to school and sing one with her, I was too afraid to make a fool of myself, and her, to go. More excuses.
Shame is insidious.
I noticed the damage a few years ago when my daughter became self-conscious about her singing voice. There was no convincing her what everyone who has ever heard her says—that it is beautiful, and uniquely so.
And who was I to talk—the guy with dozens of songs he’ll never sing in public?
I resolved to take whatever voice I had left and sing, come hell (and some listeners have described it as similar) or high water.
It’s a work in progress.
I’m in a choir again: Blending your voice with 40 others, the elation is exponential.
If someone tells me they “can’t sing,” I’ll do anything within my power to prove them wrong.
And singing has become a family activity again. At my daughter’s wedding reception last spring, my nine-year-old grandson played piano and sang a tribute in memory of his other grandfather, who had died three months earlier. The sort of memorial only music can be. Partway through the song he saw his grandmother crying and started to tear up, but he kept playing. And with my daughter, granddaughter, and me in the band as backup vocalists, he kept singing, too.
That afternoon as the power of song resonated through three generations of my family, I heard the breaking of at least a few links of the chain that had bound us.
Tthere’s a metaphor in this somewhere.
We work most of our lives to hide our imperfections from one another.
It’s exhausting, and futile.
At the very least, we rob ourselves of the chance to be loved for who we are, not who we think we have to be.
At the very worst, the masquerade drives us to despair, and shame can kill us.
The irony is that, as the educator Parker Palmer writes, “it’s in our brokenness, not our illusions of perfection, that we connect most deeply with one another.”
Isn’t it that brokenness—those imperfections and working through them together—that bonds so many Wabash students, particularly in their first years here? In a place where failure is built into the learning process, everyone stumbles.
Isn’t that one reason alumni look back so fondly on those years—the friends for life made here because you got to know each other, warts and all?
But there are things even friends, especially men, rarely talk about. Still grieving from the death by suicide of a student last fall, a group of students, teachers, and alumni began changing that.
In this issue you’ll read about the grassroots effort led by Bilal Jawed ’17 and Professor Eric Wetzel, among others, to form a Mental Health Concerns committee to de-stigmatize conversations about depression and mental health and “to never lose another student.”
In this issue’s A Man’s Life, Tim Padgett ’84 likens clinical depression to “a cage you’re always straining to escape.” One key to
that cage door is learning how to talk about the disease, realizing that depression has a physical cause like any other that you wouldn’t hesitate to treat.
There is wisdom, not shame, in asking
for help.
Last year I was grieving the death of friend and former Wabash Professor of Religion Steve Webb ’83 when Communications Director Kim Johnson suggested we put together an issue that dealt holistically with “mental health.” We’d ask readers to tell us how they take care of themselves physically, emotionally, and spiritually. We’d ask doctors for the latest on treatment, find out what’s behind the new sense of urgency in treating anxiety and depression. We’d find alumni willing to talk about their struggles with depression and grief, whose lives give new meaning to
“Wabash always fights.”
When Kim and I sat down to plan, the only way I knew to explain my vision was to sing an old hymn I first heard sung by Pete Seeger years ago. It would be less a performance than a conversation with a friend, but it needed music. I needed to remember to breathe, and I had to be strong on the last verse, especially those last two lines, the words that express what I hope this edition can be as we join this ongoing conversation in the Wabash community:
When friends rejoice both far and near, How can I keep from singing?
In prison cells and dungeons vile Our thoughts to them are winging When friends by shame are undefiled How can I keep from singing?
