The Loss of Robin Williams and Why We Must Keep Talking About Depression

Yesterday, along with the rest of the world, I got the horrible news that Robin Williams had died. Even worse, he had taken his own life.

I found out via a breaking news email, tiny text in a few sentences on my cell phone. I gasped, and had to read it twice before I could answer my husband’s cries of “What’s wrong?”

I felt sick. Of course I didn’t know Robin Williams personally. I was just a fan. But anytime I read of anyone losing a battle with depression, committing suicide, I feel this way. It can be a stranger I read about in a newspaper article, a random obituary. It makes my heart hurt, because I know that pain.

After I read the email, my husband and I immediately turned to the 24 hour news channel on the television, and watched as the story unfolded. Already, stars and mourners were sharing their shock and memories of Robin Williams. I watched as social media turned into a place for people to grieve openly, and I was pleasantly surprised to see compassion dominate the postings. People were so shocked that someone who had given them such happy and touching moments in their lives was, in reality, suffering so much. They wished they had known--wished they could have helped somehow. It was hard for people to fathom how someone who had brought so much joy to the world could have possibly not felt that same joy returned to him.

Suddenly, total strangers offered their contact information out to the world—if anyone needed someone to talk to, just call, just write. YOU are important. YOU matter. People began to realize that if this could happen to someone like Robin Williams, it could happen to any one of us. They wanted to help. I found myself tearing up at the outpouring of love in honor of this man’s passing.

All I could think about was his last moments. I cannot claim to know his personal suffering, but like anyone who has battled severe depression, like anyone who has attempted suicide and been in that low, horrible place, I felt I knew something few people know. There is just a darkness that is like nothing else, that you can’t escape, that you can’t see a way out of, that envelopes you and hurts like nothing else. You feel worthless in a way that is bottomless. You feel like such a burden to everyone and everything and that you will be relieving the world of you and your problems if you are gone. There is nothing more painful, more confusing, and more horrible than those moments. You want to die and you don’t. You want to the pain to end, you want so badly to be anything other than this dark, horrible thing that you are.

I hated so badly that someone so gifted, so genuine, who had given so much, felt that way, and was alone like that in his last moments. But everyone who dies like that is alone in those moments, and it always hits me the same way when I hear about it. I hate it.

If we learned anything from Robin Williams’ death, we learned that depression can affect anyone. It doesn’t matter how rich, how talented, how popular, or well thought of you are…depression doesn’t discriminate. It can crawl in on shadowy feet into the minds and souls of any one of us. It isn’t a choice or a mood. It is a disease, and it can be fatal.

I was so, so fortunate to have survived my battle with depression, that lasted most of my adult life. I am one of those people who will always have to be careful, always aware that depression will be just below the surface for me, easier to inhabit my psyche. For me, it feels like a rope around my waist, loosely hanging now, as I am healthy and fine, but with the threat of it always being able to pull tight and drag me down. I have to know and understand my triggers, take care of myself, not let myself get too stressed by work (or life), get enough sleep, take medication, and seek help if I feel myself slipping.

What I think was also apparent as I watched social media erupt with love and grief last night, was so many people shared their own battles with depression. It’s almost absurd that we have the stigma that we do, when almost everyone either has suffered from depression or is close to someone who has. It’s as if we are all keeping this big, stupid secret about something that is painfully obvious and happening all the time to all of us right before our eyes. Because it is. Life is so hard. We all struggle. We all need help sometimes. Keeping quiet is what leads people into lonely rooms to take their lives. We have to keep talking.

If Robin Williams had been just another comedian, he wouldn’t have touched people the way he did. Sure, everyone loves to laugh, and someone who makes you laugh is always welcome. But the reason Robin Williams was so beloved is because he surprised us. He was one of the most gifted funny men out there. He could truly make you belly laugh like no one else. But then, almost out of nowhere, he appeared on screen in serious roles and showed all this heart and made us weep. There was such a true genuineness in his dramatic roles, they were as touching as his comedic roles were funny. There are so few people in the world with that much range, that much depth—to be able to pull off both comedic and dramatic roles the way that he did. I believe he felt things so deeply, he gave so much and we, his audience, felt that too.

To me, he always seemed a little tortured, fighting something—in a beautiful way. You could tell he felt everything, deeply. That’s why his performances rang so true. I have just felt so sad by this loss, all the performances we won’t see, what we will miss out on now that he is gone. But most of all, I can’t quit thinking of his last moments, and I am haunted.

