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“Monsters are real,” Stephen King said. “And ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”
LIFE IS HARD. It may be beautiful and wonderful but it is also hard. The way people seem to cope is by not thinking about it too much. But some people are not going to be able to do that. And besides, it is the human condition. We think therefore we are. We know we are going to grow old, get ill, and die. We know that is going to happen to everyone we know, everyone we love. But also, we have to remember, the only reason we have love in the first place is because of this. Humans might well be the only species to feel depression as we do, but that is simply because we are a remarkable species,
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“An infinity of passion can be contained in one minute,” wrote Flaubert, “like a crowd in a small space.”
“I’m also a sculpture, born with structure . . .” I was a sculpture with no structure. A structureless sculpture
10. You will one day experience joy that matches this pain. You will cry euphoric tears at the Beach Boys, you will stare down at a baby’s face as she lies asleep in your lap, you will make great friends, you will eat delicious foods you haven’t tried yet, you will be able to look at a view from a high place and not assess the likelihood of dying from falling. There are books you haven’t read yet that will enrich you, films you will watch while eating extra-large buckets of popcorn, and you will dance and laugh and have sex and go for runs by the river and have late-night conversations and
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WE ARE ESSENTIALLY alone. There is no getting around this fact, even if we try to forget it a lot of the time. When we are ill, there is no escape from this truth.
So why do we bother with love? No matter how much we love someone we are never going to make them, or ourselves, free of pain.
If, as Schopenhauer said, “we forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people,” then love—at its best—is a way to reclaim those lost parts of ourselves. That freedom we lost somewhere quite early in childhood. Maybe love is just about finding the person you can be your weird self with. I helped her be her, and she helped me be me. We did this through talking. In our first year together we would very often stay up all night talking. The night would start with us going to the wine shop at the bottom of Sharp Street in Hull (the street my student house was on) and buying a
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How to be there for someone with depression or anxiety 1. Know that you are needed, and appreciated, even if it seems you are not. 2. Listen. 3. Never say “pull yourself together” or “cheer up” unless you’re also going to provide detailed, foolproof instructions. (Tough love doesn’t work. Turns out that just good old “love” is enough.) 4. Appreciate that it is an illness. Things will be said that aren’t meant. 5. Educate yourself. Understand, above all, that what might seem easy to you—going to a shop, for instance—might be an impossible challenge for a depressive. 6. Don’t take anything
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I’m not talking about all that What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger stuff. No. That’s simply not true. What doesn’t kill you very often makes you weaker. What doesn’t kill you can leave you limping for the rest of your days. What doesn’t kill you can make you scared to leave your house, or even your bedroom, and have you trembling, or mumbling incoherently, or leaning with your head on a windowpane, wishing you could return to the time before the thing that didn’t kill you.
“Hate is a lack of imagination,”
“There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.” Experience
“The wound is the place where the light enters you.”
I dedicated the book to Andrea, obviously, but it wasn’t just a book I owed her. It was a whole life.
Mark Twain suffered depression and died of a heart attack. Tennessee Williams died from accidentally choking on the cap of a bottle of eyedrops that he frequently used.
Smartphones. Advertising (I think of a great David Foster Wallace line—“It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.”).
“Most parts of the brain do different things at different times,” says Dr. David Adam, author of The Man Who Couldn’t Stop. “The amygdala, for example, plays a role in both sexual arousal and terror—but an MRI scan cannot differentiate between passion and panic . . . So what should we think when the amygdala lights up on an MRI scan when we are shown a picture of Cameron Diaz or Brad Pitt—that we are afraid of them?”
Live in the present. Here is meditation master Amit Ray: “If you want to conquer the anxiety of life, live in the moment. Live in the breath.” Love. Anaïs Nin called anxiety “love’s greatest killer.” But fortunately, the reverse is also true. Love is anxiety’s greatest killer. Love is an outward force. It is our road out of our own terrors, because anxiety is an illness that wraps us up in our own nightmares. This is not selfishness, even though people read it as such. If your leg is on fire, it is not selfish to concentrate on the pain, or the fear of the flames. So it is with anxiety. People
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@ilonacatherine Not everyone thinks you’re as much of a waste of space as you do when in the depths of depression. Trust others. #reasonsto stayalive
Understand, for instance, that having a sad thought, even having a continual succession of sad thoughts, is not the same as being a sad person. You can walk through a storm and
Read Emily Dickinson. Read Graham Greene. Read Italo Calvino. Read Maya Angelou. Read anything you want. Just read. Books are possibilities. They are escape routes. They give you options when you have none. Each one can be a home for an uprooted mind.
Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, William Styron (Vintage, 2001) This classic memoir from 1989, which references Paradise Lost in the title, is beautifully written and—given the author’s experience on the sleeping pill Halcion—serves as a reminder of the dangers of taking the wrong medication.
