Reset

I really miss coming here to blog – lately, there's only, like, 2 people still reading, so even though blogging is cathartic, it is also hard to motivate myself to do it.

The farther behind I get in updating on all of life's blog-worthy events, the more difficult it is to just lightly jump back in.

This month, one of my good friends – a mentor, like-a-big brother – committed suicide. That has been hard. You know all the intellectual stuff where you say that there is nothing you could have done, he was suffering from depression (and had been for a long time), it was a disease, etc. But even if you know this intellectually, you STILL think all those thoughts and wrestle with your own part in the end.

My part in his last two years is that we had become closer than previously. We spent a lot of time talking about work and architecture - and in retrospect, maybe I was just trying to distract him from telling me one more time about how depressed he felt, or how he was thinking about killing himself, or reading the most recent article about the best new depression/bipolar drug/treatment/therapy. All the depression talk: it was a lot. It began to normalize. Yes, yes, you are feeling depressed. How about this house? Do you like it? Good design? Nice detailing? Or ugly? Whattayathink?

I don't have answers. His family wanted answers from me, because we were close in the last few months. What was it? What was the thing that did this? I couldn't answer them, standing in his living room, wearing the stick-on mustache that his five year old son gave me before the funeral. But the thing was something: it was mental illness; it was depression. The thing, actually, felt a lot like 5 years ago when my uncle died of Lymphoma. It marched onward, without regard to all the various interventions. It was relentless. The disease became a part of life so integrated in the everyday that it was hard to know what was the disease and what was the person.

There's no neat, tidy package to wrap up my feelings or the feelings of his other friends and his family or even society's feelings. Life's so messy sometimes – which is all the more reason to step back and really think about how to live our life as thoughtfully as possible.That is where I'm left: Am I doing right by others? Am I the me I should be? How can I appreciate and prioritize who I am and where I am?