There’s a new hit musical on Broadway and it feels like it was written for people exactly like me. It’s called Dear Even Hansen, and it’s about a socially isolated and lonely boy who gets drawn deeper and deeper into Internet culture as a lie he tells – that he was good friends with a boy who had committed suicide – spirals out of control.

In this song, he describes his perfect day with his “friend” to the kid’s grieving mother, who is desperate for something she can hold on to after her son’s death.

And this song really moves me. So fair warning, it might move you too.

 

The song moves me so much because it’s so clearly (to me) the product of a very lonely person dreaming a perfect dream of all the love and connection and friendship that the real world has denied him and that he yearns for more than anything at all.

And I know exactly what that’s like. I basically was Evan Hansen in high school. For most of high school I had no friends at all. No friends, no social group, no clique, no invitations, no validation, and absolutely no hint or trace of romance.

In many ways, that kind of isolation harms a member of a social species like ours. I was miserable all the time, and the gates to my heart froze shut. I was emotionally unstable and went through deep distortions of emotional affect which led to times when I felt like I was the only person on Earth and everyone else was the shadow of the ghost of smoke, and other times when everything in my life seemed hostile and alien and strange, and other times when I felt such futile and impotent rage at the world and at myself that I wanted to destroy myself utterly in some huge dramatic way that would force the world to notice me and realize what they lost by ignoring or being outright hostile to me for so long.

So yeah. I was Even Hansen. But I was the suicide kid too.

Let me tell you about one of the worst days of my life. I had stayed home from high school because I was too depressed to go. This happened a lot in high school. I got away with it because I was so bright that I could do the homework and ace the test without attending every single class. But it was, in its own sad way, a cry for help.

Historically, those have never worked for me.

On that particular day, I was so depressed that I couldn’t take it any more. I wrote a suicide note – in blank verse form – and left it on the kitchen table and then I went looking for a means to kill myself.

My first stop was my father’s bedroom because that is where our guns were stored. I stared at my dad’s big .22 caliber rifle. That would do the trick. Click, bang, done. One act of will and I would be free of having to be me forever.

It was a lot like this, actually.

But in the state I was in, I was not able to image what steps I would have needed to go through to load the gun then prop it up somewhere and rig a way for me to pull the trigger with the barrel facing my head.

So I didn’t end up doing that.

Then I drifted into the bathroom and look at all those products with the poison symbol on them. All the cleaners and solvents and other common household toxins. I thought about taking a bottle and downing it, just chugging it down. Then it would be inside me and it would be too late for me to do anything about it and I would die.

But I didn’t know which one would kill me dead and which ones would just make me really sick and land me in the hospital but leave me alive and in a lot of pain.

And I was all alone in the house, so nobody would be there to notice my plight for around seven hours. That’s a lot of time to spend in agonizing pain.

So that was out. That’s when I went downstairs and got the knife.

It was our biggest knife, a huge butcher’s knife with a very sharp blade. Somehow, I ended up in my father’s bedroom again, and I sat on the end of his bed with the knife in my hand and thought about doing it.

Obviously, I didn’t do it. Eventually, I got so tired that it was all I could do to put the knife back in the rack in the kitchen and go to my bedroom to lay down and sleep.

I don’t remember a lot of the rest of the day, I know I didn’t eat. I might have watched some TV, but probably not. I think I just slept as much as I could.

Then my mother comes home, and finds the note. Oops.

She calls my name, panicked. This makes me very happy. Someone really does care. That wasn’t the reason I wrote the note but I am super happy nevertheless, and a tiny spark of warmth flares briefly in my ice bound heart.

I tell my mother that it was only a poem. She grumbles at me for upsetting her with my poetry. But she must suspect the truth.

I feel bad about how good that made me feel. But I was so depressed that it felt like I didn’t even really exist and that nobody would miss me when I was gone because they didn’t even notice me when I was alive, so what’s to miss?

And just like when I was severely depressed adut, I actually thought that people would pretend to be sad about my death because that seemed like what they were supposed to do in such an occasion, but everyone would really be glad I was gone so they didn’t have the burden of my existence any more.

Psychosis makes you see things that are not there.

Neurosis makes you feel things that are not true.

I really felt like the world would better off without me.

Thank God I survived that, and the crushing depression that came after my parents took me and my brother out of school later and didn’t relent until…. fall 2014 or so?

Whenever I went to Kwantlen, anyhow.

If the internet had been around when I was in high school, I might have gotten through it better. But I might also have become a horrible person once I discovered trolling and started using all my verbal skills to punish the world for denying me.

I had a lot less self-discipline back then, and a much poorer understanding of the world and how I contributed to my own problems.

Lashing out at the world would have made a lot of sense to me back then.

I’m just glad the school shooting meme was not out there at the time, or I might have gotten some very bad ideas.

But now, here I am, getting my life started, and with people showing interest in my talents on Upwork and on track to make a name for myself.

I am so glad I am alive to enjoy it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.