“Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.” —Virginia Woolf

In the end, one’s mind is not so free as we might wish.

This week I read a short piece on Virginia Woolf’s three suicide notes.

I felt well up inside an unsurprised disappointment as I read about the utter misinterpretation and misquoting of one of her notes just after her death. The coroner and soon the media painted her character and her motivations in altogether the wrong light. She says clearly in her note and her husband confirmed that she struggled with mental health and breakdowns throughout her life.

Little surprise that a society might so easily discard a woman who was sexually assaulted from childhood through adulthood, a literary giant and enduring feminist figure who said one thing about her intended suicide, was misquoted and dismissed, and was then criticized as a defeatist for not coping better with the war effort. Never mind the fact of living during two world wars and beneath bombs falling through sky might cause a person emotional strain. Paying just a little closer attention to her writing makes it clear she waded into the Ouse River to escape the madness in her mind, not the war with Germany.

But, once the press runs with something…

Humans are not a species accustomed to extending the benefit of the doubt. And our track record over time of seeing mental health as health itself, quite poor.

My Virginia Woolf rabbit hole led me this morning to archived New York Times pieces on her disappearance in 1941 and the ensuing recovery of her body. She and her husband had already moved twice during the war after their houses were bombed. Not so bad as millions of people received, but not good either.

I think of all the people struggling through mental health challenges, through trauma, that are not so well known that their suicide notes become public record and are cabled across the ocean to other countries. All the people whose feelings are chalked up to weakness. Parents, children, spouses, soldiers all responding to what happens inside and outside of their minds as they move through the world. As they live and as they die.

The passing of the famous and the exceptional figures of our time—those we see in our feeds each week, each year—are not a news story because they are actually more important than all the others. But, they are opportunities, reminders to recognize in everyone around us the humanity and the struggle. They are touchpoints for humility and empathy.

They are reminders of that which is shared and that which is possible.

“I will not be “famous,” “great.” I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one’s self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.” —Virginia Woolf