The economics professor backpedals habitually to survey his work on the chalkboard. He thinks better when he's moving.
He passes his notes to his left hand, which shakes. It's a tiny tremor. His hands shake often and have all his life, which is how he knows it's not a side effect of his antidepressant. Beneath his shirt, at the wrist, are two faint scars from his twice attempting to kill himself.
"So how do we decide which bundle to choose?" he asks the class, some 30 students inside Snow Hall.
He draws a curve on the board. The class discusses "utility" - an economic term for "happiness."
To 37-year-old Ron Caldwell Jr., happiness is more than economic concept.
The United States, the world, is going through dark economic times these days. But the professor describes himself as "extremely happy," because he knows how dark life can really become.
He remembers ages 14 to 26 as mostly black.
"I totally derailed," he says
It was a chemical imbalance in his brain. Therapy, medication and his own will power couldn't lift him from the fog.
"The emotions were real," he said. "I couldn't just beat it down."
He was happy as a child. He played, until middle school, when he became unbearably uncomfortable in his own skin. He was afraid to speak and leave the house. He cried. People liked him and invited him out.
"I would say, 'No thanks, I'm busy,'" he said. "I thought once they got to know me they wouldn't like me anymore, despite all evidence to the contrary."
He grew up in Bellingham, Wash., with his sister, Leah, 39, his father, Ronald Sr., and his mother, Andrena. His dad was a bus dispatcher and later a human-resources manager and his mother sold Tupperware, among other odd jobs. They were always supportive, even when he decided to drop out of high school at 18.
School couldn't keep his focus. He beat himself up when he was interested in women who wouldn't or, he thought, couldn't return his feelings. His anguish sometimes overpowered his will to live. He cut his wrists twice; the wrong direction, slicing himself the short way, across his wrists rather than up his arm, because he didn't know better. He tried overdosing on aspirin. He's lost track of the number of times he has been hospitalized for talking about or attempting suicide. Most were in high school.
He made an agreement with his parents. He would earn a GED and get an associate's degree.
He did. It took almost ten years.
He attended community college, but dropped out. He aged out of his teens and into his 20s, working odd jobs: an Arby's morning employee, a dispatcher for a charter bus company, a kitchen worker in a retirement home.
He says he changed during those years, matured.
He went to Western Washington University, studied economics, and graduated with a 3.9 GPA.
"I was a completely different animal by then," he said. But the depression always lurked inside.
"He'd be just freaking depressed. Just sitting in his room, just locked away," said Caldwell's friend, Richard Downing.
Downing, now a dentist in Olympia, Wash., remembers when he first met Caldwell at Western, he saw him as "a little quiet, a little shy, a little bit strange."
Caldwell studied for release. He graduated Magna Cum Laude with a new problem: His self-esteem was based on getting As.
He went to graduate school at the University of Washington. The pace was nauseating. He quit. He returned the following year determined to worry less. Despite close friends, he was anxious.
He saved his emotions for when he was alone.
"He'd go into his own little funk and you just missed, like, three days," said his friend, Alan van der Hilst.
Finally, after about five years in graduate school, the nurse practitioner prescribed a new drug, Cymbalta.
Everything changed.
"I feel like I deal with things like a normal person," he said.
Up at the board, Caldwell's narrow back is to the class as his hands jump purposefully among the curves. He connects the three graphs he's made.
"I'll end with that," he says, after a quick glance at his watch.
Caldwell sometimes worries about what the medication is doing to his body. It makes him light-headed. He worries more, though, about returning to life before it.
He taught microeconomics and labor economics at the University of Washington as he completed his doctorate. He was scared the first time he taught. He teaches the same courses here. He's no longer afraid.
His round face holds boyish features. His hair sits thick and dark. While teaching, he displays childlike traits, keeping his eyes to the ceiling and shrugging his long arms often. Caldwell knows people think he's younger than he is. He sees himself the same way. In some ways, he said, he feels like he's catching up.
"I didn't grow through those years," he said. "I was experiencing things in my 20s that people experience in their teens...To me, I'm a young, single guy, not a middle-aged whatever."
Caldwell is comfortable with where he's been, he says, although there are some days he's still not comfortable in his own skin. But it doesn't bother him anymore.
After class, he goes to wash the chalk off his long fingers. On his left hand, six stitches commemorate the time he caught his finger in the swing set. He was five.
He explains how the accident helped him know his left from right. He talks of the scars on his wrist with the same ease.
"Some scars are visible, some are not," he said.
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