The Betrayal of Being Sad

My parents came to this country on a boat. Not metaphorically. An actual boat, in 1993, from Vietnam. My mother was twenty. My father was twenty-three. They left behind everyone they knew so that one day a kid who didn't exist yet could have options they never had.

That kid is me. I have options. I go to a good university. I'm pre-med. I have a meal plan and a laptop and a dorm room with a mini-fridge. By every metric my parents would recognize, I am the success they spent their lives building toward.

I'm also depressed. And I can't tell them.

Depression, in my family's framework, doesn't exist. Not as a clinical condition. Not as something that happens to people who have enough to eat and a roof and a future. The word in Vietnamese that comes closest—buồn—just means sad. And sadness, in the context of what my parents survived, is a luxury.

My father worked in a nail salon for twelve years. The chemicals gave him headaches every day. He didn't complain. He sent money back to his mother in Ho Chi Minh City and saved enough to open his own shop. When I was ten, I asked him if his head hurt. He said, "My head is fine. Your future is what matters."

How do you tell that man you're struggling to get out of bed?

How do you sit across from someone who ate rice and salt for a year so you could eat pizza in a dining hall and say, "I think I need help"?

It feels like treason. Like I'm taking the gift of their sacrifice and saying: it wasn't enough.

It started sophomore year. Not a dramatic event—no breakup, no failure, no crisis. Just a slow graying. The alarm goes off and I lie there calculating the minimum effort required to not fail. Go to class? Maybe. Eat? If convenient. Call home? I'll text instead, because on the phone they'll hear it.

My roommate, Chris, noticed first. He said, "Dude, you've worn that same hoodie for four days." I told him it was comfortable. He didn't push. Guys don't push. We observe and we don't push, because pushing is "overstepping," and the code says you respect a man's privacy even when his privacy is killing him.

I started skipping organic chemistry. Then anatomy. Then the study group that meets on Thursdays that I used to organize. Nobody asked why. Or maybe they did and I didn't hear it. Depression has a way of putting glass between you and other people—you can see them but the sound doesn't quite reach.

Last month, during a phone call, my mother said, "You sound tired." In Vietnamese, mệt means tired but it also carries a weight. She was asking without asking.

I said, "Just studying a lot, Mẹ."

She said, "Don't forget to eat."

That's it. That was her reaching out. In a family that doesn't name the thing, "don't forget to eat" is the closest you get to "are you okay?" And "just studying a lot" is the closest I get to "no."

I went to the campus counseling center three weeks ago. Walked in, filled out the intake form, sat in a waiting room between a girl reading a textbook and a guy staring at the floor. Nobody looked at each other. The waiting room for mental health services is the quietest room on campus.

The therapist asked me what brought me in. I said, "I think I'm depressed." And then immediately: "But I have no reason to be."

She said, "Depression doesn't need a reason. It's not a reward for having a hard enough life."

“Depression doesn't need a reason. It's not a reward for having a hard enough life.” Click to tweet →

I've been replaying that sentence for three weeks. It's the first time anyone separated my right to struggle from my parents' history of struggle. They're not the same account. My pain doesn't overdraw from their sacrifice.

I haven't told my parents. I'm not ready. Maybe I will when I have the vocabulary—when I can say it in a way that doesn't sound like ingratitude. Or maybe I'll never find that way and I'll say it imperfectly and they'll be confused and hurt and then, eventually, okay.

What I know is this: the boat didn't cross the ocean so I could suffer silently in a dorm room and call it gratitude. My parents didn't sacrifice everything so I could perform wellness. They sacrificed everything so I could have a life. A real one. With all its options—including the option to say, out loud, to someone with a degree on the wall:

“The boat didn't cross the ocean so I could suffer silently in a dorm room and call it gratitude.” Click to tweet →

"I'm not okay, and I'd like to be."

That's not betrayal. That might be the bravest thing a son can do.