Charlie Brown’s Existential Crisis Saved My Life
No one talked about kids and depression when I was little; no one, but Charles M. Schultz and Charlie Brown.
“The secret to life, is to replace one worry with another.”
“I have a new philosophy; I only dread one day at a time.”
~Charlie Brown
My childhood memories tend to be vague, distant as the time itself. When they come into specific relief, they are a loud, tangled mess, punctuated ever so sporadically by familiar talismans of 1970s suburbia.
Situation comedy childhoods — a football to the nose, Mrs. Beasley, a tonsillectomy — I remember those better than mine, but no more fondly. Thin, blonde, and disproportionately happy, I had nothing in common with these kids. There was nothing funny about my family’s problems and issues were never resolved in 22 minutes.
Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang, however, that I understood. Charles Schultz never tried to pull the wool over kids’ eyes. He acknowledged that childhood was not for the faint of heart.
Filled with irony, and a constant reminder of real life’s lack of fairness, Peanuts represented childhood in a way that I understood, and it was comforting. Peanuts’ precocious little group of kindergarten and first graders represented a broad spectrum of fears and neuroses. Already jaded, even cynical, Peanuts’ characters introduced America to childhood depression.
From its debut, the mental health struggles of “Good Ole’ Charlie Bown” anchored the strip, specifically the loneliness of the outcast. Almost from the first panel, Charles Schiltz and Peanuts, originally titled, Lil’ Folks addressed mental health issues like depression, anxiety, agoraphobia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Chronicled with irony, humor, and compassion, Charlie Brown’s struggle with depression and anxiety helped me recognize and understand the consuming, painful feelings I had. As long as I was reading the little paperbacks-that seemed happily endless-I felt less alone. I was less alone.
You are four, maybe five and you are sad.
You are always sad.
Only it’s much more than sad this dense thing that starts in your brain then soon envelopes you. And it’s exacerbated by something your mom calls worry. Because if you are not sad about what is happening, you are sad about what is going to happen, and always what may happen.
At four, maybe five you have absolutely no way of knowing what category of storm is headed your way but given the turmoil in your own house on any given day, it sure doesn’t look good.
So, you’re sad and worried and being sad makes you worry more and worrying more makes you sadder still.
Now, wrapped tightly around the sharp, black branches of sad and worry in that dank forest upstairs that lets in no light, grows a thick, greedy, choking vine called “fear.”
Fear, the most destructive thing in your forest, is omnipresent. Fear is the second shoe. There is always a second shoe and as sure as you were born that motherfucker will drop. You can’t stop it no matter how hard you try. All you can do is wait and hope that when the shoe lands, it lands near you, not on, you.
Whether the waiting or the dropping is worse, is hard to say, but relief is rare, which is why you will still have a “binky” at 10 1/2 years old and the attendant, epic shame that always accompanies addiction.
For several years, besides the binky, you rely on re-runs of a television show for solace. Every day from five thirty to six thirty you hide under your dad’s desk, emerging only for snacks — too many snacks, because after all, you’re four, maybe five and can’t mix a Manhattan yet.
When Park Avenue Beat rockets out of the television you are so fucking Zen for the next hour you are Buddha. Sure, someone gets murdered in each episode, but the inevitability of justice — always procured by the handsome attorney and his sunny gal Friday — will fix everything.
Not for you, of course, but for a while they will calm you with the inherent suggestion that there will be gentler places well off in the distance, a temporary antidote to the inhospitable landscapes of home and school. At four, maybe five, this is a lifeline.
With the closing theme, dread floods the little space under the desk. Any minute dad will walk in the door and the long night will begin, thick with such violence and anger between your parents that there should be a curfew to get everyone off the otherwise safe suburban streets. They, of course, always seem unscathed the next morning.
The family dinner table isn’t so much a place to eat as it is a boxing ring. Most nights it feels as if your parents are going to fight to the death. Mom plunges a fork into the back of Dad’s hand, which he raises to slap her. She kicks back. Shattered antiques litter the floor to hurt mom, spaghetti hangs, gooey, from the wall so dad goes unfed.
Anyone could have predicted the eating disorder headed your way. Your entire childhood you never spend more than ten minutes at the dinner table, can you
I never knew anyway.
No one talked about kids’ mental health when I was little. The media was only just starting to address adults’ mental health. Kids were supposed to be, at least they were presented to us as, preternaturally happy.
