May is the cruelest month, and even though that was probably written about other circumstances, it has often been true in my world. I have not checked recent statistics but May is often the most dangerous month for suicides. I guess the winter is depressing, and everyone understands that, but come spring, if things don't get better, then they get dangerous.
Spring is the time when the sap begins to run through the trees and through the veins of people with difficulties. Everything escalates, everything becomes more intense. Last week I received many more calls for new appointments, and most of them were from people I had not seen for a year or more, but who felt the need to get stabilized before things fall apart.
Another sign of spring is that I get at least one thin, sensitive, artistic, contemplative, gay adolescent. They usually come in, as this one did yesterday,upset by the state of the world and man's inhumanity to man. He was well read in philosophy. He was vegetarian. He had a boyfriend and tons of girlfriends.
Like most of them he thought all of his difficulties were due to the weight of the world. The fact that he was gay, that his father was a drunk and disappeared, that his mother was depressed, that his stepfather was clearly very uncomfortable around him and that his brother's friends beat him up, were all denied as part of the reason that he was upset.
Some of then young men are more fragile than others. Sometimes they just need to learn how to leave their families and all of their family's difficulties and go out on their own. Sometimes they are using this as a way to bring attention to all the problems, and sometimes, as may be the case this time, they are really overwhelmed with all of their emotions and in danger of falling apart.
It is difficult to know if a sixteen year-old kid is really gay, in rebellion, or just confused. But these days there is so much sexuality beginning in Jr. High that everything can get intense and confused pretty early.
Take the time to smell the flowers. That's the good part of spring. That and the Sox beating the Yankees.
1 comment:
yes... the smell of flowers in spring! just the slightest particle entering a nostril draws a smile on a face that was otherwise closed all day for millions of reasons - or none.
Funny how this year is the first year I really felt Spring in my flesh and my bones and I lived in tune with it - something new being born, exploding and showing off before it becomes imprinted in the cells. I hope it is growing and will bear fruits in summer...
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