U.S. Marine Jonathan Buzin is emerging from a suicidal depression. He’s learned that forced positivity only makes things worse. Pain demands to be felt.
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What if not even 12 hours into your new year, your life as you know it ends and the following 364 days are like watching a movie about a fire slowly consuming the bright lights of a city that was your life?
On December 30, 2013, I was a hard charging, yet skeptical, United States Marine with a beautiful woman by my side. I believed we’d be together forever. I loved her three-year old daughter as my own and I believed I’d be watching her grow up. All of that disintegrated in an instant on the first day of this year with the simple removal of rings and everything I ever owned in my life piled at the door.
With what seemed like everything, including my own self, trying to kill me, I thought something was wrong with me, not just my situation.
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I was the only one who didn’t see it coming.
In the days and months to follow, I was drowning in the remnants of my own life and the things that were everything to me were poisoning me. The love of my life was gone and moved on.
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The Marine Corps put me on suicide watch and sent me to a mental hospital due to depression, distancing me from my fellow Marines. I developed lung problems due to a broken heart. My left leg got hurt during a training accident and I was in a cast and on crutches for what might be the next year.
My friends disappeared, my family slowly crumbled around me, and I put on a lot of weight due to lack of exercise. I didn’t care about myself anymore.
Everything I held dear in life was gone. When my military-issued therapist gave me direction on getting back on my feet, it failed every single time, leaving me more heartbroken and scared to try again.
The funny thing about men is that we think we are so coy and strong, that we can hide our emotion. In reality, it is seeping out from our very pores.
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With what seemed like everything, including my own self, trying to kill me, I thought something was wrong with me, not just my situation. After all, my friends from high school had well-paying jobs, healthy relationships, and were living life to the fullest. Meanwhile, I was in bed with a mangled leg, by myself with no around to understand or love (and by love, I mean pity) me.
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I brought all my woes to my therapist and he said something that I just could not comprehend: that everything I was feeling was ok. No way! Men are not allowed to be openly miserable or weak. It makes them unattractive, unproductive, and all around no good to be around. I had still been trying to get the love of my life back at this point and needed those attraction points. The funny thing about men is that we think we are so coy and strong, that we can hide our emotion. In reality, it is seeping out from our very pores.
I thought that things would just work themselves out if I just stayed strong and kept the floodgates to my depression and fear up. Now my therapist was telling me to give in to the emotions and mourn my relationship. I was supposed to let myself miss her, miss that little three year old girl, miss walking, miss being motivated about the Corps, and cry it out.
To put me even more outside of my understanding of what a man is supposed to be, he told me to seek out other broken people like me. Outlandish!
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We are told that we are who we associate with and to keep our social circle set to success. But now I was being told to seek out obliteration and make friends with it. He sent me to a month long inpatient psych therapy gig exclusive to Marines. I was to make friends with the denizens who shed their tears there.
Like any good subject of depression, I was being hypocritical. Why in the hell would I want to sit in a room for a month hearing people complain about their problems? I involuntarily went and it was the best thing that’s happened all year.
For those of us that are a bit wiser to the ways of heartbreak and having our lives turned upside down, we know that going out and seizing the day will get us killed sometimes.
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Sometimes, we as men need to be around the negativity. We need to embrace it (not bathe in it, though), and feel the pain with someone else who feels the same pain. Counter-productive stigmas aside, the healing started to occur. It was/is a long, blood soaked, and tedious process.
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Looking back on everything, the past seven months have been my darkest. Nights of suicide attempts, contemplation of suicide, and crying over pictures are certainly not the way to spend the only time you have. Just because it’s not desirable, doesn’t mean it isn’t important, crucial even.
We as men have bad days, months, and years. We are ingrained with this notion that this is the only life we have and that we need to go out there with our chests puffed out and seize the goddamned day. For those of us that are a bit wiser to the ways of heartbreak and having our lives turned upside down, we know that going out and seizing the day will get us killed sometimes.
Depression has a domino effect or maybe our perspective just sees it that way. Regardless, we decide to go out and make the most of things after a break up, getting fired, or a death only to feel a hundred times worse when we do it. We see reminders of what we lost.
I recently saw The Fault In Our Stars and was reminded that pain demands to be felt. We don’t have to seize the moment or go for dinner with friends with our head held high. Many people tried telling me that what I’m going through will pass and that it’s not so bad.
The only way you can be fixed is through the process you create for yourself. Mourn your loss. It is a part of your autobiography.
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I wanted to throat punch those people. They weren’t there when I saw those rings back in their box on top of all my things piled high at the door. They weren’t there for the long nights in a military mental ward, just like they weren’t there for your big disaster.
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These people who minimize your issues weren’t there for the darkness falling, for the beautiful letdown, or for your brain to go into FEMA mode and try and pick up the wreckage (with your depression being Kanye West).
If I’ve learned anything, it is to hell with the mantras of how everyone created their magical life of happiness and great sex. You’re broken! The only way you can be fixed is through the process you create for yourself. Mourn your loss. It is a part of your autobiography.
Don’t get stuck in it but allow yourself to have and survive your bad year. Let those bad experiences shape you and define you as you deal with them. I’ve seen some extraordinary men come back from Afghanistan mentally obliterated and broken on the inside and outside. But they’ve let those experiences redefine them. Some light the way for others lost on the path they once walked. Others just go on existing, letting each morning they wake up be a war monument for the trials they faced in their bad year.
Let ride it out. Let yourself bleed. When you’re ready, and only when you’re ready (don’t let anyone put a timestamp on your readiness either), get back out there and wait for the next ball to drop.
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Photo: Steven Depolo/Flickr
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Jonathan Buzin – In behalf of trying to help others I admire your transparency. You are a good Man!
I think the key thing here is “forced.” You’re absolutely correct that forcedd positivity is damaging. But, so is wallowing in the negative as well. We tend to get what we focus on, so focusing on the ways in which life is bearable is going to be more useful than focusing on how much things suck. I also think that as a society, we do a poor job of re-integrating vets into society. There’s just way too much hero worship and fixation on the things that you’re presumed to have done. The truth is that some vets have combat experience,… Read more »