Dear Ones —
The sad news about Robin Williams's suicide makes me need to remind you all to please, please, please take care of your beautiful lives, and to please seek help if the snakes in your head have been attacking you without mercy.
I wanted to share with you this tweet that the great Harvey Fierstein wrote yesterday, in mourning over his old friend. He has said it perfectly. Do not fuck with depression, and do not let it corner you alone in a room.
Pick up the phone and call someone. Don't let your pride or your pain force you into silence or isolation.
I once read an article about the Golden Gate Bridge, and how it has become a suicide magnet over the decades — to the point that public health officials must struggle with how to make the bridge somehow less appealing to the despairing and the lost. The story quoted the one man who ever survived a jump off the bridge. He said that he had wanted to die because his life was so hopeless, and he'd lost everything — his spouse, his job, his dignity, his friends, his meaning. But then, he said, in the moment that he jumped, he was overcome with this one remarkable, true realization: "Everything in my life can be changed and reversed…except what I have just done." Luckily, impossibly, he survived. But far too many others do not — and far too many others do make that final, irreversible decision.
As someone who has been through depression and came out on the other side (with help from: therapy, friends, medication, meditation, prayer) I beg you to not walk alone through your darkest shadows.
And please share here your own thoughts and wisdom and resources on this topic. Let's be of help to each other, always.
With love,
Liz
