by Chris Rose
He replied, “It’s a roll of the dice.” He listened to my story, observed me, and made an educated guess. If it didn’t work, he said, we’d try something else.
But it worked.
Today I can take my kids to school in the morning and mingle effortlessly with the other parents. Crowds don’t freak me out. I’m not tired all day, every day. I love going to the grocery store. I can pump gas. I notice the smell of night-blooming jasmine and I play with my kids and I clean up after my dog and the simplest things, man—how had they ever gotten so hard?
The only effect I have noticed on my writing is that the darkness lifted. I can still channel anger, humor, and irony—the three speeds I need on my editorial stick shift.
And I’m not the only one who senses the change. Everyone tells me they can see the difference, even readers. I’m not gaunt. I make eye contact. I can talk about the weather, the Saints, whatever; it doesn’t have to be so dire, every word and motion.
Strange thing is this: I never cry anymore. Ever.
I tell you truthfully that I cried every day from August 29 last year until August 24 this year, 360 days straight. And then I stopped. I guess the extremes of emotion have been smoothed over, but, truthfully, I have shed enough tears for two lifetimes.
Even at the Saints’ Monday Night Football game, a moment that weeks earlier would have sent me reeling into spasms of open weeping, I held it together. A lump in my throat, to be sure, but no prostration anymore.
The warning labels on antidepressants are loaded with ominous portent, everything from nausea to sexual dysfunction, and, without going into more detail than I have already poured out here, let’s just say that I’m doing quite well, thank you.
It’s my movie now. I am part of the flow of humanity that clogs our streets and sidewalks, taking part in and being part of the community and its growth. I have clarity, and oh, what a vision it is.
I am not cured, not by any means. Clinical trials show that Cymbalta has an 80 percent success rate after six months, and I’m just two months in. I felt a backward tilt recently—the long stare, the pacing, it crept in one weekend—and it scared me so badly that I went to my doctor and we immediately agreed to increase the strength of my medication.
Before Katrina, I would have called somebody like me a wuss. Not to my face. But it’s what I would have thought, this talk of mood swings and loss of control, all this psychobabble and hope-dope.
What a load of crap. Get a grip, I would have said.
And that’s exactly what I did, through a door that was hidden from me but that I was finally able to see.
I have a disease. Medicine saved me. I am living proof.
Emphasis on living.
Letters from the Edge
10/29/06
Life is full of stunning moments of revelation; couldn’t every one of us title our memoirs “Little Epiphanies”?
Certainly my world took a tilt this past Sunday—my privacy and worldview ripped wide open and exposed—when I wrote what I suppose is the most personal story I’ve ever laid down in print, a story about my yearlong bout with depression.
That term “bout with depression” just makes me cringe. I never would have read such an article had I not written it myself, all maudlin and self-helpy. But that’s what it has been. A bout. With depression.
The response has been, to say the least, overwhelming. If you are one of the roughly 1,000 people who e-mailed or called me to say thank you or welcome to the club or hang in there, I want to acknowledge that with gratitude here because the odds of my actually getting an opportunity to respond to all of my recent correspondence are slim. I was already backlogged a few thousand e-mails and phone calls from the past few months, the period in which I sank into an incapacitating abyss.
I mean it. I feel the love, from so many readers, and I appreciate that more than I can say. And answering 1,000 e-mails definitely constitutes more than I can say.
Even to those who suggested I substitute yoga, Jesus, or Saint-John’s-wort for my antidepressant medication, I thank you and will take your recommendations under advisement but stick with my doctor’s prescribed remedy for now.
There are two correspondences that particularly shook me, one of which I answered and the other I could not. One was from someone in our community who has already attempted suicide and had been in possession of a prescription for antidepressants for weeks but had not gotten it filled.
Maybe he or she would refill it now, the correspondent wrote. But it was expensive. But, after food, I don’t know of a better use for money for one who is suicidal than medicine to make you not be.
So, whoever you are . . . please.
The other communication was a letter—unsigned—from someone who told me they were experiencing the same symptoms and despair that I had written about but were seeking an alternative solution.
I had written about three friends who had killed themselves, and this person wrote, “I will not be your fourth friend to die. I am only an acquaintance, so I will be your first, second, third or fourth or fifth to die. My rabbit hole is becoming deeper, more comfortable, more desirable. Your pain and fear is as valid as mine, your depression is as valid as mine. The only difference is that I will stop my pain differently than you.”
Unfortunately, I don’t think the writer was referring to yoga, Jesus, or Saint-John’s-wort. Do I detect a cry for help? Do I detect a community in crisis, at wit’s end? Hell yes, I do. (These were only among the extreme letters I got; there are hundreds that are mere Category 4s.)
Here’s a funny thing: In my article about fighting depression, I listed, as one example of the weight that took me down, all the thousands of e-mails I have received over the past year from readers spilling out their own stories of misery and funk. I wasn’t assigning blame, mind you, just listing the circumstances that preyed upon me from time to time.