My hope in all of this, in all of the compassion, the sadness, and the realization is that out of this huge loss, a conversation will start and continue. This is the best example of the fact that depression can affect ANYONE. Robin Williams has left an amazing legacy of his work onscreen, but my hope is also that another legacy will be that so many lives will be saved because we all kept talking, and more people came out of the shadows, and stayed out of their lonely rooms and more people reached out for help.

I think he would have loved that. Don’t you?

Please, if you are contemplating suicide, know that you are not alone. YOU ARE IMPORTANT. YOU MATTER. No matter how bad things are right now, they can get better. Reach out for help.
Call this hotline—I have called this number before—they save lives and they can save yours:

1-800-784-2433 (1-800-SUICIDE)

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Shots in the Dark

I was unable to sleep Thursday night. In fact, even though I had a really important meeting scheduled for Friday, I ended up only sleeping two and a half hours total. I watched a few DVDs, and as usual, the glowing screen of my laptop was only a few feet away.

I happened to have Twitter open and on my screen, and I noticed a sudden burst of activity. Updates at 3:00am, even from the people I follow internationally, are never that frequent. A few random bits of information about a mass shooting in Colorado at a movie theater began to trickle in. Then major news outlets were breaking the news in more detail.

I ended up getting all of my information online, and literally watching the story unfold before me via 140 character updates, and online local news feeds from the Aurora area. I worried as I watched the death toll rise frighteningly fast from more and more sources. I read “first hand” accounts, and saw information passed along from people who were there, living this nightmare.

Honestly, after a few minutes of staring at the screen and toggling back and forth between websites, the thing that I kept thinking about was the book Columbine by Dave Cullen. When tragedies like the one in Aurora, Colorado happen, I make myself remember that so much inaccurate reporting happens in the moments right after something this horrible and chaotic. Case in point, at one time last night, several reputable sources were reporting that 39 people were dead, with 79 wounded.

Does it matter who got what number wrong? Yes. It does. It also matters when well-meaning witnesses, onlookers, and the media themselves get things terribly wrong. In the race to get the story, break the story, and LEAD with the story, so many things get quoted without double checking. In fact, without checking at all.

I am as guilty as anyone of getting sucked into the exciting and tragic moments, waiting for updates, and mostly, just wanting so badly to understand, quickly, why and how something like this happens. But the truth is, we never really forget the things we hear first, and they become part of accepted fact, no matter how wrong or damning the information may be. The corrections to numbers, people’s personal histories, and comments of “witnesses” are never front page news, so what we heard first is just accepted, and then never really erased from our memory.

I think of the book Columbine, because if you haven’t read it, you would be shocked to learn that everything we had all, as a nation, understood to be the truth-- facts about the killers, the case, the victims—most of it wasn’t true. Not even close. I was shocked reading this unbelievably well-written and researched book. I would say about 90% of the information I had taken to heart and believed was wrong. And why is that important, really? Because until we all understand why tragedies like this happen, until we all see and understand the many facets and factors of cases like this and all of the people involved, we cannot prevent these tragedies from happening again. Until we all take a hard look at our own communities, the flaws, the broken systems, and most importantly what REAL traits, characteristics, illnesses, and behavior to watch for in our own community members, we won’t learn how to help those people who need it before they resort to violence.

I asked myself last night and today why this case in Aurora had shaken me up so much. So many tragedies fill my inbox daily, headlines of suffering across the country and the globe. What I realized is that at some point in time, these shootings have stopped being these random, isolated tragedies. They are now more common crimes, popping up everywhere, leaving us with almost no safe havens where it hasn’t yet happened. These shootings are creeping into the fabric of who we are as a society and how people who are sick, angry, or forgotten are dealing with their problems. This is not an excuse for taking lives like this. It is horrible and senseless. But, instead of writing off these killers as psychopaths that “snapped”, we have to take a hard look at how these people came to these decisions and how we can help them make better ones, or get the help they need before it is too late.

Whenever I write about or address the need for better gun control laws in this country, I get a backlash on my blog or Facebook or Twitter, so much so, that I don’t write about it a lot. Even though I don’t choose to own a gun, I don’t want to deny anyone the right to own a gun and protect their family. Even though I can’t stand the thought of hunting animals as sport, I also don’t want to deny anyone the right to own guns and hunt if that is what they want to do. That is a right and a freedom, and I am from a small town that is full of many people, many of them friends of mine, who love hunting.

