A Letter to Logan Paul

2^nd January 2018

Dear Mr. Logan Paul,

I’ve just seen your apology on the news and this topic hits close to me given that two members of my immediate family have attempted to take their own lives. I have suffered with depression for a lifetime and have a good deal of experience with mental illness.

Let me say firstly that I understand. There is a certain spectacle to what you saw in Aokigahara forest of Japan and even Aristotle wrote of the seeing of dead bodies in his poetics. It may have seemed right to you to share so unique an experience with the world and not all of us understand the solemnity involved.  

With that, may I point out that the common person is not good with forgiveness and apologies rarely hit as close to home as offences. People lash out, they lash out because of the pain of their memories, and because they need someone to focus that pain on. The depressed often feel helpless and sometimes even the act of destroying one’s own self is an act of taking control.

Where does this leave you? Well, sir, you can turn this negative moment into awareness. More appropriately, you should find a way to help people with depression. Look at the story of YouTuber Boogie2988 who became profitable after being discovered by Ray William Johnson. Boogie was depressed and disabled until Ray gave him economic freedom.

You can do that, Logan, you can help people.  I know you tried by including a help line in your video, but I mean make it personal. What I think you should do is find ten people who suffer from depression and make their lives better. Include them in a blog or find a way to better their situation.

As a YouTuber and a Blogger I know a person like yourself can change the life of a man like me with a few clicks of a mouse. You may have made a mistake but you can still do the right thing and people will love you for it.

Go find someone to help,

Richard Leland Neal

A Sad Voice

1^st June 2012

Dear Cassi,

There are times in the doing of my job that voices come from the darkness. Each voice has a story to tell and none are happy tales of wonder. All too often when I lift the receiver to my desk phone the voice on the other side needs to tell me the horrors of their life.

       

Such was the case not too long ago when a woman called apologizing for not having money to donate to the homeless. This is a funny thing about working with the homeless; those who hold a tender part in their hearts for the folks I look after are often odd folks themselves. 

       

On the phone this woman with such a deep pain within her that she had to lance the wound and let it drain into strange fabric of the night wile she spoke. She was an aging hippy with the withered sound that the hard party lifestyle in her voice.

       

She told me of how she had been kicked out of her family home the night of her high school graduation by a mother calming to be protecting her. She was given a fifty dollar bill, that was a lot of money at the time, and told to make her way before her father took her life. This was back in the seventies before I was born and it was a different kind of world.

       

Unable to find work she had turned to friends who viewed her as an accessory to the lush accommodations of the era. She kept her place by satisfying carnal appetites. To live with herself she took drugs and lived in her ugly dream for an undisclosed time.

       

This had left her body ravaged and her womb broken. The injuries to her body left a hole in her heart where should have lived a child that she could never mother in biology or household. Those, the unfortunate, had become her children, and I shepherd to that brood. She had no idea if it was staff on that phone or client and said “if your homeless, god bless you”.

Live with who you are, little sister,

Richard Leland Neal

Something Stronger

11^th June 2012

Dear Cassi,

Today I saw the doctor again and got a stronger sleeping pill. There is a hollow feeling in my chest with the acceptance of this medication, but what can I do? I need to sleep and sleep is denied me. I feel as if I’m betraying some trust with myself taking these things. I’m now on the largest dose of SSRI that they will proscribe for my medication. The doctor said that I should feel energized, but I simply do not.

My old man was a pill pusher and so taking these things offends me because of him. He horded these things and thought that all the answers lived in those little vials growing dusty and cracked in his pink box that had once held my mother’s makeup.

I know that the pill can do no more than simply help, and I have been told that the same recovery can be made without them so long as someone is willing to wait another ten years to recover. No, these pills will be a part of my life until I resolve the issues in my head. The nature of my problem is long lasting and requires cognitive restructuring.

I need to reassign emotions to the events of my life. How do you un-feel? How is it possible to take the natural feelings of a man and dash them into the world of passable? I’ve chosen to laugh at a good amount of my pain because laughing is better than crying. Well, no, I never cried, I just got angry. Laughing is better than getting angry as well. It’s better for your heart. Anger causes heart disease.

Live healthy, little sister,

Richard Leland Neal