George Eliot wrote these lines in Middlemarch about 135 years ago: If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. In the midst […]
Depression Symptoms
Days of Anxiety – 1
Anxiety is one of the fringe benefits of depression. The form of it that I find most acute is now called social anxiety, but as I mentioned in a previous post, I used to call it torture. When it’s upon me in full force, every encounter with people is a searing experience. I can hardly […]
Depression, Identity and Hope
Some Rights Reserved by jairo at Flickr Marissa wrote a post at Wellsphere that made me pause. She was objecting to the idea found in Richard O’Connor’s book (Undoing Depression) that “I am not my depression.” She interpreted this as an evasion of accountability for one’s actions. The depressed behavior that harms relationships, for example, […]
Facing My Double in Depression
About a hundred years ago, Robert Frost wrote a famous poem about two roads diverging in a wood: “And sorry I could not travel both/ And be one traveler.” He makes his choice to take “the one less traveled by.” “Oh I kept the first for another day!/ Yet knowing how way leads on to […]
Isolation
Susan and Dano have presented in comments here two different ideas about isolation that I need to explore more deeply, with your help. This is hard for me to pin down alone. My mind wants to wander, to lose focus, to put itself to sleep because this gets at something I don’t want to face […]
Dreams in the Castle of Melancholy
Some Rights Reserved by xip at Flickr I wrote recently here about masking emotions from myself as I grew up through my college years. Here’s what happened to change that, or at least start me on a different path. As often happens with me, it started in a dream: For so long, I lived in […]