What I don’t want is someone who is mentally ill acquiring a gun to hurt themselves or someone else. Even though they may not have a documented history for gun store owners to access, (meaning many times, they just haven’t known where to seek treatment or get it without insurance or assistance) I don’t want that one moment in a very sick person’s life to be the beginning of the end for themselves and other innocent people. I don’t know exactly how we solve that. 

I also don’t think anyone needs a stockpile of AK-47s. Sorry, I just don’t. Yes, it is your right as an American. But, can we not just step back and look at this from the standpoint of sending our children out into a world where we pride ourselves so much on freedom that we forget to have a little skepticism and common sense? Can we not just try and do these things in the name of the twelve people who died Friday morning, all of those that died at Columbine and Virginia Tech, the and unfortunately, the dozens, hundreds, or thousands that will die in years to come if we DON’T?

Here’s a very personal admission that I have never made publicly anywhere else. I have been very open about my past battles with depression. I have tiptoed a bit around having been truly suicidal, because it is still a taboo subject. It’s one thing to say, “I battled (or am battling) depression”. It is another to say, “I wanted to commit (or have attempted) suicide.” I was very suicidal at times during my bouts of depression. At one point, close to ten years ago now, I was pretty certain that I couldn’t hang on. I thought seriously about buying a gun to take my life. The ONLY thing that kept me from doing it, was that I was certain they would check my doctor’s records and see that I was seeing a therapist and a psychiatrist and wouldn’t allow me to buy a gun. Thankfully, I didn’t know that I probably would have breezed through the buying process. (I looked into the state laws and procedures years later, once I was well). There is no doubt that at that one point in time, if I had known I could get a gun, I would have, and I wouldn’t be writing these words now. I wouldn’t be in my husband’s life. I wouldn’t be here. I am oh so thankful that I am. There are many moments in my life, especially in seriously happy moments, when I think back to that time, and give thanks that I made assumptions about the gun laws instead of making a permanent, deadly choice.

My point is, for people that know me, or someone like me—a family member or friend—someone you know and love—that may have struggled with depression or other mental illness before, would you want them to lose their life or hurt someone—anyone-- in one moment of weakness? You may think you know that no one close to you could do something as tragic as a shooting like the one in Aurora. But the truth is, we are all at times closer to crossing the lines than we want to believe. We all have breaking points. We all have things in our past that tug at our sanity at times. Left without resources to proper care, a strong support system, and honestly—just support and hope—anyone can slip into a place they can’t return from.

This is a HUGE part of the problem. Mental illness is still seen as a topic to be whispered about, not addressed. We have made strides, but until we quit comforting ourselves that these people who “snap” are nothing like the people WE know, nothing like us--nothing will change, nothing will get better.

I don’t know all of the answers. I don’t even know all the problems that are contributing to this horrifying trend. But I think the combination of lack of mental health resources and lax gun laws in the US are two really good places to start taking a hard look at what we can do better.

I am also quite sure that if you ask any of the victim’s families from any of the recent tragedies in our history, that they would agree. So would the families of the people who commit these crimes.

Last night, so many lives were forever changed. So many people who have lived through similar tragedies were taken back in time in ways they never want to be. There may never be any concrete answers for this tragedy. We certainly can’t solve it in a week, or a month.

What I want to know is... when are we going to start trying?

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Bill Zeller: The Last Words of a Tormented Life

I have been facing a persistent case of writer’s block for weeks now, and none of my standby remedies have worked. One thing that often helps a lot is to read the blogs of other people I admire and get some inspiration. In spending time doing that, I came across a piece on Katie Granju’s blog that stopped me in my tracks and had me weeping. 

A young man named Bill Zeller killed himself on January 5, 2011. That was only six days ago. He was incredibly intelligent- a Princeton grad student, handsome, well-liked, and only 27 years old. He left behind a lengthy suicide note detailing what led him to such a horrible decision. The words he leaves behind are so powerful, so piercingly painful, that I have not been able to stop thinking about him since I read his letter. I want so badly to turn back time and go to this person and somehow help.

