He’s just a sensitive kid.
I’m quite passionate about mental health. I’ve lived the struggle first and second hand. I understand it in ways that someone who’ve never dealt with it-or been with a loved one who’s dealt with it-can. To understand where I’m coming from, we need to start at the beginning.
It’s 1987, and a nine-year-old boy is outside at recess with his classmates. They’re on the swings and the monkey bars. They’re playing kickball or basketball. Some are walking around the play area talking-probably gossiping. Not this boy. He’s sitting, leaned up against one of the concrete pillars that serves as a support for that section of the roof, looking on. One or two of his classmates come to check on him, and he says he’s fine. He just prefers sitting there and occasionally talking to one of the playground aides or a custodian when he walks out the cafeteria doors to dump the lunch trash in the nearby dumpster. Once in a while he could be found in the classroom, eating lunch with the teacher, not because he was in trouble but-unbeknownst to him-someone had suggested to the teacher that the young man might be having a hard time.
At the time, and for years to come, I didn’t know about depression. When I was about 22 and my doctor asked me how long I’d had the symptoms I described, that little boy popped into mind for the first time in a very long time. I didn’t sit on that playground crying. I can’t say for sure that I leaning against that pillar ruminating. All I knew for certain was I didn’t take pleasure in any of the things the other kids did and I just wanted to go back in the classroom. I was comfortable there.
I didn’t have a tragic childhood. In fact, by many standards and compared to many of the children I know as a teacher, it was charmed. We had our issues and there were some traumas, but I wasn’t suffering. Nor, as far as anyone noticed or acknowledged-maybe even myself-was anything wrong. I was just a “sensitive boy.”
That boy had been like that for all his years in elementary school. He got along with everyone as far as it went but didn’t have any “best friends,” not the way his classmates talked about them-not that he saw regularly or went to their birthday parties. He spent a lot of time alone, reading instead of playing sports, watching Mr. Wizard reruns instead of going on bike rides with the neighborhood kids.
And when he did go for bike rides, they were by himself, unless his mother insisted his older brother take him along. Then he would be “ditched” somewhere along the way, far from home, while the older kids sped away faster than he could go. The older brother was a source of discord, and at various points in the boys’ lives, of trauma.
There was a younger brother too. He came along in ’82 and was doted on by the entire family. The relationship between our sensitive boy and the younger brother was always positive, but his arrival landed our boy in the middle-child seat.
He was too old to do the things his younger brother did and too young to be involved with his older brother. He neither played baseball like the older brother nor piano like the younger. He was, as is often the middle-child’s role-the peace-maker, the mediator, and the sounding board.
I went to two different elementary schools; one for kindergarten and first grade and another from second to sixth. At the end of fifth grade, I said goodbye to my teachers and classmates because we were supposed to move that summer. The house didn’t sell though, and I showed back up again in September. We moved again that November, but not across town. We moved from Allentown, Pennsylvania to Westford, Massachusetts. In Allentown, sixth graders were the leaders of the pack; the oldest kids in the building. In Westford, sixth graders were at the bottom of the middle school heap.
Now we have a boy, a pre-teen, who had moved from a place where he felt like didn’t fit in to a place where he demonstrably did not. The culture was radically different. Being a “new kid” would follow him for years. He’d never be an insider. Not playing a sport, particularly soccer, made him a pariah. He would find others who stuck out, others who struggled. He would float to the island of misfit toys.
Looking back, I know I had some problems then. I know that, though I didn’t show the stereotypical signs of a depressed youth, they were coming. I couldn’t talk about it though. The focus was clearly split between my brothers, and for very different reasons. My father was travelling and our relationship wasn’t great. There was simply nothing I was interested in that was in his wheelhouse. My relationship with my mother was positive, but when I approached her about being teased, about feeling like an outsider, about any of the feelings that were starting to keep me awake at night, she told me the other kids were just jealous. I was a sensitive kid; it was explained to me.
I wasn’t entirely sure what it meant, but I couldn’t disagree. I was sensitive. I was sensitive to other people’s feelings, their wishes, their needs. I did everything I could to make other people feel better. That would be true my entire life, and it would land me in heart-breaking situations I never should have been in.
I’ll pause there, because things shift in high school and the years to follow. You might read this and think, “what’s the big deal?” and I understand that. I might have once done the same. The big deal is this: children can show signs of depression from an early age. They often ask for help in ways you might not immediately recognize. If I’d been able to talk about the things that I felt, and some things I went through I haven’t delved into here, I might have been able to build a more stable foundation.
When I was 22 and I sat across from the doctor explaining that I needed help, I’d already spent at least a half-dozen years knowing I wasn’t just sensitive. I didn’t suffer from seasonal blues. I manage my mental health now-most of the time-but I wonder how much less I’d have suffered over the years if someone had dug a little deeper than my being just a sensitive boy.
