Robin Williams was such a wonderful actor, but sadly his life ended on August 11th, 2014 when he committed suicide. Unfortunately, for those like him who have ever wrestled with addictions or various mental disorders, suicide often appears as the only solution. I should know as I watched a father end his life in this way and at one point, I too even attempted it. Thankfully though, my Higher Power has helped me to see that it’s not the answer and that getting to the root of my pain and healing it, is.
My father was never able to learn this lesson. I remember watching him over the years, battle his own addictions and a bi-polar disorder. He was always “up” in moods and behaviors for various lengths of time, and then he would crash and be “down” for many months afterwards. In his last few weeks before his death, he grew completely weary of this repetitive cycle he had gone through already for most of his adult life. In a note he left behind for me, he was convinced that God was calling him home and that suicide was the answer to end all of his pain.
Nowadays I honestly can’t believe that any Higher Power who would ever want someone to kill themselves. But depression is a mental disease that’s frequently enhanced when engaging in any addiction and my father never fully grasped this. His only solution was to always take those drugs he was prescribed that were supposed to balance his moods out. But that never fixed his inner pain that kept driving him into his addictions and mental imbalances in the first place. It didn’t heal the fact he was abused and neglected on many levels growing up. It didn’t erase all the years he never received the unconditional love he deserved as a kid. Instead, addictions and prescriptions became his solution to numbing himself from it and his mental state continued to suffer throughout his entire life because of that.
In regards to Robin Williams, I don’t know if he had any of his own unhealed past wounds or traumas that had driven him into his addictions and mental imbalances. What I do know though is that anyone I have ever met who has battled their own addictions or mental imbalances has always had untreated past demons of their own. I definitely speak from experience about this, not just because of what my father went through, but because I went through it as well.
I endured a lot of conditional based loved and mental and emotional abuse growing up in my dysfunctional family. I was also sexually abused as a teenager and bullied more than I can count during most of my grade school years. When I discovered alcohol and drugs, they were the best elixir to hide from all that pain and trauma inside and it worked wonderfully for years, until I began battling with severe depression and anxiety.
Once I found sobriety from substance abuse, I chose to live in other addictions for several more decades instead of getting into those core wounds within me that I had never allowed to heal. All that did was continue this perpetual cycle of me taking medications to deal with all my mental imbalances. Psychiatrists labeled me as bi-polar just like my father and told me my only solution was to take medications for the rest of my life. But those medications were really no different than taking alcohol or drugs, as they only numbed me from feeling those wounds that were causing me to seek addictions and become imbalanced.
In 2011, all of this finally took its tool on me one day when I received a major rejection from someone I was addicted to. In that moment, the pain I felt inside from it somehow resurfaced every single one of my past wounds so much so that my brain said I should just take my life and that it would end all my suffering. So that’s when I went to my storage unit where one of my cars was being stored. It’s when I closed the door to that unit, when I started my car, and when I sat there in it without any hesitation to what I was about to do. I truly wanted to die and any thoughts of loved ones or people that cared for me didn’t matter. I just wanted my pain to end and that was it.
For whatever the reason, as I started to become drowsy in that storage unit after some time passed, something moved within me enough to reach out and call someone for help. I obviously didn’t die that day and as I write this, I realize how grateful I am now that I didn’t. Between that day and now though, I have had to do an incredible amount of work to heal from all those past wounds. Because of that work, my past doesn’t haunt me anymore nor do I have the desire to engage in any addictions. I also haven’t suffered from severe depression and anxiety in quite some time. Sometimes I find it hard to believe now that I truly wanted to die that day in my old storage unit. Thank God I didn’t but I’m very sad that Robin Williams did die in a similar way.
The fact is, there are too many people out there who end up feeling suicide is their only answer, and engaging in any addiction or having a mental disorder will only increase their chances of feeling that way. But with hard work and help from a Higher Power, I believe everyone can get to the root of their inner pain and receive enough healing to prevent this from ever happening. So far this has worked for me and hopefully in writing these words, it may somehow end up helping another one day. Regardless, I know Robin Williams will definitely be missed and my only prayer is that he is now at peace and with You God.
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson