
Five years later, I moved out to San Francisco on a whim. I had finished my master’s degree in Conflict Resolution (I know, English Literature to Peace Studies–real bank busters) in Washington, DC. And I was stuck in a harmful pattern of thought. My parents had recently divorced and I felt like I was twenty-five going on sixty-three. Or eighty-six. For some reason, I was always eighty-six when I thought about it, there on my death bed, thinking to myself, “Wow, this feels familiar. I’ve been waiting for this moment my entire life.”
After some encouragement from my best friend, I packed a single bag, my bright green sleeping bag, and bought a one-way ticket to SF.

When I arrived, I leaned into all the things I liked about myself. The things that maybe most see as me. But when you live with you, the other side sometimes speaks louder. Or at least it sticks more to you–like barnacles on a freshly painted boat.
***
I don’t mean to say that San Francisco or psychedelics or film have been the cure all for everything, though they’ve certainly helped.
I’m not cured.
But there’s something in that sentence. Being cured implies there’s a sickness. I’ve learned I’m far from sick. Life is dialectic. For every low I’ve felt, I’ve experienced the equal and opposite feeling of joy and bliss and love. For that, I’m so grateful.
There’s also no outrunning my brain. It will always be there. Sure, I can read Thich Nhat Hahn or exercise or pour myself into things larger than myself. All these things help. But wherever you go, there you are.
I’m here now.
And here isn’t always peachy.

I still struggle at times (though with far less frequency). I fall back into patterns of thought that I could have sworn I had left behind. Some days it’s scary as shit living in my brain. In many ways, I’m the same little boy gazing on the maple tree outside his bedroom window.
But those feelings no longer define me. I’m not depression or anxiety. I’m a lot of things. All of which I celebrate for making me, me.
***
People are losing the fight every day. We see it on the news. Chris Cornell. Chester Bennington. Robin Williams. And we have friends that have lost the battle, too. Friends that while alive set rooms on fire with their energy. They’re often the ones people count on; they’re rocks, carrying the burden for others. They’re bold and brave and dynamic. They’re the ones who took you to your first rock show. Or showed you a few moves before your middle school dance.
They’re not weak or sick or crazy. They’re humans. Complex and beautiful and trying to make sense of this giant rock ball, just like you.
When it comes to this topic, we need more than empathy. It isn’t enough to feel sad or be reminded of suffering when we hear a tragic story. We need compassion (in Latin, to suffer with). This moves us toward action and solidarity. We need curiosity and to make time to be curious. And we need the strength to have conversations that make us uncomfortable.
Sometimes simple gestures can make all the difference. A shared meal or familiar song. Encouragement to take a leap of faith. A note or text: “How are you doing? Let me know how I can support you. I love you.”
Little acts of kindness and love. They’ve made all the difference for me.
***
written for all those who feel alone out there. you’re not. we’re here.
Mark Magellan is a storyteller and community builder. His mission is to use stories to transform people, organizations, and communities.
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