...limbo...

This essay talks about depression, suicide, and dancing the limbo.  It’s Halloween so I can show you my monsters.  If you have never been to limbo, I’m hoping this helps share what it looked and felt like to me.  Thanks as always for your eyes, ears, and most of all YOUR BRAINS!

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“Limbo (Latin: limbus, 'edge' or 'boundary', referring to the edge of Hell) is the afterlife condition of those who die in original sin without being assigned to the Hell of the Damned. It has become the general term to refer to nothing between time and space in general.”

-Wikipedia-

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“How low can you go?  How low can you go?”

-Kal Mann & Billy Strange-

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The problem with depression is it can just as easily make itself a home in you as you inside of it.  It’s a scentless fart.  No one knows when it is in or around them, and yet it is totally full of shit.  My depression was a ghost display at an abandoned mall in some town I’ve never been to.  Occasionally I would consider its existence, but best I could do to know its truth was assume its identity. 

I’d see a sheet with dead open eyes, some cobwebs asleep without a spider, and the dusty brown glass someone finger stroked Bobby Loves Lois on.   Depression was fake memories of somewhere I had never been and couldn’t get to.  I was depressed but unaware.  

Depression wasn’t the ghost on display.  

I was.

I hurt a lot growing up.  I’d say ouch when the barber cut my hair.  That was not real pain.  Real pain is a pair of broken arms and legs (had those too).  Real pain is a hangnail, a paper cut between the fingers, and hearing someone use chalk on a chalkboard.  It is the loss of life and love.  It is having to listen to Yanni, Raffi, or any musician who ends their name with double consonants and a letter I (Kenny G is on this list whether or not Kenni knows it).

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I couldn’t hurt enough.  

The simple things are the hardest because they require trust.  I trusted my hurt.  I knew how real it was to feel sad, to find sadness, to hold and to know it.  I knew this because my family trusted sadness also.  Seeing the best of anything was not in our DNA.  We were midwestern, born of frozen tundra and passive aggressive enjoyment like watching purple colored vikings play with balls.  

My mom’s dad died when she was just a little girl.  That hurt.  My great grandparents died when I was just a little boy.  That hurt.  My dad got beat when he was a kid.  That hurt.  My dad hurt me and my siblings. I hurt me and my siblings. My siblings hurt me and my siblings.  That hurt.  All that fucking hurt hurts.  That hurt.  

I knew a girl who disappeared.  Another cut her wrists on the phone with me.  I got a handful of friends who are missing or asleep in prison.  I know a buddy who doesn’t have a head anymore.  

All that hurt. 

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Alone in my mind, surrounded by friends and family in my reality, I turned to the idea that strangers must be my solution.  I felt like hell, and heaven would be dialing 1-800-DEAR-GOD-HELP-ME-FUCK.  I did what any suicidally-non-suicidal human does, and searched the internet for suicide hotlines.  

What did the world wide web give me?  About a hundred different options.  Nothing like a cool drink of so many choices to cool down a headful of heinous voices.  

I could have been dialing 1-900 psychic lines.  Trying to talk to a medium to make me feel large again.  I could have called any of a number of 1-800-SUCK-ME-SEX-ME numbers.  

I could have just crank-yanked it and started pranking all of Pittsburgh.  I used to love calling strangers and farting on a phone.  Asking some midwestern dad if I could be his mom.  Calling some shop and saying buy me I’m for sale.  Prank calls were the lifeblood of my youth.  

But in my despair I wanted to talk seriously to a serious stranger, not jerk around some joker. 

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“It's always funny until someone gets hurt. Then it's just hilarious.”

-Bill Hicks-

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How low could I go?  

How low could I go?  

I dialed the first of the three phone numbers.  

Ring.  Ring.  Ring.  No one answered.  Had I chosen the wrong number?  I put the phone down and on speaker.  Ring.  Ring.  Ring.   No one answered.  Was I being pranked?  

Here I was, a man at wit’s edge, devolved to seeking counsel with a random human on a hotline, and no one was there to pick up.  This helped explain why there are so many numbers I could dial.  I must have chosen an old closed service.

I dialed the second of the three phone numbers.  

Ring.  Ring.  Ring.  An automated voice came on.  Immediate hang up.  Robots are even more depressing to me than myself.  What’s a robot know about wanting to jump in a river and forget how to swim?  Was it going to relate to me about the time someone turned them off?  

I didn’t need a robot.  I needed to talk to the only person who could help me.  A totally strange stranger that I knew absolutely nothing about who may or may not have been qualified to provide me with my specific exact needs at that exact specific emotional moment.

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The tears had dried on the corners of my eyes.  I was unaware that they had even come out of me until I felt the itching itch of their salty stain.  I dialed the third of the three numbers and a human finally picked up.  

“Hello this is the BLAH-BLAH-BLAH-BLAH help line, can you please hold?”

And there it was.  Like a zap of lightning with fluttering thunder I felt like god had just farted in my face.  I hung up the phone and stumbled to my couch.  Wet tears came out this time.  Wet tears of laughter.  It truly felt like a joke.  And like all great comedy, the humor in the situation revealed to me the truth (and involved farting). 

What was I doing?  

Here I was, in a house I shared with someone I loved.  Alive because somebody loved someone enough to make me.  Next to two confused animals that loved and needed my love.  I had friends who loved me.  Maybe even a couple of strangers who did too.  And here I was looking for love in all the wrong places.  The phone call I was making wasn’t to find a stranger.  It was to find myself.

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I didn’t love me.  

I had imagined that the lower I went, the more I might find an answer to my sadness.  But above my underworld, at the party, everyone was dancing and having a good time.  They came to play the limbo.  I had come to win it.  

I wanted to win the limbo so bad I had bulldozed myself into an earthy asshole without a ladder.  No one knew how far down I was.  No one saw me digging my grave.  To everyone at the party I was just another reveler.  To myself I was a ghost.  I was a zombie.

That was my depression.  It was a costume.  It was an invisible sidekick helping me solve nothing.  It was me farting in my own face (only the most limber can limbo like this).  

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The tears stopped.  I sighed a sighing sigh.  My apparition inhabited me like a greedy goblin at a buttered-bat buffet, said “help yourself”, and then puffed into the night (…pfft-boo…).

I hung out with a friend the next day and told them this story.  We both laughed.  I called up my doctor and said I might need to talk to a therapist (another horror story is how hard it is to get mental health help through insurance).  I made a commitment to myself to do something different every day, knowing that if I kept doing the same things the same way I would end up right back where I was, or worse.  

I don’t think there is anything anyone could have said to me that would have saved me from my situation.  The trouble with self-inflicted pain is only I knew about it.  Everybody hurts sometimes.  Not everybody tells you they are hurting.  

For someone who is in limbo, the only person who might truly help them is themselves.  One of the best ways out is to just keep dancing.  Change the song and DJ yourself.  I like dancing, but I am over the limbo.  I made it under the stick.  Time to boogaloo and watusi.

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“No matter how low you go, there's always an unexplored basement.” 

-F. Scott Fitzgerald-

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…thanks to

Leo Hepis

Lee A Smart

&

Yelena Osin

for your editing and feedback on this…always fun to dance with y’all…Dearest readers — If you like my photos or writing please share them with all your favorite boils and ghouls. A special thank to you as well dear reader and my friend Adam Traub for sharing with me this fine Halloween video. Enjoy and have an awesome forever.

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