Thursday: Sharing Our Voices
Last week at The Gaithersburg Book Festival (which is one of the best around, from its incredible annual slate of authors to its food-truck corral to its wonderful presenter “house”), my longtime friend, novelist Louis Bayard (please say you’ve watched “The Pale Blue Eye” on Netflix, adapted from his 2006 novel of the same title) was in conversation with me about my memoir, Life B: Overcoming Double Depression.
During audience questions, our mutual friend and bestselling novelist Angie Kim asked me a question that went something like this: “Bethanne, has the response to this book overwhelmed you? How do you feel about people’s reactions?”
I answered clumsily, trying to say look, if people don’t like the book, it’s OK. I can’t expect it to be a great read for everyone.
Angie interrupted me (and Angie is not an interrupter!). “I didn’t mean that,” she said. “I mean that more and more people are going to understand and love you more after reading this book! How are you going to deal with THAT?”
We all laughed, but I had to take a moment and make an inner recalibration. I mean, Angie was correct. Not that everyone will love this book, that’s not what she was saying, but that people who do read it and love it may change their opinions about me in a positive way.
I’m much more accustomed to believing, from my inner critic, that the more people know about me, the less they like me. That’s the depression (and other things too) talking. Quite a few people have brought up the paragraph in the book where I say a friend asked me not to tell her more stories about my family, “because they’re really messed up.”
Hindsight: That’s not a friend. A friend never finds your stories “messed up.” Even if your family or your stories or your mind actually is “messed up,” a friend listens. A friend holds space, and a friend helps you laugh or cry or process. Now, when I was telling my stories to that friend? I might not have had the best boundaries in place. It would have been fine if she had said “I feel unsettled by these stories. Let’s talk about why.” Or “I’m so sorry you have pain in your family. Let’s go get a coffee and talk about how you can handle it.” Or so many other things.
Because we need to share our stories. We need to share them, even when they’re painful or discomfiting or don’t make perfect sense. Not everyone needs to write a book, as I did. Many people who experience mental-health challenges and neurodiversity and difficult family dynamics simply need some time and space to be heard, by one person. I don’t know what a perfect-world version of that would look like. I do know that not enough people have access to good therapists and other healthcare providers.
But back to the readers who mentioned that paragraph: Like me, they were observing how tough it was to try and share. . . and hit a brick wall. On this Thursday, as we come to the close of Mental-Health Awareness Month 2023, I hope that we all smash some of the walls that keep us from helping each other heal and grow and evolve.
May you be well, may you be peaceful, may you be free.