Bill’s letter details abuse he suffered as a child- his first childhood memories are of being raped. That in itself it horrific enough. But as you read on, you see the devastation this abuse had on his soul, his psyche, his life. Bill saw himself as damaged irreparably. He saw nothing of how the world and his friends all saw him. It has broken my heart to read the adjectives he used to describe himself. That was not him—it was the aftermath of the abuse and the depression.

He never shared with anyone that he was abused. Not a soul. He carried this burden alone his whole life.

I also wept as I read the letter, because while my background was not nearly as severe and traumatic as Bill’s—there were some exact phrases in his letter that I had written so many times in my journals—and in weak moments—in letters like his. The words were so familiar that they jumped out at me—I thought—I know that feeling of hopelessness. I know how horrible that feels. And all I could think is that somehow I found a way out of it—there was a light at the end of that long tunnel—and how I wish so much Bill had found a way to see another life other than the one his abuser trapped him in.

There have been several tribute sites created in remembrance of  Bill, and his wonderful friends all share stories of an incredibly caring person who wasn’t the damaged soul he saw himself as at all. He leaves behind a large group of friends who will miss him terribly and hurt deeply for the pain he suffered in silence.

Bill’s final wish was that if his letter was reproduced, that it be published in its entirety. I am honoring that wish and hoping that somewhere Bill is at peace.

Bill's letter:

I have the urge to declare my sanity and justify my actions, but I assume I’ll never be able to convince anyone that this was the right decision. Maybe it’s true that anyone who does this is insane by definition, but I can at least explain my reasoning. I considered not writing any of this because of how personal it is, but I like tying up loose ends and don’t want people to wonder why I did this. Since I’ve never spoken to anyone about what happened to me, people would likely draw the wrong conclusions.

My first memories as a child are of being raped, repeatedly. This has affected every aspect of my life. This darkness, which is the only way I can describe it, has followed me like a fog, but at times intensified and overwhelmed me, usually triggered by a distinct situation. In kindergarten I couldn’t use the bathroom and would stand petrified whenever I needed to, which started a trend of awkward and unexplained social behavior. The damage that was done to my body still prevents me from using the bathroom normally, but now it’s less of a physical impediment than a daily reminder of what was done to me.

This darkness followed me as I grew up. I remember spending hours playing with legos, having my world consist of me and a box of cold, plastic blocks. Just waiting for everything to end. It’s the same thing I do now, but instead of legos it’s surfing the web or reading or listening to a baseball game. Most of my life has been spent feeling dead inside, waiting for my body to catch up.

At times growing up I would feel inconsolable rage, but I never connected this to what happened until puberty. I was able to keep the darkness at bay for a few hours at a time by doing things that required intense concentration, but it would always come back. Programming appealed to me for this reason. I was never particularly fond of computers or mathematically inclined, but the temporary peace it would provide was like a drug. But the darkness always returned and built up something like a tolerance, because programming has become less and less of a refuge.

The darkness is with me nearly every time I wake up. I feel like a grime is covering me. I feel like I’m trapped in a contimated body that no amount of washing will clean. Whenever I think about what happened I feel manic and itchy and can’t concentrate on anything else. It manifests itself in hours of eating or staying up for days at a time or sleeping for sixteen hours straight or week long programming binges or constantly going to the gym. I’m exhausted from feeling like this every hour of every day.

Three to four nights a week I have nightmares about what happened. It makes me avoid sleep and constantly tired, because sleeping with what feels like hours of nightmares is not restful. I wake up sweaty and furious. I’m reminded every morning of what was done to me and the control it has over my life.

I’ve never been able to stop thinking about what happened to me and this hampered my social interactions. I would be angry and lost in thought and then be interrupted by someone saying “Hi” or making small talk, unable to understand why I seemed cold and distant. I walked around, viewing the outside world from a distant portal behind my eyes, unable to perform normal human niceties. I wondered what it would be like to take to other people without what happened constantly on my mind, and I wondered if other people had similar experiences that they were better able to mask.

Alcohol was also something that let me escape the darkness. It would always find me later, though, and it was always angry that I managed to escape and it made me pay. Many of the irresponsible things I did were the result of the darkness. Obviously I’m responsible for every decision and action, including this one, but there are reasons why things happen the way they do.

