Category: Mental Health

He left in the mornings before I woke up and came home soon before I fell asleep, most days. As an actuarial consultant, he traveled a bit as well, but mostly he woke up early to start his hour-and-a-half long commute to from the suburbs of New Jersey to NY, to One Penn Plaza, just across the street from Penn Station, and far enough away to ensure as I grew up I saw him little outside of weekends, holidays, and tired homework help sessions that ran into the weekday nights.

My dad seemed to enjoy his job as an actuary, but I really don’t know what he felt about all of the responsibility to provide for a family, especially after he left his dream of becoming a physicist behind and settled for a stable corporate job using his math talents. I remember going into his office and him proudly showing off the views of the Empire State building, and vaguely recall him introducing me as a child to his colleagues.

This is the silence that should fill my heart with joy despite exhaustion — the 3am buzz of the persistent fan humming through the air with a tiny human person lying across my chest, nuzzled in my neck in the perfect fit puzzle of mother and child.

I want the night and my mind to be quiet and simple. I want to listen to my baby’s breath as it speeds up and slows down in his dreams of milk and nightmares of not having any. His tiny limbs comforted by my aging ones, our breaths synchronizing together as one.

I’ve always felt I was a disappointment to my father, and he made this clear at many times throughout my life. I know it was his means of tough love — of pushing me to be my best — but the voice in my head that says you are not good enough and you should not think or be different from the accepted norms of society is decidedly his.

Losing our parents is hard and happens at some point to everyone of us. For those with a purely loving relationship this can be filled with only sorrow, grief and fond memories. For others, it’s much more complicated.

Following a rash of celebrity suicides lately, as there is following any major celebrity suicide, there’s increased talk of mental health through social and national media. What isn’t talked about as much, though mentioned, is that the national suicide rate in the US has increased by 30% since 1999. That’s not just a minor increase — this is a major public health crisis.

The question is — what can or should we do about it? Some quick stats to get the conversation started: the annual age-adjusted suicide rate is 13.42 per 100,000 individuals. There are 123 suicides per day. This is the 10th leading cause of death in the US. Men die by suicide 3.53x more often than women. The rate of suicide is highest in middle-age white men in particular.

I want to write all of the details to process what happened today, but I should not. I can only share how hard it is to be in the situation many “adult children” are — in seeing a parent in poor health getting worse and worse, and the other unable to take care of them. I am glad I was here to handle this morning only because I can’t imagine what would have happened if I wasn’t. What would have happened if I hadn’t woken up to cries for help at 5am or the decisions that came after.

It’s questionable whether my fear of risk and failure was innate or taught through my parents risk-averse personalities, or both. I’ve been competitive from a young age, despite not being athletic, instead opting for art competitions and securing speaking/singing roles in school plays. But when it came to success and intelligence, I held this firm belief that the only worthy accomplishments were the ones that came naturally.

Clearly, this is the antithesis of how success occurs in 99.9% of cases.

“What is the point of it all,” asks the depressed person numerous times on a daily basis. Perhaps a sunrise-or-sunset-painted sky offers momentary respite from begging the world for an answer, but it’s so easy to return to the loop of wondering: why.

Happiness is incredibly alluring. But is happiness something one should even desire? Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs certainly doesn’t have “being happy” at the top. No, that’s “Self Actualization” — peak experiences where you are in flow and experiencing full creativity. Is that happiness? That moment where you are lost in your work — when you’re producing at full human capacity, that’s not happiness, is it? But it is distraction from the opposite. Maybe that’s the same thing.

Born with foot-in-mouth disease, my ability to think before I speak is nil. I’ve determined that there is some value in being so genuine no one would ever mistake my words for falsehood, but overall there is greater value in a carefully constructed existence, where communication is precise, thoughtful, and limited.

Communication skills are 50% learning when to shut up.