Two Decades Later, I’m Glad You’re Still My Neighbor

I can’t tell you the first time I felt “depressed”, can’t point you to the first day I didn’t get out of bed or when sighs seemed to consume all the air in the room. Part of me feels like it was always there; the shyness that kept my voice in my stomach, the anxiety that kept my hand at my side.

I’m the fourth out of five children. An otherwise forgettable position, it gave me a lot of liberty and the ability to fly under the radar almost entirely. When my baby sister was asleep in her crib and after my dad would go to work, I’d sneak out of the room I shared with the former and turn on the television next to the kitchen table. Sitting criss-cross-applesauce on the floor, I’d watch him: Mr. Rogers, my hero, my friend, my only neighbor.

In 2003, at the age of 74, he died. I was 10. The world was in disarray. Talks of weapons of mass destruction, war, hate, and fear almost encompassed all of our daily lives. There was a lot I didn’t understand, including Fred Rogers’ death, but I knew it impacted me.

Today, 15 years later, when the world is surprisingly and almost impossibly in more disarray, I look back to Mr. Rogers and the lessons he taught me.

Lately, I have been stomping my feet and wallowing in “life is unfair”. Because it is. It has always been unfair. I know that… I already mentioned I’m the fourth of five children. Before the anger streaks tears down my face, I think of this:

“What do you do with the mad that you feel
When you feel so mad you could bite?
When the whole wide world seems oh, so wrong…
And nothing you do seems very right?

What do you do? Do you punch a bag?
Do you pound some clay or some dough?
Do you round up friends for a game of tag?
Or see how fast you go?

It’s great to be able to stop
When you’ve planned a thing that’s wrong,
And be able to do something else instead
And think this song:

I can stop when I want to
Can stop when I wish.
I can stop, stop, stop any time.
And what a good feeling to feel like this
And know that the feeling is really mine.
Know that there’s something deep inside
That helps us become what we can.
For a girl can be someday a woman
And a boy can be someday a man.”

Fred Rogers wrote that in 1968. When I’m about to rip someone a new one on Facebook for calling Colin Kaepernik a derogatory term or when I feel a passion burning throughout my entire being because ignorance and bigotry have taken the forefront, I pause. “I can stop when I want to. Can stop when I wish.” And I do. I take a step back.

There is so much of me that is discouraged, so many parts of myself I give way to the depression that controls much of my life, and I get angry. I get upset. I find my cheeks soaked for seemingly no reason at all, but the reasons are real and they are valid and I feel them. And even when it feels like absolute shit, “what a good feeling to feel like this and know that the feeling is really mine.”

20 years down the line and I need you now more than ever, Mr. Rogers. Thanks for being a neighbor.