Every once in awhile, breaking through all those Facebook posts from Cabo and Maui and Paris that make us question our own self-worth and our boring, pedestrian lives, a little truth gets posted.

A friend of mine is mentally ill, and his Facebook posts have no Margaritas, no white ribbons of beach, no banks of elms along the Seine with Notre Dame’s towers soaring just beyond.

My friend is in a hospital.

I emailed the hospital and asked if there’s anything I-—or we-—could do to help him. I don’t know that there is. I had to ask.

When I knew him almost fifty years ago, he was one of the finest young men I’d ever met. He impressed me so much with his integrity, his intellect and, underneath his shyness, his personal warmth. We grew up together in both high school and in the Episcopal Church, so that means a lot to me, too. The kind of young man he was-—the kind of person each of us once was, or the person that we hoped to be-—is something profound and deep and enduring. But it’s not unassailable.

We spend great parts of our lives, I think, under siege, rather than sipping Margaritas, fighting so hard just to survive that we never quite become the person we were going to be in our dreams. We get worn down. Sometimes, in our exhaustion, we lose faith in ourselves and we have to fight to get it, and ourselves, back again. Life is a war, constant and merciless, for so many of us.

My friend’s war may be the most frightening any of us has ever fought.

I know a little, and it’s a very little, about what he’s going through. So do many of the young people I’ve taught who fought their struggles so quietly but with so much courage.

I’ve been hospitalized several times in my life for depression—it killed my mother and twice almost killed me—and while the spectrum of our illnesses might be vastly different, the constant in both is the voice inside my head and inside my friend’s, insistent and seductive, that tells you lies about yourself, your self-worth, and about reality itself (it may be as menacing as the green fog in Eliot’s “Prufrock,” or, conversely, reality might be a kind of English garden, lavender-scented, where you are a barren stinking weed). That voice is a damnable liar.

It’s also cunningly persuasive—-the most persuasive when it makes the least sense—and it is powerful. It’s a voice that lies almost as much as Facebook.

So I’ve been crazy, too, and I wanted to say that in my friend’s defense. I also wanted to say that because it gives me an extra measure of responsibility toward him.

I am also a devout coward. I like mental hospitals and long-term care institutions only a little less than I liked bulls when I was a little boy, when, laden with fresh jolts of testosterone and adrenaline, they would look up at me from their grazing with suddenly murderous eyes. I get the same catch in my throat today when I see large men driving pickup trucks garnished with Confederate battle flags.

Fear’s the only thing that stops me trying to do something for my friend. I don’t know that seeing him would do any good, or even if his doctors would think it a good idea. Maybe it wouldn’t be a good idea for me.

But maybe it is.

Maybe anything we can do, even if it’s tollhouse cookies, is a good idea. Compassion is never a small gesture and, in the research and the writing I’ve done, it’s never rare, either, not even when the war is even more murderous than the one we fight inside ourselves, when it’s the kind of war young men fight to murder each other.

You’re right, by the way, if you think that this is none of my damn business and that I’m in way over my head. I agree with you completely. Maybe, and I’ve done this before, I am confusing myself with Jesus.

Maybe that’s exactly what He wants of me.