Being Sincere

"I will my heavy story tell
Till my own words re-echoing shall send
Their sadness through hollow pearly heart;
And my own tale again for me shall sing
And my own whispering words be comforting
And lo! my ancient burden may depart."
From "The Sad Shepherd,” W.B. Yeats

It is a well-anecdoted, non-scientific fact that the one opinion Harvard students share, whether they be Ec or Philosophy or MCB or theater kids or football players or lone wolves, is the belief that things aren’t as they should be. More specifically, what I have gathered (from talking to friends and acquaintances or reading Crimson op-eds or simply paying attention to the issues that people care about) is that most of us seem to agree that there is one thing tragically missing from this place: Sincerity. Not the Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary definition that you can plop down at the beginning of a paper, but rather the feeling that all of us are hiding something and we don't know why we are hiding it. The implicit promise that sincerity holds is that, once we share whatever those things are and put them out in the open, then everything will be all right, then we will all be broken together, then we can all turn around triumphantly, hand in hand, away from extinction and towards meaningful existence.

Last semester, I tried to kill myself. I was, as the lingo goes, not in a good place, and I hoped that offing myself would lead me to a better one. And, humanity being what it is—the only species that panics whenever it sees one of its own threatening to leap off a ledge—I was held back, by friends, by University administrators, by hospital staff. For that, I will be forever thankful.

I have been told that a good way to prevent me from ever feeling ashamed or guilty of what I did is to share my struggles with other people. This exercise is meant to be rejuvenating, a new form of life. This is sincerity at its core.

What has happened, then, ever since I have shared this gospel with others? In a sense, it has been rejuvenating; it has let me experience sound and touch and sense even when the cocoon around me seems oppressively dark. But it does nothing to remove the darkness itself. The act of telling bad news, even if your very telling is a testament to something bad being avoided, doesn’t make it good news.

The way people react to another person's "deep, real" experiences is amusing. The tendency is to look down, shake one's head, take a moment to stop the jokes and the joviality and get Serious for a moment. Mental health talk is a party pooper, but we can't assume that there is anything else that it could be. Everything else, from classes to jobs to sex, looks meaningless in the face of the possibility of death. That fact is not profound; it's just a fact.

Then, the outpourings of sympathy arrive. The reason that these fail is not because other people don't get it. The problem is that they often come from an emotionally faulty premise, the idea that the way to help someone get better is to somehow affirm everything they've felt and experienced. It comes in the forms of hugs and sympathies, people saying, "You're brave. So brave."

The truth, however, does not lie in how I felt or what I experienced. I’m not brave. I’m the asshole who almost broke the heart of my family, my friends, people who I had only briefly encountered in passing.

Everyone, whether they struggle with mental health problems or not, has the unfortunate privilege of living in a broken world that keeps breaking its promise to get better. But that is no excuse to position ourselves behind a wall of self-pity because it's the way we feel and the way we feel must be right and true and pure.

Sincerity sounds kind and sweet. It sounds important. It sounds (and I'm not doubting that it is) like a massive step forward in a culture that tries to cloak itself in a shroud of invincibility and triumphalism. But behind all of its good intentions, it seems to implicitly promise that you are fine, that you will keep being fine. It justifies the state of mind that led me to do something unbelievably stupid. At that point, I am gaining sincerity with others at the price of honesty with myself.

Depression should be de-stigmatized, and I’m not trying to argue otherwise. But I fear that, by trying to reaffirm others’ experiences, we are encouraging the state of mind that led them to that point in the first place. I am afraid that, instead of taking any sort of meaningful action that tries to prevent unhealthy patterns of thinking, we are participating in an emotional circle-jerk punctuated by patting each other on the back. I have a hard time believing that we view depression as an urgent issue whenever we are content to just talk about it, to treat it academically as a natural part of the post-post-modern “condition” or whatever.

Much more importantly, I am afraid that we are encouraging those who are going through mental health struggles to find truth in their experience, to do nothing else but be happy with who they are as a person. Then, depression becomes simply one more aspect of ourselves, another nice little identity badge, hello, I’m (so and so), and I’m (insert gender) and (insert ethnicity)—and I’m depressed.

Being depressed is not an identity marker. It’s a clear, terrible, awful sign that something is wrong with our world. And, if our prayers and supplications come from trying to affirm the thought patters that are dragging us down, we end up doing more harm that good. We might be becoming better mental health advocates, but we’re not actually learning to deal with the problem.

As a community, we should stop thinking that throwing words at the problem, no matter how well-meaning they may be, is going to do anything to actually fix it. And, on an individual level, we need to realize that the way we feel, the actions we want to take when we are at our lowest, are wrong. It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to make some sort of statement, it doesn’t matter if it’s the only rational way to justify your philosophical or aesthetic sense of living. We as a society have become afraid to condemn anyone or anything out of respect for an individual’s psychological depth. But, at this point, we have to decide whether we care more about not offending anyone (our own thinking included) or about stopping the thing that is taking the lives of the people we care about.

Self-flagellation is not the answer, and I would never want anyone to sink into a state of morose self-contemplation in order to figure out what's wrong with them. But what we can condemn is the desire to record the same sad tune over and over again, expecting to hear something different when we play it back. Depression can lead us to rationalize this type of action. But that doesn’t mean that we, as individuals and as a community, should follow suit.

I am not only writing this to a community at large; I want it to be an encouragement to those who have been in the darkest, lowest places. But, at the same time, I don't simply want to reiterate the obvious: That you are not alone. That's the message passing for life-affirming these days. I want to remind you of something else: That there is truth beyond the suffocating walls of our feelings and experiences. Because those sentiments are completely disconnected from the reality now, the one that is teaching you, the hard way, to be a better person, to be the kind of person who, for at least a moment, can lift that suffocating preoccupation with your existence (excuse the phrasing) off yourself, and breathe.

Al Fernández '17, an English concentrator, lives in Eliot House.