The thing about suffering is that when it’s over, you sometimes forget the depth of the cave you’re still emerging from. And by suffering, I mean depression. By depression, I mean 2024 when I found myself spiraling down a staircase that led me through all of Dante’s hells. A different way for me to admit this is to confess again: the best thing that you can do when hurting is find someone to talk to, but sometimes, the need to ask for help masks itself. You believe you’re asking for a life raft, but never articulate the word help. You emote. You weep. You learn what taciturn means. Around you, too often, people see your pain and it troubles them. They run to their comfort.
Let me say it clearly. I was in a meeting with a district attorney advocating for someone’s freedom. There were four lawyers in the room and I was one of them. I wore a bright yellow MLK hoodie that I’d worn weeks earlier while crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge barefoot in a downpour with tears racing down my face. But that’s a different story. On that afternoon, I was presenting to the world as a confident lawyer, one who even had a Yale Law degree. I’d gotten a handful of people out of prison and was hoping to get another man freedom to make myself feel better about the hurt I wore like my state number. During the conversation, I slipped up and confessed something that kicked open the door to who I really was: a man barely holding it all together.
Later, one of the lawyers in the room called me. Not to talk about my case, but to say that he’d heard what I said. To tell me how important it was for me not to disappear. And that tears well up in my eyes as I remember the call makes me remember how I needed that call.
At the end of Invisible Man, Ellison writes that the unnamed narrator was an invisible man simply because people refused to see him. Well, I was drowning, and this brother, who had all kinds of responsibilities that didn’t include calling me, picked up a phone and said he was an ear for me to bend if ever there was another drowning night.
May is Mental Health Awareness Month, but maybe every month should be, as we walk and ask ourselves if we’re all okay, in this world where many of us accumulate more sadness than joy.
When I started Freedom Reads, I didn’t understand that our mission was about mental health. As if I don’t remember breaking my hand once on a cell door, as if I’ve forgotten every piece of evidence in my memory of prison being a catalyst to the worst mental health breakdowns I’ve witnessed.
We’ve walked into prisons and visited so many who’ve not had visitors see them, who’ve not had strangers insist on seeing them. We show up on the cellblocks where they sleep, where it is often the loneliest place on earth. We show up with an abundance of literature and beauty never before brought into these institutions. Many of us know the desperation so intimately that it’s a wonder we’ve done this now more than 600 times, walked into prison cellblocks bringing beauty and books in the shape of handcrafted and well-stocked Freedom Libraries.
Sometimes, I think we do this work because we’re the only people who understand. Then I think of the lawyer who called me. So many of us understand what it means to need an outstretched arm.
If you believe like many of us do, that freedom begins with a book, you should know that being mentally well is a necessary condition of freedom. I hope you support us this month and all the rest, as we transform these places of sorrow one Freedom Library at a time.