Posted by AKC on July 5, 2001, at 21:15:36
Here is a book recommendation - a book by Andrew Solomon, subtitled "An Atlas of Depression." I should wait until I have read more than the first 33 pages to recommend it. But here is an early passage that touched me deeply that I think is an indication of the talent of this writer. To set-up the passage, the writer has likened depression to a vine that sufficates the life out of a tree (his life) to the point that the vine itself is the life for the tree --
"I will be in treatment for depression for a long time. I wish I could say how it happened. I have no idea how I fell so low, and little sense of how I bounced up or fell again, and again, and again. I treated the presence, the vine, in every conventional way I could find, then figured out how to repair the absence as laboriously yet intuitively as I learned to walk or talk. I had many slight lapses, then two serious breakdowns, then a rest, then a third breakdown, and then a few more lapses. After all that, I do what I have to do to avoid further disturbances. Every morning and every night, I look at the pills in my hand: white, pink, red, turquoise. Sometimes they seem like writing in my hand, hieroglyphics saying that the future may be all right and that I owe it to myself to live on and see. I feel sometimes as though I am swallowing my own funeral twice a day, since without these pills, I'd be long gone. I go to see my therapist once a week when I'm at home. I am sometimes bored by our seessions and sometimes interested in an entirely dissociative way and sometimes have a feeling of epiphany. In part, from the things this man said, I rebuilt myself enough to be able to keep swallowing my funeral instead of enacting it. A lot of talking was involved: I believe that words are strong, that they can overwhelm what we fear when fear seems more awful than life is good. I have turned, with an increasingly fine attention, to love. Love is the other way forward. They need to go together: by themselves pills are a weak poison, love a blunt knife, insight a rope that snaps under too much strain. With the lot of them, if you are lucky, you can save the tree from the vine." (page 30)
I hope you find this as meaningful as I did.
AKC
poster:AKC
thread:7105
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20010628/msgs/7105.html