Robin Williams’ Suicide Death: Reason Yet Untold
A legendary comedy genius, an Oscar-winning actor, a charitable human being, a well admired and respected father, a filthy rich man apparently decided to terminate his own life.
I personally loved the funny actor. There’s not even one single movie that I haven’t watched… at least twice. He epitomized the concept of entertainment. He brought so much joy and laughter into people’s lives, not only in the US, but also in many places around the world.
When I first read the tragic news about the suicide-death of this wonderful artist, my first impression was “Oh no”, and then, as I read on, I was hoping that I would find out it was all some sort of a bad joke but unfortunately, it wasn’t. It was simply and truly bad news. By the time I finished reading the article, I was feeling terribly sad, probably because I realized that all these memories of laughs had come to an end. Then my sadness got replaced with anger. I was angry. I’m not sure whether I was angry at him or about his death, it really wasn’t clear to me, but all I know is that I was pissed. I still don’t know why but it could be because I felt that my admiration to him and that of tens of millions of people in the world was just not enough for this talented human being to see any point of sticking around a little while longer. I might have felt slightly betrayed.
Then came the dreadful question to my mind. Why? Why did he do it? Why would HE do it? It would almost seem Mr. Williams would be the last person to consider doing such a thing. I needed answers. I needed to know why. Naturally, I kept on reading more articles about his death to find out what others are saying about it, friends, family and fellow actors who knew him up close and personal. They all spoke of depression. Yes, true, the actor was depressed and thus took his own life. But that doesn’t answer the “why” question? It just makes it more complicated. So it would perhaps be more accurate to ask “why was he depressed?”. Why would a person like HIM, who had what HE had, decide to hang himself with a belt?
As I failed to find the answer to my question in the articles I read, I switched myself onto the “reflective mode” to try to figure out what could have led that man, who is thought to have had it all, to put himself to eternal sleep.
Unlike many, I have found that the answer could lie in the very same words that everyone used to express their shock at the actor’s death and in the reason why he SHOULDN’T have killed himself, “he had it all” right? I thought, what if THAT was why he killed himself. He had it all. “All”, however, is relative. For many people, it’s fame, money, career success, family, children, etc. Let’s agree though that, in the materialistic world, the actor DID have it all. The way I see it, Mr. Williams had it all and only decided to terminate his own life upon realizing it. He must have got to a point where he thought “Is that it?”.
And then I thought, how dangerous is it to base your self-validation, success and happiness on receiving recognition or approval from others. For Mr. Williams, that recognition or approval came in the form of laughter. He would’ve done anything to get that laugh from people because he lived his entire life thinking that the ONLY way to calm his restless mind and appease his painful soul was to make people laugh, to make people happy. Towards the last decade of his life, he started to realize that that pain and restlessness were not going away, no matter how many laughs and cheers he was getting from his millions of audiences.
Mr. Williams was bullied probably for being a short chubby hairy kid (maybe the “hairy bit” came a little later). As a teen, you have just a few options to cope with bullying:
1. You keep your mouth shut and put up with the misery and humiliation,
2. If you’re a big boy (or know one), you beat the hell out of the bullies, which he couldn’t have done,
3. You run away only to get chased off by the bullies and and then get teased and beaten even worse and
4. You start to crack jokes about your own self to please the bullies and get some recognition and approval which then transform into a survival mechanism, and then into an art which Mr. Williams would master and perfect later on in life making him a comedy legend but at the same time leaving him weak and vulnerable to the dark power of the tortured human soul. It’s not a coincidence that the only Oscar that Mr. Williams won was for his role of a psychiatrist in Good Will Hunting, a psychiatrist counseling while empathizing with a Math genius who was physically abused by his father.
So, Mr. Williams definitely knew one thing or two about being abused and bullied as a kid. He thought making people laugh could make it all go away. Unfortunately, it didn’t. He could achieve what so many of us would define as “success” searching for self-validation in the process using an art he brilliantly perfected throughout his life. As he attained the peak of what most of us deem as “success”, he realized that there was nothing more he could do to self-validate. It was game over.
My conclusion is, there are two different worlds we live in simultaneously, the “materialistic world” and the “spiritual world”. Fearing that “spiritual” could be interpreted religiously, I’ll also refer to it as the world of the mind, the world of the soul. It is very important for humans to learn how to live at peace with themselves. It’s also very important to build our self-confidence, self-image and self-worth by recognizing our own achievements not seeking recognition from others. Your happiness cannot be derived from others or other external elements, it has to come from within.
We all grieve the loss of a legend, of a man who never failed to impress, but who, at the age of 63, had it all and was not impressed.