Whitney Houston

The Three Doors

I’ve been that guy more times than I can count. Barely getting by. Barely keeping my head above water. No cure on the horizon, no prospect of waking up normal, just the daily work of hauling myself through another one.

And then somebody comes by and asks the question. Are you okay?

The second it lands, three doors open up in front of me. Not four. Not two. Three. And I have to walk through one of them.

I’ve almost killed myself fifteen days in a row, I don’t know if I can go on — and the answer comes back, yeah, I get sad sometimes too.Door One

Door One: The Truth

Behind the first door, you tell them. All of it. That you are deeply unhappy and just trying to hold it together. That you’re suicidal at times. That you’ve largely given up hope and you’re fighting through mostly because you’re waiting on something outside your control to come relieve you of a life you never asked to live.

Here’s what nobody warns you about door one: the second you open it, some people run. They don’t want to deal with it, or they don’t know how, and those two look identical from where you’re standing. Others stay, but they file you away — you showed weakness, so now you’re fragile, now you’re a risk, now you get underestimated in rooms you’re not in. That’s a whole other game that opens up, and you opened it.

And then there’s the reflex. You’re conditioned to feel like you’re complaining. Everybody has a bad day. We all have problems.

Said like there’s a presupposed equality. Like you’re both dealing with the same stuff and the only real question is who’s the bigger trooper.

All of that is behind door one. All of it is unpleasant.

Door Two: The Short Answer

So maybe you go small instead. Not a lie, not a dump. Going a little rough, honestly.

Which usually triggers the chin-up-kiddo speech.

Chin up, kiddo. It’ll get better. Keep that chin up. A brief, tertiary brush-off, or a shove toward positive thinking. All right, skipper — back on that track, keep walking. As if there were a world where that track was good enough. As if getting back on it and continuing to walk were anything other than being miserable for the rest of your life, and possibly ending it early.

It’s the little league speech. Kid strikes out twice against a pitcher two years older and a head taller, and his father comes over and says chin up, he’s older, you’ll get bigger, you’ll get experience, this was your first try. And it’s all true. Most of the time that kid does grow up, get confidence, and do fine.

It just isn’t a parallel. The honest version would be: chin up — your whole life is probably going to be like this, you can’t move right because of the medication side effects, and you frequently want to die. But chin up.

Cheeseburgers in paradise. All good. Let’s move on.

Door two is the most inauthentic exchange available to two human beings.

Door Three: The Lie

Yeah, I’m good. Doing great. No problems here.

This is the one almost everybody picks, almost every time. It’s easier. It doesn’t make you feel like an attention whore. It’s more manageable in passing. And it’s what people wanted to hear in the first place.

It also costs. You wake up, you try to take on the day while you’re genuinely struggling, and every few steps you’re lying — saying you’re all good in a world where you never are. That’s exhausting in its own right. It’s just a quieter kind of exhausting.

Pick Your Poison

I don’t have a moral here. There’s no clean principle at the end of this.

The exhaustion of the three doors is that none of them helps. Not one improves my situation or how I feel about myself. Door one costs me standing and often gets me the we’ve all got problems treatment. Door two is the most inauthentic exchange available to two human beings. Door three is a lie I have to keep telling.

And they’re there every single day. Same three, same hallway, every time somebody means well and asks.

Damn, I hate those three old doors.