Alcohol and other drugs provided a way to ignore the realities of my situation. It was easy to spend the night drinking and forget that I had no future to look forward to. I never liked what alcohol did to me, but it was better than facing my existence honestly. I haven’t touched alcohol or any other drug in over seven months (and no drugs or alcohol will be involved when I do this) and this has forced me to evaluate my life in an honest and clear way. There’s no future here. The darkness will always be with me.

I used to think if I solved some problem or achieved some goal, maybe he would leave. It was comforting to identify tangible issues as the source of my problems instead of something that I’ll never be able to change. I thought that if I got into to a good college, or a good grad school, or lost weight, or went to the gym nearly every day for a year, or created programs that millions of people used, or spent a summer or California or New York or published papers that I was proud of, then maybe I would feel some peace and not be constantly haunted and unhappy. But nothing I did made a dent in how depressed I was on a daily basis and nothing was in any way fulfilling. I’m not sure why I ever thought that would change anything.

I didn’t realize how deep a hold he had on me and my life until my first relationship. I stupidly assumed that no matter how the darkness affected me personally, my romantic relationships would somehow be separated and protected. Growing up I viewed my future relationships as a possible escape from this thing that haunts me every day, but I began to realize how entangled it was with every aspect of my life and how it is never going to release me. Instead of being an escape, relationships and romantic contact with other people only intensified everything about him that I couldn’t stand. I will never be able to have a relationship in which he is not the focus, affecting every aspect of my romantic interactions.

Relationships always started out fine and I’d be able to ignore him for a few weeks. But as we got closer emotionally the darkness would return and every night it’d be me, her and the darkness in a black and gruesome threesome. He would surround me and penetrate me and the more we did the more intense it became. It made me hate being touched, because as long as we were separated I could view her like an outsider viewing something good and kind and untainted. Once we touched, the darkness would envelope her too and take her over and the evil inside me would surround her. I always felt like I was infecting anyone I was with.

Relationships didn’t work. No one I dated was the right match, and I thought that maybe if I found the right person it would overwhelm him. Part of me knew that finding the right person wouldn’t help, so I became interested in girls who obviously had no interest in me. For a while I thought I was gay. I convinced myself that it wasn’t the darkness at all, but rather my orientation, because this would give me control over why things didn’t feel “right”. The fact that the darkness affected sexual matters most intensely made this idea make some sense and I convinced myself of this for a number of years, starting in college after my first relationship ended. I told people I was gay (at Trinity, not at Princeton), even though I wasn’t attracted to men and kept finding myself interested in girls. Because if being gay wasn’t the answer, then what was? People thought I was avoiding my orientation, but I was actually avoiding the truth, which is that while I’m straight, I will never be content with anyone. I know now that the darkness will never leave. 

Last spring I met someone who was unlike anyone else I’d ever met. Someone who showed me just how well two people could get along and how much I could care about another human being. Someone I know I could be with and love for the rest of my life, if I weren’t so fucked up. Amazingly, she liked me. She liked the shell of the man the darkness had left behind. But it didn’t matter because I couldn’t be alone with her. It was never just the two of us, it was always the three of us: her, me and the darkness. The closer we got, the more intensely I’d feel the darkness, like some evil mirror of my emotions. All the closeness we had and I loved was complemented by agony that I couldn’t stand, from him. I realized that I would never be able to give her, or anyone, all of me or only me. She could never have me without the darkness and evil inside me. I could never have just her, without the darkness being a part of all of our interactions. I will never be able to be at peace or content or in a healthy relationship. I realized the futility of the romantic part of my life. If I had never met her, I would have realized this as soon as I met someone else who I meshed similarly well with. It’s likely that things wouldn’t have worked out with her and we would have broken up (with our relationship ending, like the majority of relationships do) even if I didn’t have this problem, since we only dated for a short time. But I will face exactly the same problems with the darkness with anyone else. Despite my hopes, love and compatability is not enough. Nothing is enough. There’s no way I can fix this or even push the darkness down far enough to make a relationship or any type of intimacy feasible.

