I realized that I had demanded that my parents accept me but had resisted accepting them.
If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.
Love is circumstantial; we can love anyone if need be; and losing the one we love is the singular catastrophe. Time does not heal it. Every present moment yearns for even the roughest past.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and no power is more absolute than parenthood.
What to say? That I would have loved to make the trip but was busy staying out of the mental hospital? It’s so humiliating – so degrading. If I knew I wouldn’t get caught, I’d love to lie about it – invent an acceptable cancer, that recurs and vanishes, that people could understand – that wouldn’t make them frightened and uncomfortable.
It is the aloneness within us made manifest, and it destroys not only connection to others but also the ability to be peacefully alone with oneself.
The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and my life, as I write this, is vital.
In depression, the meaninglessness of every enterprise and every emotion, the meaninglessness of life itself, becomes self-evident. The only feeling left in this loveless state is insignificance. Life.
Remember that writing things down makes them real; that it is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know; and, most of all, that even in our post-postmodern era, writing has a moral purpose. With twenty-six shapes arranged in varying patterns, we can tell every story known to mankind, and make up all the new ones – indeed, we can do so in most of the world’s known tongues. If you can give language to experiences previously starved for it, you can make the world a better place.
Life itself seemed so alarmingly exigent, to require so much of the self. It was too difficult to remember and think and express and understand – all things I needed to be able to do to talk. To keep my face animated at the same time was insult added to injury. It was like trying to cook and roller-skate and sing and type all at once.
That is, perhaps, the greatest revelation I have had: not that depression is compelling but that the people who suffer from it may become compelling because of it.
Life is most transfixing when you are awake to diversity, not only of ethnicity, ability, gender, belief, and sexuality but also of age and experience. The worst mistake anyone can make is to perceive anyone else as lesser.
For some parents of children with horizontal identities, acceptance reaches its apogee when parents conclude that while they supposed they were pinioned by a great and catastrophic loss of hope, they were in fact falling in love with someone they didn’t yet know enough to want.
Perhaps depression can best be described as emotional pain that forces itself on us against our will, and then breaks free of its externals.
Depression frequently destroys the power of mind over mood.
It is too often the quality of happiness that you feel at every moment its fragility, while depression seems when you are in it to be a state that will never pass.
If you attach better services to a diagnostic category, some doctors will apply that diagnosis to children from whom it is not entirely appropriate in order to access those services.
The parental predisposition to love prevails in the most harrowing of circumstances.
I think that while I hated being depressed and would hate to be depressed again, I found a way to love my depression. I love it because it forced me to cling to joy. I love it because each day I decide, sometimes gamely, sometimes against the moment’s reason, to cleave to the reasons for living-and that, I think, is a highly privileged rapture.
The unexamined life is unavailable to the depressed. That is, perhaps, the greatest revelation I have had: not that depression is compelling but that the people who suffer from it may become compelling because of it. I hope that this basic fact will offer sustenance to those who suffer and will inspire patience and love in those who witness that suffering.