Until Charlie Brown, I felt different, wrong, but I could not have told you why. By first grade, depression and anxiety and I were so inextricably entwined it was if they were grafted to me like a plant being cultivated, until we grew into ad along with each other.
School was tricky. My teacher disliked me and held me up as an example of everything that could be wrong with a six-year-old. Mornings I managed, even if I occasionally wet my pants when she yelled at me, but there was no way could I handle the cafeteria. Each day — until the principal said it had to stop — mom picked me up to eat lunch at home. Once in the car to go back to school, I rocked the whole way, steeling myself for the afternoon.
No one should be that brittle at six.
That was the first December I saw, “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” Within the first few moments of the show, Charlie Brown tells his best friend Linus, “I’m depressed.”
And although I had never heard the word before, I knew exactly what he meant, what he felt. It was a revelation that could not have been more astonishing if the Angel had cut in front of the Three Wise Men, to bring me to the manger to greet the Baby Jesus, Himself.
Charlie Brown was an unhappy child and not because he lost a favorite toy or got hit in the nose with a football. Charlie Brown was unhappy because of life, its random luck, other, often cruel inhabitants, and his inability to understand his place in it all.
“A Charlie Brown Christmas” was, in fact, a thirty-minute existential crisis, a sweetly subversive message for 1965 with children’s frailties in every frame.
Linus is wise, pensive, and centered — apart from The Great Pumpkin. In explaining the true meaning of Christmas to Charlie Brown, he brings him peace, then exits the spotlight, once again cuddling his safety blanket and sucking his thumb.
Linus’ sister Lucy has a psychiatry stand, where she “treats” Charlie Brown at 5-cents a pop. Going through a litany of his possible phobias, she finally nails it when she asks if he has pantophobia, “The fear of everything.”
“That’s it!” he screams.
These were my people.
I wanted to watch it over and over, but it would be years before we had the technology to make that possible. A couple of years later year I discovered the Peanuts gang in paperback and my life changed. Charlie Brown rode shotgun everywhere I went.
The more riddled with self-doubt, fear and worry Charlie Brown was, the better I felt. Some strips were slapstick humor, others were witty, and a few were just plain dark.
When Charlie Brown debuted in 1948, we didn’t even see him. Asked where Charlie Brown is, a kid who has just buried him in the sand box, says he hasn’t seen him.
In the early years, Snoopy is an adorable, loyal puppy with looping ears. By the time Charlie Brown refers sarcastically to him as “man’s best friend” in the Christmas special, he has become the most self-absorbed character in cartoons.
Devastatingly charming, gifted, and prone to drama, Snoopy is a classic narcissist. He insists his needs come first, craves attention, and mocks or ignores Charlie Brown, the one person who takes care of him.
Over the years, “Snoopys” would recur repeatedly in my life.
My parents’ 40-year battle, and the abject self-absorption that came with it, often made me invisible to them. Most days their rage and alcohol dictated our lives.
But there was a genetic component, too. In newborn photos, my fresh cheeks are scratched and bloody from my frantic fingers. Depression churned and chewed through the women in my mom’s family, like a brutal storm leaving them wrecks at the bottom of the sea.
After years of seeing Lucy “treat” Charlie, I asked my sophisticated, world-traveling parents if I could go to a psychiatrist. I can still see the ashen looks on their faces when they informed me that children did not go to psychiatrists.
I did not ask again.
Until I was old enough to find my way to the couch on my own, Peanuts’ cast of anxious, depressed, occasionally jaded, often sarcastic kids suffering under the weight of a frequently cruel world, sufficed.
Plenty of kids read the Charlie Brown books casually but for many years I never met anyone who took solace from them as I did. Until I met my partner of 27 years.
Not a terribly emotional person, when we shared our first “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” it dragged it all out of her. She loved those books almost as much as I did, for similar reasons.
I don’t think Charles Schultz, with whom I sporadically corresponded for a few years, meant the strip as a mental health manifesto for kids when he started out.
When Lil Folks went into syndication his bosses wanted the name changed to Peanuts. Schultz always hated that name and Lil Folks probably better imparted his intent.
I do know that he understood what Charlie Brown meant to generations of kids suffering from anxiety and depression, at a time when no one even acknowledged kids could be sad. He was very proud of that.
While a kid should never have to depend on a cartoon like Charlie Brown for therapeutic help, when you are four, maybe five, and utterly alone in the grim, you are damn glad he is there.