So I watched as things fell apart between us. I had put an explicit time limit on our relationship, since I knew it couldn’t last because of the darkness and didn’t want to hold her back, and this caused a variety of problems. She was put in an unnatural situation that she never should have been a part of. It must have been very hard for her, not knowing what was actually going on with me, but this is not something I’ve ever been able to talk about with anyone. Losing her was very hard for me as well. Not because of her (I got over our relationship relatively quickly), but because of the realization that I would never have another relationship and because it signified the last true, exclusive personal connection I could ever have. This wasn’t apparent to other people, because I could never talk about the real reasons for my sadness. I was very sad in the summer and fall, but it was not because of her, it was because I will never escape the darkness with anyone. She was so loving and kind to me and gave me everything I could have asked for under the circumstances. I’ll never forget how much happiness she brought me in those briefs moments when I could ignore the darkness. I had originally planned to kill myself last winter but never got around to it. (Parts of this letter were written over a year ago, other parts days before doing this.) It was wrong of me to involve myself in her life if this were a possibility and I should have just left her alone, even though we only dated for a few months and things ended a long time ago. She’s just one more person in a long list of people I’ve hurt.

I could spend pages talking about the other relationships I’ve had that were ruined because of my problems and my confusion related to the darkness. I’ve hurt so many great people because of who I am and my inability to experience what needs to be experienced. All I can say is that I tried to be honest with people about what I thought was true.

I’ve spent my life hurting people. Today will be the last time.

I’ve told different people a lot of things, but I’ve never told anyone about what happened to me, ever, for obvious reasons. It took me a while to realize that no matter how close you are to someone or how much they claim to love you, people simply cannot keep secrets. I learned this a few years ago when I thought I was gay and told people. The more harmful the secret, the juicier the gossip and the more likely you are to be betrayed. People don’t care about their word or what they’ve promised, they just do whatever the fuck they want and justify it later. It feels incredibly lonely to realize you can never share something with someone and have it be between just the two of you. I don’t blame anyone in particular, I guess it’s just how people are. Even if I felt like this is something I could have shared, I have no interest in being part of a friendship or relationship where the other person views me as the damaged and contaminated person that I am. So even if I were able to trust someone, I probably would not have told them about what happened to me. At this point I simply don’t care who knows.

I feel an evil inside me. An evil that makes me want to end life. I need to stop this. I need to make sure I don’t kill someone, which is not something that can be easily undone. I don’t know if this is related to what happened to me or something different. I recognize the irony of killing myself to prevent myself from killing someone else, but this decision should indicate what I’m capable of.

So I’ve realized I will never escape the darkness or misery associated with it and I have a responsibility to stop myself from physically harming others.

I’m just a broken, miserable shell of a human being. Being molested has defined me as a person and shaped me as a human being and it has made me the monster I am and there’s nothing I can do to escape it. I don’t know any other existence. I don’t know what life feels like where I’m apart from any of this. I actively despise the person I am. I just feel fundamentally broken, almost non-human. I feel like an animal that woke up one day in a human body, trying to make sense of a foreign world, living among creatures it doesn’t understand and can’t connect with.

I have accepted that the darkness will never allow me to be in a relationship. I will never go to sleep with someone in my arms, feeling the comfort of their hands around me. I will never know what uncontimated intimacy is like. I will never have an exclusive bond with someone, someone who can be the recipient of all the love I have to give. I will never have children, and I wanted to be a father so badly. I think I would have made a good dad. And even if I had fought through the darkness and married and had children all while being unable to feel intimacy, I could have never done that if suicide were a possibility. I did try to minimize pain, although I know that this decision will hurt many of you. If this hurts you, I hope that you can at least forget about me quickly.

There’s no point in identifying who molested me, so I’m just going to leave it at that. I doubt the word of a dead guy with no evidence about something that happened over twenty years ago would have much sway.

You may wonder why I didn’t just talk to a professional about this. I’ve seen a number of doctors since I was a teenager to talk about other issues and I’m positive that another doctor would not have helped. I was never given one piece of actionable advice, ever. More than a few spent a large part of the session reading their notes to remember who I was. And I have no interest in talking about being raped as a child, both because I know it wouldn’t help and because I have no confidence it would remain secret. I know the legal and practical limits of doctor/patient confidentiality, growing up in a house where we’d hear stories about the various mental illnesses of famous people, stories that were passed down through generations. All it takes is one doctor who thinks my story is interesting enough to share or a doctor who thinks it’s her right or responsibility to contact the authorities and have me identify the molestor (justifying her decision by telling herself that someone else might be in danger). All it takes is a single doctor who violates my trust, just like the “friends” who I told I was gay did, and everything would be made public and I’d be forced to live in a world where people would know how fucked up I am. And yes, I realize this indicates that I have severe trust issues, but they’re based on a large number of experiences with people who have shown a profound disrepect for their word and the privacy of others.

