Yesterday evening I read the brief yet ominous sounding diary of a Kossack here who seemed to be letting go. It wasn't the first such diary I've read here, though thankfully they aren't common. Yet, on some level, it makes me wonder how much more common the emotions and circumstances are amongst us all that led the individual to post his diary. As Henry David Thoreau wrote:
Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.
I read the diary, and read the comments from people here beseeching him to respond...to reach out...ask for help. To which there was, for a long time, no response.
There have been other diaries here from a few that have asked for help, and they generally are met with help extended. Those diaries, too, provoke me to contemplation. How may are there, I wonder, who remain silent in their own "personal hells" and cope as best they can, for each one who decides to make a public plea for a rope to be thrown to them? More, I suspect, than any of us care to think about.
It is a curious thing, who asks for help and who does not. For every person who finds themselves caught in quicksand, how long do they wrestle by themselves to extricate themselves before calling out for help? For some, it may be only until they are up to their thighs. For others, it may be when they are chest deep. For still others, it may be when only their head is above the water, and even it is cocked backwards to keep the mud out of their mouths. And then, one can be certain, there are some who quietly disappear below the surface....a few bubbles, and then placid calm that reveals not a trace of their frantic struggles of just a few moments past.
I know a thing or two about depression. I, too, know a thing or two about the struggles that one contends with in life. For some they can be financial, for others they might be health issues. It could be addiction, or some other issue. For all, they can seem overwhelming at times. Intractable. Never ending. Couple those feelings with depression and you are likely to find a circumstance where the person desperately trying to juggle more balls than they are capable of simply finds a way to keep them in the air for as long as they can, until they drop. I don't know why it is so hard to ask for help. If you were to ask me...I would hesitate, embarrassed, and simply offer up the response "because I don't."
That diary made me remember a short story I read as a young teen by Edgar Allan Poe, entitled "Descent Into The Maelstrom". I will include a link to the entire story...it's a very short read, perhaps 10 minutes, and I hope you follow the link to read it if you aren't familiar with it. Even if you have read it before, it's worth having another read. The story is an account by a man who was caught up in an immense whirlpool and sucked down, and the things that went on in his mind during the harrowing experience. Here is but an excerpt:
Looking about me upon the wide waste of liquid ebony on which we were thus borne, I perceived that our boat was not the only object in the embrace of the whirl. Both above and below us were visible fragments of vessels, large masses of building-timber and trunks of trees, with many smaller articles, such as pieces of house furniture, broken boxes, barrels and staves. I have already described the unnatural curiosity which had taken the place of my original terrors. It appeared to grow upon me as I drew nearer and nearer to my dreadful doom. I now began to watch, with a strange interest, the numerous things that floated in our company. I must have been delirious, for I even sought amusement in speculating upon the relative velocities of their several descents toward the foam below. "This fir-tree," I found myself at one time saying, "will certainly be the next thing that takes the awful plunge and disappears," -- and then I was disappointed to find that the wreck of a Dutch merchant ship overtook it and went down before.
http://etext.virginia.edu/...
As I read the "Please help me", or the "Please help so and so", and even the occasional diaries that ask for no help, but rather hint at resignation, that pop up here from time to time...they provoke mixed feelings within me sometimes. I can't quite process them emotionally. I'm not in a position to help those who ask, and none of us can respond to pleas that go unspoken.
I understand the force of will it must require for many to ask help. I also understand the stubborn reluctance, and even refusal by others to do the same. I understand the effects of depression, and the tendency of one who suffers with it to insist that they are, in fact, a rock...an island unto themselves. Beyond help and somehow undeserving of it at the same time.
I wonder how many of us are caught up in our own maelstroms?