So I’ve held off writing about Robin Williams committing suicide because, well, I wanted the fire hose of fucked up shit to run its gravity-defying, spraying shit everywhere course…and…I see we’re down to a mere trickle so this is what I think.

Robin Williams made a choice that was only his to make…

…and it is not within the realm of my experience or influence to say that it was a wise choice or not.

I cannot know or understand what is inside another person’s mind, let alone Robin Williams, nor can I know or understand what is inside the minds of the people he loved and who in turn loved him. And I mean real people, not movie audience people…not People Magazine reading people…not TMZ website visiting people but the people who actually knew Mr. Williams in real life.

I’ve read that he was selfish, he was an asshole, a coward (name a pejorative, it’s likely been hurled him, dead as he is) but I’ve not read anyone say that Robin Williams was a human being with his own reasons and his own ideas of what life is and should be. And that when the one he was living—his life—stopped being that thing or idea that he thought it should be, then he had every right and prerogative to choose to stop living it. Regardless the rest of the planet, the other 7 billion similar humans, and what their thoughts about what life is…

…and should be.

We so often overlay our lives, our experience, the very idea of what WE think life should be on top of the lives of others and we then judge them on the obvious gaps, the shortcomings, the areas where they fail to meet OUR expectations. We look out from inside the only place we ever really know and understand…and we make guesses and suppositions and try to create theories and hypothesis to explain what can’t be explained…so we call those people who don’t measure up…

…selfish…cowards…assholes.

When the most correct thing to call them is…simply another human using the limited tools (we all have) to try to live in an increasingly confusing world were we try to simultaneously meet hundreds (maybe thousands) of conflicting expectations…some from external sources but the vast majority we created inside each of us. I know I have them. I know you have them.

We all have them.

Robin Williams was an outrageously funny man and brilliant comedian and actor…and that is what we can only and ever know about him; the things we saw, read and heard in his movies, his writings and his standup act. What we can’t know, nor will we ever know, is where he failed himself or where his brain chemistry failed him or where he constantly missed meeting his own expectations or his own standards. Regardless the underlying pathology, we can’t know the parts of himself he could never, ever hope to love…and we can never know the feeling of utter hopelessness that it could have caused.

Robin Williams made a choice that was only his to make…as a man…as a human.

And I respect him for that.

Believe . Go. Do.

~TrevorZen