I Realized Something Tonight

For this week's lesson in my Dante course, we read Canto XIII of the Inferno. In it, Dante and Virgil are traveling through the Wood of the Suicides on the seventh level of Hell. All that is seen are knotted and dying trees with black leaves and poisoned thorns and the sounds of wails and grief. Virgil insists that Dante break a branch from the tree. He does so, and the tree speaks; it is the soul of one that committed suicide. Blood and words spilled from the wound, and Dante learned of the shade's story.

My notes from my journal concerning this Canto:

I found it interesting that the suicides are a dead and dying forest. I think this symbolizes how a person driven to suicide feels dead inside, so for eternity, their internal death is turned outward as a dead tree or shrub. Also, this forest had no path, much like the forest Dante was lost in Canto I. Although you could interpret Dante straying from the path of God and getting lost in Canto I, I think it can also be seen as Dante's mind wandering through the thoughts of suicide.
Though Dante breaking the branch off of one of the trees to hear the shade speak is an homage to Virgil's Aeneid, I think it is representative to a person going through a deep and brooding depression. Emotions and any hints to the person's depression are pent up inside. At some point, something or someone comes along and causes the sufferer to "snap." The person can take two paths from this point. The person can spill their heart and soul to someone about what they have been going through and try to make it out of depression (one way of seeing the blood and words spill from the tree's wound). The other path is that they will take their life. This could be seen as the blood spilling from the wound, and the words spoken by the tree could represent the final words of a suicide of what they want the world to know before they can speak no more.

While I was writing this, I realized something about my past. As most of you know, I've been through depression a couple times now. My first episode, when I was in ninth grade, was much more serious than my second, and has a larger impact on who I am today. I contemplated suicide almost every night, almost as a way of getting revenge against all of those people that made my life miserable. At the time, I don't think a single person knew what I was going through. To this day, I still don't think anyone completely understands, my parents especially. It pains me to think that even they did not recognize what was going on, even when I broke down yelling, bawling, curling up on the floor, and pulling my hair in distress one night in the kitchen. They just thought I had a bad day, I guess. Even now, when I tell them what I went through, I don't think they have the faintest idea of what I was going through, and that hurts. Maybe it's because of the stress that they put on me about my grades and they won't even glance at how they assisted in keeping me in depression.
Anyways, there was one girl in my class that I credit to putting me through depression. She always made fun of me, and at that time, I couldn't just let things roll off, no matter how much I tried. She always mocked me and made the most idiotic statements, saying that I smelled bad in P.E. and all that jazz (which I did not. I showered daily (unlike her), didn't smoke (unlike her), and used body spray after class). One day after the same comments she made, I had my "snap" moment. I broke down and started crying. This was the only time I had cried in school since probably second grade. I couldn't stop. I kept crediting other things to why I was crying, trying not to empower her. I remember one of the things was that "this is probably the last Thanksgiving I'll have with my grandad" (it was around a week or so before Thanksgiving break). When she heard this, she mocked me. She mocked me. Here my grandad was a breathing corpse suffering from colon cancer and the chemo that he had been going through for months, and she was making fun of it.
I went to class, but I couldn't stop crying. All those years that I had been going through depression (it had started around fifth grade) that I had pent up inside of me were bursting through the wound that she had made in me. My teacher let me go to the counselor, but I didn't want to talk about it. I just wanted to go home. My mom came and picked me up, and the next day I started on medication.
It was because of her, a girl that held my head under, that I got out of depression. That was the last straw, I broke, and I finally did something about myself. I suppose tonight's reading in my class on Dante was another branch that was broken from me. Here I am, spilling my blood, tears, and words to you. Thank you.




Edit: Also, -I'm probably reading into this too much- Psalm 13 is what I always felt was one of the only things that could express how I felt during my depression. Is it a coincidence that this is Canto XIII?











My head was feeling scared, but my heart was feeling free.