People say suicide is selfish. I think it’s selfish to ask people to continue living painful and miserable lives, just so you possibly won’t feel sad for a week or two. Suicide may be a permanent solution to a temporary problem, but it’s also a permanent solution to a ~23 year-old problem that grows more intense and overwhelming every day.

Some people are just dealt bad hands in this life. I know many people have it worse than I do, and maybe I’m just not a strong person, but I really did try to deal with this. I’ve tried to deal with this every day for the last 23 years and I just can’t fucking take it anymore.

I often wonder what life must be like for other people. People who can feel the love from others and give it back unadulterated, people who can experience sex as an intimate and joyous experience, people who can experience the colors and happenings of this world without constant misery. I wonder who I’d be if things had been different or if I were a stronger person. It sounds pretty great.

I’m prepared for death. I’m prepared for the pain and I am ready to no longer exist. Thanks to the strictness of New Jersey gun laws this will probably be much more painful than it needs to be, but what can you do. My only fear at this point is messing something up and surviving.

—-
I’d also like to address my family, if you can call them that. I despise everything they stand for and I truly hate them, in a non-emotional, dispassionate and what I believe is a healthy way. The world will be a better place when they’re dead—one with less hatred and intolerance.

If you’re unfamiliar with the situation, my parents are fundamentalist Christians who kicked me out of their house and cut me off financially when I was 19 because I refused to attend seven hours of church a week.

They live in a black and white reality they’ve constructed for themselves. They partition the world into good and evil and survive by hating everything they fear or misunderstand and calling it love. They don’t understand that good and decent people exist all around us, “saved” or not, and that evil and cruel people occupy a large percentage of their church. They take advantage of people looking for hope by teaching them to practice the same hatred they practice.

A random example:“I am personally convinced that if a Muslim truly believes and obeys the Koran, he will be a terrorist.” – George Zeller, August 24, 2010.

If you choose to follow a religion where, for example, devout Catholics who are trying to be good people are all going to Hell but child molestors go to Heaven (as long as they were “saved” at some point), that’s your choice, but it’s fucked up. Maybe a God who operates by those rules does exist. If so, fuck Him.

Their church was always more important than the members of their family and they happily sacrificed whatever necessary in order to satisfy their contrived beliefs about who they should be.

I grew up in a house where love was proxied through a God I could never believe in. A house where the love of music with any sort of a beat was literally beaten out of me. A house full of hatred and intolerance, run by two people who were experts at appearing kind and warm when others were around. Parents who tell an eight year old that his grandmother is going to Hell because she’s Catholic. Parents who claim not to be racist but then talk about the horrors of miscegenation. I could list hundreds of other examples, but it’s tiring.

Since being kicked out, I’ve interacted with them in relatively normal ways. I talk to them on the phone like nothing happened. I’m not sure why. Maybe because I like pretending I have a family. Maybe I like having people I can talk to about what’s been going on in my life. Whatever the reason, it’s not real and it feels like a sham. I should have never allowed this reconnection to happen.

I wrote the above a while ago, and I do feel like that much of the time. At other times, though, I feel less hateful. I know my parents honestly believe the crap they believe in. I know that my mom, at least, loved me very much and tried her best. One reason I put this off for so long is because I know how much pain it will cause her. She has been sad since she found out I wasn’t “saved”, since she believes I’m going to Hell, which is not a sadness for which I am responsible. That was never going to change, and presumably she believes the state of my physical body is much less important than the state of my soul. Still, I cannot intellectually justify this decision, knowing how much it will hurt her. Maybe my ability to take my own life, knowing how much pain it will cause, shows that I am a monster who doesn’t deserve to live. All I know is that I can’t deal with this pain any longer and I’m am truly sorry I couldn’t wait until my family and everyone I knew died so this could be done without hurting anyone. For years I’ve wished that I’d be hit by a bus or die while saving a baby from drowning so my death might be more acceptable, but I was never so lucky.
—-

To those of you who have shown me love, thank you for putting up with all my shittiness and moodiness and arbitrariness. I was never the person I wanted to be. Maybe without the darkness I would have been a better person, maybe not. I did try to be a good person, but I realize I never got very far.

