Thank You For Being My Neighbor

Mr. Rogers and the Lesson that Love is a Struggle

To begin. To continue. To end.

At each moment you are doing one of these three things. An example: each morning you wake up and begin your morning routine, later you are on the bus on your way to work, continuing the routine, and if things go as planned, you end at your destination — the desk. From there you will be in one of these states. Continuing is the one which you will spend most of your time.

For most of my life my focus has been almost exclusively on the shift from continuing to ending.

A line from the movie “Father’s Day” starring Robin Williams and Billy Crystal sticks in my head. Robin Williams’ character, a writer in San Francisco, is writing his suicide note and he states, “For years I have thought about killing myself. It’s the only thing that has kept me going.”

I’m uncertain whether my mental health disorders are biological or environmental in origin. I doubt it’s anyone’s place to know at this moment in history. The only thing that I am certain of is the constant question it forces me to answer: will you continue?

At times the answer is so glaringly obvious it’s nearly tacky. Gold lamé fox fur nesting above a hot pink sweater and accented with a bouffant hairstyle. Yes, of course I will continue. Don’t be daft. I wouldn’t trade existence for all the gold in heaven. (How could I enjoy it if I weren’t here to spend it?)

In other times the answer isn’t evident. The question feeling biblical in scope. As if I am Jacob wrestling with the angel and the only way I can answer with any sort of honesty is letting go of certainty and answering strictly with a well-rehearsed faith. Yes, I will continue, I must, mustn't I? Things will be easier, won’t they?

At the root of this, I suspect, is that most days I can’t much find anything in myself to like. Although my sense of humor is well-developed (as you can no doubt tell with this incredibly lighthearted essay), and although I’ve been fortunate enough to have been called friend, brother, and partner — I cannot see what these people see.

I wish I could. I worry this wish makes me conceited. “Oh yes, darling, I’d love to see myself how you must see me: A golden god descended from Mount Olympus, no doubt. My, how incredibly lucky you are to experience me this way. Hmm, it simply makes me green with envy.”

But the truth is most days when I look in the mirror I see nothing worth looking at.

At a particularly low ebb I was withdrawn as severely as my bank account was overdrawn. To compliment the rotten state I was in I decided to drink. But I laid up with depression. Lucky for us lazy drinkers Amazon will deliver booze to your door and even though I didn’t have money I did have an Amazon gift card.

So I ordered the drinks online, vodka and scotch and got ready to enter the card number into Amazon’s check-out. And that’s when I learned Amazon doesn’t allow payment with a gift card for door delivered alcohol.

At times heaven feels so far away.

With no booze, I lay on my couch, YouTube autoplay on, suggesting videos based on some sort of algorithm I’m too simple to understand. And as I lay there in that stupor of neurological sadness I heard Joan Rivers’ voice. She was hosting The Tonight Show and her guest that night in ’83 was Mr. Rogers.

I wasn’t really listening to it, my attention mostly focused on myself. On a side note, I’ve always felt the simplest question to ask me is, “What are you thinking about?” The answer is almost always, “myself”.

But as I was thinking about myself I picked up on this bit of dialogue:

Joan Rivers: Sing that song Melissa likes, ‘I Like You [sic].

Mr. Rogers: I’ll sing that to you and everyone else here.

Joan Rivers: No don’t, you’ll make me die!

And then with the Tonight Show Band playing piano behind him, Mr. Rogers begun to sing “It’s You I Like”.

As he begins to sing Joan hides her head in her cardigan sweater.

What is it about someone unabashedly telling us they like us that makes us so uneasy? If he was singing it to me on national television, I have no doubt that I would curdle into human whey.

When I was boy, I spent my days certain I was loved. My mother and grandmother were the architects of this feeling. Although I didn’t have a father, I didn’t need one because they were more than enough. However, my mother drifted to California and towards the man she’d met there. My grandmother died when I was eleven. Ignored and feeling insufficient in a way words can never truly capture I grew detached and suspicious.

On my worst days, I’m uncertain whether I can truly accept the idea that another person loves me. I can accept that I love others, but when I imagine the feeling being returned, I treat it suspiciously, as if it’s a joke and I’m the punchline.

When my first girlfriend told me, “I love you, Elliott” my immediate response was, “Yeah, but you also love Gogol Bordello and they’re a stupid gypsy band nobody likes.”

It’s a strange thing, this attitude towards being loved. It’s a form of narcissism. Saying to another person, “I know you have healthy relationships with other people and I’m certain that you love them as you say you do. But I am different.”

A self-sabotaging narcissism, though most forms of narcissism are, unless you’re the president.

Of course, it’s also a self-defense. If you tell yourself you aren’t lovable and people leave, you know that in some way you aren’t to blame, no one could ever love you. Then again, it’s all your fault because there’s something wrong with you at the very core. You’re the reason you’re unlovable but it’s not your fault no one loves you because how could they?

Contradictory, yes, but no one ever said emotions, especially harmful ones, adhere to any sort of formal logic.

But, when I heard Mr. Rogers sing, “ But it’s you I like/The way you are right now/ The way down deep inside you/Not the things that hide you” I did something I haven’t done in such a long time, I believed him.

After hearing the song I immediately searched for more Mr. Rogers clips on YouTube. Furthermore I found myself doing something I’d only done with musicians and writers (the troubled ones) before: buying books and biographies and reading every article I could about him. And re-reading them. Especially Tom Junod’s Esquire profile, “Can You Say . . . Hero?”.

And in each article I re-discovered something I worried I’d lost. That feeling of security I had when I was a boy in Oregon. The feeling that despite the challenges and deep-seated knowledge that you’re not worth loving, that someone does love you simply because you are you and that’s all you need to be.

And I keep trying to piece it together, what is it about this man, his simple show, the gentle cadence to his voice, the eye-to-eye sincerity as he looked to camera, that soothes? And I believe it all hinges on trust.

I do not trust people’s opinions about me unless there is at least an undercurrent of critique to it. And then I think of this quote from him, “Love isn’t a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like ‘struggle.’”

I feel him making the effort to love each and every person he reached. I can feel his earnestness as I read about him reaching back to all the people who wrote him fan mail (he would spend three hours every morning hand writing letters to fans). Instead of love being a presumption one has to work at it. And Mr. Rogers worked at it.

Maybe, when I look in the mirror and see nothing worth liking, I shouldn’t just leave it at that. Instead of receding away I should try to struggle to like the person reflected back at me.

It carries a risk of course. It is entirely possible that after all my effort nothing will come of it. I can write these words and be filled to the brim with good intentions and a patient therapist but maybe I’ll never find the end to this struggle. Maybe I will never actually see anything worth liking.

Perhaps continuing is the struggle. Persistence is a way of love.

Maybe, when faced with the question, do you like yourself? I can answer honestly with a hopeful if hesitant faith, “Not right now, but I know someone who does.”

And if you can’t trust Mr. Rogers who can you trust?