It is a positive and active anguish, a sort of psychical neuralgia wholly unknown to normal life.
Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self – to the mediating intellect – as to verge close to being beyond description. It thus remains nearly incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it in its extreme mode.
The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it.
The writer’s duty is to keep on writing.
Which is worse, past or future? Neither. I will fold up my mind like a leaf and drift on this stream over the brink.
Writing is a form of self-flagellation.
I have learned to cry again and I think perhaps that means I am a human being again. Perhaps that at least. A piece of human being but, yes, a human being.
The pain of depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne. The prevention of many suicides will continue to be hindered until there is a general awareness of the nature of this pain.
Reading – the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.
I get a fine warm feeling when I’m doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let’s face it, writing is hell.
The pain is unrelenting; one does not abandon, even briefly, one’s bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.
In Vineyard Haven, on Martha’s Vineyard, mostly I love the soft collision here of harbor and shore, the subtly haunting briny quality that all small towns have when they are situated on the sea.
The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone’s neurosis, and we’d have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.
Let’s face it, writing is hell.
The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone’s neurosis.
The madness of depression is, generally speaking, the antithesis of violence. It is a storm indeed, but a storm of murk. Soon evident are the slowed-down responses, near paralysis, psychic energy throttled back close to zero. Ultimately, the body is affected and feels sapped, drained.
Every writer since the beginning of time, just like other people, has been afflicted by what a friend of mine calls.
I felt a kind of numbness, an enervation, but more particularly an odd fragility – as if my body had actually become frail, hypersensitive and somehow disjointed and clumsy, lacking normal coordination. And soon I was in the throes of a pervasive hypochondria.
When, in the autumn of 1947, I was fired from the first and only job I have ever held, I wanted one thing out of life: to become a writer.
The stigma of self-inflicted death is for some people a hateful blot that demands erasure at all costs.