Do we ever answer the question “How are you?” truthfully? How often do we answer with a simple “I’m good” or “I’m fine” to avoid a deeper conversation and analysis of our current situation?
Recently, I’ve been through quite a rough patch. Finishing my masters in dramatic writing at NYU, and then falling into a life of unemployment and boredom, led to a deepening of my already existent depression, and a series of bad decisions, some my own, some by others, that placed me in an almost catatonic state.
I don’t do well with idleness. I knew this would happen. Terrified of graduating, though I was ready for a break from writing eight different pieces at once, I knew the stress of having nothing to do was much harder for me than the stress of being too occupied.
And so, now, as folks ask me a very simple question, a question asked multiple times per day, I freeze. “How are you?” “How have you been?” Paralyzed, I wonder if I should tell them. If I should tell them about how I was scammed, my bank account closed. How one night while drunk I fell asleep on the subway, and ended up lost, wandering in a part of Brooklyn I didn’t recognize. How in that vulnerable state I accepted a car ride from a stranger, thinking naively it would just be a ride home, that he wouldn’t want, wouldn’t try to force anything from me in return. How I thought I deserved that, because I’d been drunk, because I’d been lost, because I’d accepted the ride home. How that event shattered me, how it made me never want to leave my couch. How hard it is to be productive, search for jobs, keep writing, keep active, when in that state.
So often, to quote Mariah Carey, I wore my disguise til I lay down at night, and then I broke down and cried — ieeed — -ieeed.
But the truth is, I actually told a fair amount of people. I’ve learned over the years, people can’t know you’re going through something, or how things are affecting you, unless you tell them.
I found the reason I wasn’t telling people, or why I’d brush it off with a “Things are kinda rough, but they’ll get better” or “When you’ve hit rock bottom there is no where to go but up!” wasn’t for myself, but for the other person. When you tell someone about a personal tragedy, you then have to worry not only about your own emotions, and what retelling the story will do to you, but you also have to worry about the other person’s emotions, and how their emotional reaction will impact you. So often, we keep these things to ourselves. I know I have talked to a number of friends about this, who have dealt with the deaths of parents, of serious breakups, of divorces, unemployment, by simply answering “How are you?” with a shrug.
Is it too much to answer how are you with: “I feel the crushing despair of life and sometimes found death as appealing as a soft warm blanket with which to take a cat nap and then fall into a deeper slumber?” Probably, and that’s probably why we often say clichéd phrases like “hanging in there” even when we don’t know how much longer we can hang on. Is it a week? This branch can hold. A month? I might need some folks to place a safety net underneath me to catch me.
So to some people, I’ve kept these secrets. To others, I’ve bared all. And those folks have become my safety net.