I’m sorry for the pain this causes. I really do wish I had another option. I hope this letter explains why I needed to do this. If you can’t understand this decision, I hope you can at least forgive me.

Bill Zeller

—-

Please save this letter and repost it if gets deleted. I don’t want people to wonder why I did this. I disseminated it more widely than I might have otherwise because I’m worried that my family might try to restrict access to it. I don’t mind if this letter is made public. In fact, I’d prefer it be made public to people being unable to read it and drawing their own conclusions.

Feel free to republish this letter, but only if it is reproduced in its entirety.

 William "Bill" Paul Zeller: October 26, 1983 - January 5, 2011

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Someone's Son: The Tragedy of Tyler Clementi's Suicide

We really know little about Tyler Clementi. Right now, he is a headline. Tyler took his life after his roommate at Rutgers University secretly spied on him via webcam from a friend’s dorm room and then publicly released the video (of Tyler making out with another young man) on Twitter. It is infuriating and heartbreaking.

If you have read many of the articles out there, you might know he was an accomplished violinist, and a member of the orchestra at Rutgers. His family has been quiet, releasing only one statement asking for acceptance and compassion for others in our communities and for their own privacy to grieve. Those who knew Tyler who have been interviewed have described him as incredibly intelligent and caring, with a love of helping others.

Tyler was a lot of things to many people, I am sure. I can’t help thinking of what we don’t know about his life. That at one time, he was a toddler, wobbling around his family’s living room, taking first tentative steps. He was once a kindergartner, learning the alphabet at his gradeschool. He was someone’s son. Someone’s friend. He had tremendous potential.

I also think a lot about the age, 18, when we go off to college. The whole experience is almost surreal. You are thrown out of one world into another. From a somewhat protected environment into a completely unprotected one in many ways. The glory of that unprotected atmosphere is the ability to find out who you are, to test the waters, to explore so many different things. But, it is a double edged sword. All that freedom can seem overwhelming to some, as it was for me. Tyler had only been in that new world, at college for less than a month. He barely had time to adjust.

No matter your sexual orientation, belief system, culture or anything else…imagine yourself at 18 years old in Tyler’s situation. Your roommate is spying on you, has a camera in your room, and is sending this video of you in a romantic or sexual situation LIVE to a world (or so it would seem) of internet watchers. I daresay many of us would feel weakened, hopeless, humiliated. And remember how your young mind worked. Every slight by someone else could seem like the end of the world. Humiliation on this level would have been devastating.

I want to say that his roommate and the woman who filmed him via webcam, spied on him and then released the video over Twitter are young too, and learning a hard lesson. But it is not that easy. What they did took malice. I can’t help but think—was there a point when either one of them got that uneasy sick feeling of knowing what they were doing was wrong? Did they ever think of the consequences or pain their actions would cause? Evidently not, as they tried to repeat their actions again after the first episode.

I do hope this is prosecuted as a hate crime. Although I don’t know all the details, the homophobia of Tyler’s roommate seems evident. I have been so upset by this story, by these events, by the horrible outcome. I feel so sad for Tyler’s family, and even more heartbroken that Tyler could not feel the support of all the people, famous and otherwise that have spoken out since his suicide. He had no idea of the legion of people across the country, around the world that have felt his pain, and have asked for an end to bullying activities like this one.

The other problem is that the laws have not caught up with the technology. After the Megan Meier case, I had hoped the government would spring into action, and realize that we as a nation were already behind the times and need to catch up quickly by putting laws in place to prosecute internet crimes. Sadly, we are still behind, and the criminals in Tyler’s case will likely serve little, if any jail time.

For now, it up to every parent to teach acceptance, tolerance and compassion. It is up to every person to set that example. For those who teach the opposite, who preach hatred, a reminder that your child could be on either side of a case like this one. And both of the outcomes are horrible- a death and/or a life ruined.

We are all responsible. Every moment, every day. Every single one of us.

Article Links and resources:

Early Article About Tyler’s Death from ABC:
http://abcnews.go.com/US/victim-secret-dorm-sex-tape-commits-suicide/story?id=11758716
It Gets Better Project:
http://www.youtube.com/user/itgetsbetterproject
Celebrities Ban Together to Speak out Against Bullying
http://www.popeater.com/2010/10/06/tim-gunn-ellen-degeneres-bullying-psa/

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