An evening last week I biked out to what can best be
described as the small wooden pavilion on the Riverview side of the Petticodiac
river adjacent to Bore View Park. I was
happy to be the only one there when I arrived since I was really craving some
alone time. It was a warm windy evening
that finally felt like summer. I took my
helmet off and stood on the side of the pavilion looking at the Moncton
side. I could see people on the trail on
the other side. They seemed so close but
still far enough that they wouldn’t recognize me even if they were
watching. I meditated for a while then
just stood there and paid attention to the feeling of the warm breeze on my
skin. It felt good. The solitude and stillness made me feel a
strong sense of peace.
Riding there, I could feel that my focus was off. It’s been like that off and on since the
concussion, but mostly on, especially when I’m doing something that involves movement and when I get tired. I felt pretty bummed out that my brain just can’t
go as fast as the rest of my body anymore.
It’s a feeling of disconnection, a foggy, dream-like state that requires
me to concentrate so much harder but still leaves me feeling like I’m not
interacting directly with my physical surroundings. In so many ways, I feel like I’m no longer
part of this physical world when I feel like this. I kindof feel half-dead.
Buddhists regularly meditate on death. Since it’s a sure thing, why not get
comfortable with it? This really makes
sense to me. Becoming at ease with our
mortality is how we become brave and free.
As I stood on the side of the pavilion, feeling so very disconnected
from the world around me, looking at the city from the outside, on the other
side of the river meditating, I thought about my mortality. I thought about how I
felt like I was having an out-of-body experience, looking down at the world
from above in this very moment. I
thought about the intense peace that I was feeling. And then this intense peace suddenly scared
the shit out of me. The fear that I was
feeling wasn’t a fear of dying, but rather a fear of not being afraid of dying.
I still have many fears. I am always afraid of leaving my loved ones
and suffering before I die and I am always terrified of hitting my head again
every single minute of every day, but in that specific moment I wasn’t afraid of
death. Maybe a certain fear of death is
necessary to keep us alive?
Following the recent deaths of Kate Spade and Anthony
Bourdain from suicide there is a shit load of talk on social media and the rest
of the internet about depression and mental illness. Depression, like Type 1 Diabetes and Post-Concussion Syndrome, is invisible. With celebrities, we build them up as being
inhuman. Not that they are more
important than the many other non-celebrities that die from suicide each and
every day but we tend to look at them differently. We have been brainwashed to believe that if
we just had enough money and success that our lives would finally be perfect,
that we would finally be happy. Both of
these celebrities had achieved this and even more. Their deaths prove to us that external
abundance can never fill our inner void.
And that really shakes us to our core because it really goes against
what society has taught us. The thing is
that society doesn’t give a shit about you and your happiness. It just wants you to work hard and spend lots
of money to make the economy thrive. And
it wants you to do this without questioning why.
Premature death seems unfair to us since we’ve been told
that we deserve more. I’m not really
sure why I chose the word “premature” here because is there really an age when
we are expected to die? Maybe that age
is the average life expectancy?
Unconsciously we all figure we’ve at least got that much time, even
longer, as long as we follow the guidelines that our medical community has
established.
With suicide there is underlying belief that it is a choice
and that it could have been prevented.
Maybe in some cases things can get better in the end with proper
treatment? Some do manage to survive
severe suicidal depression. What do we
have if not at least a bit of hope?
I’ve never been suicidal.
The year after my concussion, I can say that I felt quite depressed and
didn’t really want to continue living with the extreme physical feelings of
disconnection that I was constantly feeling at the time but I can’t say that I
was planning ways to end my life. My
brain was (as still is to a certain extent) physically broken and this had a
very big effect on my quality of life which caused my depression. Like all of our other organs, our brains can
become broken beyond repair, caused by both physical and emotional trauma, and
the result is terminal depression ending in death from the disease called suicide. Just like dying from heart failure, kidney
failure or liver failure, I see suicide as dying from brain failure.
Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain were very smart and I’m sure
that they knew about Helplines that they could have called in order to seek
help, but they didn’t reach out. It was
too late. It was far beyond a call for
help. Their brains were broken beyond
repair. They died from brain failure.
Openly talking about it is a start but in the end I think
we’re all to blame for the rise in mental illness. We have created a society based on
competition and elitism where we celebrate and adore the best, the
winners. We all get caught up in this
spell of losing ourselves in working towards reaching the top, seeking excellence. But in order for someone to win, everyone
else has to lose. By design, this system
will always breed unhappiness, a feeling of not quite measuring up, of never
being enough. Even for those who do
manage to reach the top, they know deep-down that everyone else is working
relentlessly to bring them down, to take their place on the top step. It is as stressful, maybe even more
stressful, to stay on top of the power pyramid as it is to climb up it.
Standing on the side of the pavilion contemplating my
mortality I felt alive again. Just like
Type 1 gaming being a constant reminder of the fragility of life as we live
with every single insulin injection avoiding a certain death, happiness would
be meaningless without suffering. It may
just be a matter of becoming still enough every once in a while to remind us of
this truth.
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