Depression Lies: What Robin Williams Meant to Me

So. Robin Williams. Dammit.

The first Robin Williams movie I ever saw was Mrs. Doubtfire. I was 13, my parents were getting a divorce, and my father thought that some related comedy might be healing.

He was right.

He and I saw a lot of movies together — RW’s and otherwise — throughout my teen years. This was a time when I was angry at my father for the divorce, unhappy at school, and in dire need of something uplifting. I won’t say that RW was my only solace, or the only reason that my father and I were able to rebuild our relationship, but he sure helped.

My father loved RW. They were close in age. My father was a pastoral counsellor; RW often played psychologists and doctors. RW sometimes even sported a beard that made him look a lot like my father.

I think the reason RW’s work resonated so much with my father, and with me as well, was his wistfulness. He was a comic, but behind the comedy was always something a little sad.

Now, of course, we know he couldn’t fight it back any longer.

I want to say to him — Don’t you know how loved you were? Don’t you know how many people you touched? But that isn’t the point, is it? External love couldn’t touch his internal pain, in the end.

What scares me is that I know so many people like him.

Not like him, precisely. Nobody could replicate what he did, who he was.

But in other ways…exactly like him. Full of pain, self-doubt, self-loathing so deep that it threatens to overwhelm all that is good in their lives, all the love of those who know them, all that is unique and sparkling in their souls.

Here’s where I come out of the mental health closet. I have never been suicidal and hope I never will. But that struggle, that darkness, the thing we call depression? Yes, I know it well. I, too, am a creative spirit with a dark shadow. I, too, share the burden that finally crushed his beautiful spirit.

Keep fighting, my friends. We are all worth it.

RIP, Robin Williams. Depression lies.