So I have to believe that some readers would have taken this as a mild plea not to burden me anymore with their stories, and still—I got more than a thousand responses from folks telling me that they, too, have felt hope and purpose slipping away as they try to rebuild or even just get back to New Orleans.
How many wanted to write but didn’t because they thought they might send me into a tailspin? I don’t know. But I’m glad people did write to me because I have accumulated a mind-boggling compilation of stories that capture the emotional landscape of life after the flood and I don’t know what the hell I’ll do with it but someday, someone smarter than me can take a look at it all and tell us just what happened here.
It boggles the mind to think of how many among us are holding on by frayed threads, just barely, and trying to hide it as I was for so many months.
There is no cavalry on its way to save us. Other than putting vast stocks of serotonin and norepinephrine—the happy molecules in your brain—into the water system, I don’t know what we can do to turn this thing around.
It is up to us. We need to start looking for red flags even where there don’t appear to be any. I loathe even intimating that our community is weak, unable to face the challenge and devastation on our hands, but there’s no question that a lot of folks are treading on thin ice or no ice at all.
It’s simple stuff to look for and think about. It may be the guy next door whom you’ve never even spoken to because his yard is a mess or the woman you just honked your horn at and gave the finger to because she was befuddled at the intersection or the mail carrier you just chewed out because your Sports Illustrated didn’t get delivered once again or the guy who was rude to you in the checkout line at Walgreens and not because he’s a jerk but because he can’t even see straight.
He probably didn’t even know you were there. Didn’t see you, didn’t hear you. All he knows about is the scream in his head.
I was having a conversation the other day with a New Yorker who talked about how everybody was all touchy-feely in the months after 9/11 but that, in due time, everyone just went back to being Ne
w Yorkers.
She said she sees that here, now, that maybe all the goodwill and kindness and togetherness is fracturing as the slog goes into year two and everyone’s kind of fed up with one another’s neediness.
I was leaving my therapist’s office Wednesday morning and encountered a guy in the waiting room who wore the mask of complete surrender. I have never seen in a man’s eyes so much pain, someone just so damn spun around by what has happened that he can’t even get his shoes on without full concentration.
I felt powerless in this man’s presence. He was able to lift up his head to make eye contact only because his brother was pointing me out to him. I’m famous now. I’m the guy who’s got depression, the New Orleans poster boy for all the sorrow in the world.
All I could muster for the guy was “Good luck.” How lame. What else could I have done?
The poet Rick Danko used to sing, “Twilight is the loneliest time of day,” and it is haunting and beautiful and I think about it a lot because we’re in permanent twilight around here.
When you look into someone’s eyes and see a cave with nobody living inside, say hello in there. I don’t mean to get all Oprah on you here, but if you see the opportunity, help a guy get his shoes on, because sometimes it’s harder than you know.
Find some way to shine a light. Together, maybe we’ll find our way out of this.
Where We Go From Here
Children of the Storm, It’s Time to Represent
5/14/06
I was asked to give the commencement speech at Ursuline Academy last night.
I have faced many personal challenges in the days since last August, but making an inspirational speech to a couple hundred restless Catholic schoolgirls—and their parents—strikes me as the most daunting yet.
For what it’s worth, this is what I came up with:
Good evening. As you look at me, I know what you’re thinking. Just what you need: another old man who doesn’t understand you, giving you advice, rendering forth the wisdom of the ages like some geezer sage from the Paleozoic Era here to utter inspirational platitudes from Dear Abby and that fine self-help manual All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.
Or worse: Oh, the Places You’ll Go!.
Those are all great books; don’t get me wrong. But in kindergarten, they didn’t teach you how to siphon gas during a natural disaster, how to send a distress signal with a flashlight, and how to decontaminate a refrigerator—to say nothing of how to properly open, season, and heat a National Guard–issued MRE without burning your hands.
We in New Orleans were always different from folks elsewhere. Now we’re real different. I wager that you learned more about life, death, and everything in between this past year than in the rest of your life combined.
You are survivors. The Katrina Kids. The Children of the Storm.
And yes, I am middle-aged. Eisenhower was in office when I was born.
Eisenhower was a president. Of this country. Anyway . . .
Yes, I am from the past. I do not own an iPod. I do not text-message. I don’t have a tattoo on my lower back. I think skateboarding is dangerous. I think ketchup should be red and only red. Energy drinks give me the shakes. I don’t know who the lead singer of Maroon 5 is. I think Bruce Springsteen is cool.
For those of you still awake . . .
I have an advantage that commencement speakers didn’t have when I was your age: the Internet. Yes, there was a time before the Internet. It was a long time ago. It sucked.
My kids marvel when I tell them that television was once just in black and white. And that no matter how many channels you tuned into, you couldn’t find Hilary Duff on any of them.
They don’t believe me.
