If you’ve never
experienced depression or lived with someone who has, then it’s unlikely you’d
want to read much about it. It makes
little sense to those who haven’t known what it’s like to be immobilised by this
‘malignant sadness’. The reaction you
are most likely to experience when coming across someone struggling to
extricate themselves is one of immense frustration: get a grip, pull yourself together!
Plus, it has the additional bonus of being one of the least charismatic subjects to write
about, unless you happen to have bipolar disorder, which is certainly not any
more pleasant to live with but tends to be a lot more entertaining for the
reader.
Of course, there are many more terrible things that can befall a person
in their lifetime. But depression is
something that sucks the marrow out of life, then spits it into the gutter and
stamps on it, repeatedly. This has the
effect of making even the wealthiest, luckiest, most famous person as much of a
victim as someone in the direst of circumstances. It is no respecter of persons. It shows no favouritism. It tempts you down a shadowy path, it taunts
and beckons, disguised as something both innocuous and protective. As Mary Oliver writes in ‘Members of the Tribe’:
‘Everything wants to enter the slow
thickness, aches to be peaceful finally and at any cost. Wants to be stone….’ And when this
trouble strikes, you fold up like an umbrella in a strong wind, again and again
and again.
On the plus side, I have learned a
great many things to help me stop sliding down that slippery slope. And best of all, I like nothing better than
to take suffering and extract from it something precious; a diamond from the
ashes. I don’t always succeed, but I
hope that my writing is one way of doing this.
A friend told me recently that my stories are ‘exquisite, like gems’.
If that’s even the tiniest bit true, it would make it all worthwhile.
J D Cooper ‘The Wishing Tree and Other Dreams’
https://www.facebook.com/thewishingtreedreams
Brit Writers
Facebook
Twitter
No comments:
Post a Comment