About Suffering by Nin Andrews

Birds, I thought, were small angels.

About Suffering

by Nin Andrews

I heard on the radio this morning that someone commits suicide in the US every eleven minutes. Children between the ages of ten and fourteen are particularly vulnerable. Also at risk, children who experience medical trauma or repeated surgeries. 

I underwent six eye surgeries between the ages of one and twelve. Once, during an eye operation, I became a ghost and looked down at my body as the surgeon sliced open the conjunctiva of my left eye.  When I told this to the doctor, he suggested I see a psychologist. 

Back then, I thought I was the only girl with a death wish. What saved me: animals. A farm child, I loved cows, horses, chickens, dogs, cats, pigs, birds, mice. I rescued baby starlings that fell from nests in the eaves of our house and raised them on Alpo. Birds, I thought, were small angels. 

My parents didn’t believe in therapy, said it was unscientific—a modern-day religion.  My father, a philosophy student, loved to quote Nietzsche and announce to his Christian friends, God is dead.  Once, when one of my baby starlings woke my father at dawn with its raucous cries, he flushed it down the toilet. 

Both Nietzsche and my father suffered from depression, mood swings, chronic pain, and visions of grandeur. They believed they were supermen, or rather Übermenschen, who could rise from the ashes of despair.

When Nietzsche was forty-four, he watched a horse being flogged in the Piazza Carlo Alberto in Turin, Italy, and was so overwhelmed with grief, he never spoke again. 

My father debated whether animals suffer. The question originated with Rene Descartes, who claimed that animals lack souls and consciousness and therefore can feel no pain. Descartes practiced vivisection and insisted that animal howls and moans are uncorrelated with physical discomfort.

On our farm, horses that became fractious, whinnying day and night, kicking their stalls and riders and  rearing when approached, were first whipped, then treated with Acepromazine, an antipsychotic and mood stabilizer.  

I have often wished for a mood stabilizer.  

The effectiveness of antidepressants is unpredictable. For some, a placebo works as well as drugs. For others a drug can be a miracle—a savior in pill-form. Once, when I was treated with Prozac, I saw death as a doorway with light leaking around the edges. The light was singing my name.

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Read our interview with Poet of the Week, Nin Andrews, wherein she discusses eye surgeries, mythical girls, and why prose poems are like Kodak slides. About this, she says:

“I do think most people spend their lives putting on a show, to a greater or lesser degree depending on who they are. What a gift when we can stop the performance, be alone, hear no one, not even voices in our head. I think of silence as a relief and the key to survival. It’s the delicious white space in my life. The emptiness at the bottom of the page after a prose poem. A space to breathe and wonder.”