Everybody Hurts...Sometimes

You guys probably don't know REM, a super awesomely awesome band from the 80s and 90s.  If you like mellow alternative rock, I recommend you listen to some classic REM songs like "Everybody Hurts" with its haunting melody to capture human pain or "It's the End of the World as We Know It," one of the band's perkiest and most fast-paced songs that ironically depicts images of pre-apocalypse chaos.  OK.  I forgot I'm supposed to blog about books, but I wanted to explain my title...and I get carried away about music. Here's a playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQ2yXWi0ppw&list=PLJ8BmocBsrxbh2dUGArR0HOjgsqvKBy92

I finished Look Me in the Eye this week, which took me longer than I intended, but that's because I also started and finished It's Kind of a Funny Story during the same two weeks.  These books are not connected in terms of their overt issues; the first one focuses on living with Aspergers, while the second discusses dealing with depression and thoughts of suicide. The second will pair nicely with The Burn Journals, a memoir in which a middle school kid sets himself on fire.  Dark stuff, but an engaging read. Someone has that checked out and didn't fill out a card - frowny face.) So I am still pursuing my goal of pairing fiction and nonfiction, and I'm afraid depression and suicide are issues many of us encounter at some point, if not within ourselves, with the people we love.

 

Still, I found a connection between the books, and that is simply the idea that everyone suffers and feels isolated from others who don't know their internal suffering.  For the man with Aspergers who wrote Look Me in the Eye, suffering ended when learned to celebrate some of his eccentricities while also adapting to more traditional social "rules." In one particular section, before things got better, he recounts an experience with leaving a job because he couldn't adapt to the team mentality. As he saw it, he "needed to stop forcing [himself] to fit into something [he] could never be part of. A big company. A group. A team" (205).  Most of us at some point confront that experience of not fitting in and feeling like the outcast, but this was a reoccurring problem for him since his way of communicating was so vastly different from others'. Fortunately for Robison, he took an opportunity to start his own business fixing rare cars (like Bentleys - so cool) and eventually taught himself to make personal connections by "rewiring...[his] own brain in [his] thirties and even later" (209).  He ends his book content with his job, happily married, and surrounded with people who understand him.

Sadly, Ned Vizzini did not have such a happy outcome, though his book suggests the ability to come through depression with a hopeful outlook.  The author himself, however, who based his book on his own youthful struggles with depression, eventually committed suicide.  So very tragic considering how many other books he might have written of offer insight into the problem of depression.  The most enlightening part for me was his explanation of "fifth and sixth life crises," which occurs in teen years when kids are "scared out of their minds and willing to buy facial cream, designer jeans, SAT test prep courses, condoms, cars, scooters, self-help books, watches, wallets, stocks, whatever....all the crap that the twenty-somethings used to buy, they now have the ten-somethings buying" (374). Vizzini seems to suggest that the sheer amount of stuff and decisions we force on people at a young age takes away their childhood and makes them face adult concerns far too soon.  I hope we don't really do that to you guys.  But if we do, know that "Everybody Hurts," and you're not alone in your frustration.  And when someone else is hurting, I hope we'll all show them compassion and remember that everyone's suffering is real for them.