So I checked out some Web sites for tips about making a graduation speech, but I came up wanting. Most said to lean heavily on inspirational quotes from famous people, but if Ursuline Academy wanted Einstein or Mark Twain to give you a speech, I suppose they would have arranged for Einstein or Twain to be here today.
With the digital technology available today, I suppose that’s almost possible.
And I found out that I could even purchase an audience-tested motivational commencement speech online for only $25—a much higher fee than the going rate for college term papers; I suppose they are mindful of the budgetary constraints of students as opposed to, say . . . someone who gives a graduation speech.
One Web site pointed out that nobody listens to the graduation speaker anyway because everyone is distracted and preoccupied, but if you make a winking reference to alcohol, you’ll catch everyone’s attention.
But I’m not going to do that. That would be a cheap gimmick.
And now that I have your attention, let me lay some heavy on you.
There are commencement exercises all over this country today, but you and your fellow graduates from the Gulf Coast are different, very different. Particularly here in New Orleans.
The water, it came to your school. The gasoline, chemicals, sewage, and blood came to your doorstep. It settled into the ground of this courtyard where we now gather.
Not a pleasant notion to consider on this joyous occasion, but there you are: the elephant is out of its cage again.
You must never forget what happened here. You must take that experience with you into the world.
You must, as they say, represent New Orleans.
I can tell you from my years of work and travel that to be from New Orleans has always been an interesting proposition. Historically, if you were, say, in Europe, and you told someone you were from the United States, generally they would shrug. But if you told them you were from New Orleans, they would want you to pull up a chair at their table, they would want to know more about you and your city.
On our domestic shores, historically, when New Orleanians check into college dormitories their freshman year of college, they are an immediate attraction, and not just because everyone assumes their partying credentials are higher than everyone else’s.
You are interesting because where you come from is interesting, unique, colorful, diverse, and tolerant. People have always wanted to know about it, to see it for themselves, to touch the magic here if by no other means than by the picture painted by your words, your stories.
Tell them what happened here.
I’m not going to offer you the language to describe it or the politics to color it; use your own words and thoughts.
But I’ll give you an example:
My daughter was asked to write about her experiences over the past year when she came back to school in New Orleans in January, and this is what she wrote: “There was a Hurricane. Some people died. Some of them were kids.”
My daughter was six when she wrote that. It just doesn’t strike me as what you would wish for your child to write in her first-grade journal, but there it is.
You—all of us—are marked for life by what happened here, and if you go out into the world and you shrug it off—if you are soooo over the Katrina thing—then you are doing a disservice to yourself and to the community that gave you your spirit and identity.
Like it or not, this storm, these circumstances, have marked you. My belief is that your generation and those who come after you in this town will be extraordinarily resilient. That is a good quality to carry with you. You have seen and have suffered loss.
For those of you who fall into that huge swath of our community known as “lost everything,” people try to tell you it was just stuff, get over it, at least you’re alive, and what you lost was just stuff.
Yeah, well. It was your stuff. It took seventeen years to get that stuff. And if it all disappeared in one day, then, hell yeah, it’s all right to be mad about that.
But move on. Make the anger work for you.
Perhaps the most valuable lesson we have learned as a community is humility. The great equalizer. We have been targeted by our circumstances as the recipients of the greatest outpouring of donations, charity, and volunteer help in
American history.
People from elsewhere, people we don’t know, saved us. They gave us their money and their time and they cleared our streets and protected our homes and, funny thing, most of us don’t even know who they were. Or are.
They expected—and in most cases received—nothing in return.
Are you ready to do the same for someone else when the time comes?
Think about it. Discuss amongst yourselves. And get ready. Because that time will come, many times over, in your lifetime.
Life is short. Now you know that. What happened here shows how it can all be gone tomorrow. So just do it. Seize the day. Carpe diem. I am Tiger Woods. Rise up. Make levees, not war. Vote for Pedro. Whatever.
Just do something important with your young life. Don’t sit around and wait until you’re fifty to suddenly understand how precious all of this is.
There’s always the story of the bitter, angry old man who picks on little children and never says thank you to the waiter or waitress and doesn’t say hello to the mailman.
And then one day the old guy gets cancer and a wake-up call, reality check, and he realizes how little time is left and suddenly he’s volunteering at the oncology ward at Children’s Hospital and he asks after the bank teller’s mama and he stops and pets the neighbor’s dog and he tells everyone that he can: I never knew how beautiful it all was.
Don’t be that guy. Nobody likes that guy.
New Orleans got cancer this past year. We got our wake-up call, and if you’re living an existence here that is without purpose and mission, then you are asleep.
Twice in my column in recent months I have invoked the words of a Magazine Street barber named Aidan Gill, whose call to arms is the most powerful I have heard since the storm.
He said, “A time will come when someone asks you, ‘What were you doing about it?’ You can’t tell them, ‘I was just watching it. I was just an innocent bystander.’ Let me tell you something: there are no innocent bystanders in this.”