Being a depressed writer, I was instantly intrigued by this article by William Grimes for the New York Times (isn’t that fun to say?) about the links between writers, depression, and suicide.

Apparently, a group of people met to talk about the subject :

In a daylong conference at the 92d Street Y on Friday, several scholars and writers explored the links between depression, creativity and suicide, primarily in the life and work of Sexton, Plath and Ernest Hemingway. The conference,”Wanting to Die: Suicide and American Literature,” was organized by the American Suicide Foundation.

I am impressed that the American Suicide Foundation (I assume they’re against it) organized such a thoughtful and potentially useful conference.

This statement here caught my eye :

In rereading his work, Mr. Styron said, “I began to realize all my work was of an incipient depressive personality struggling to prevent the demons of mood disorder from crowding in.”

Writers being the sort of people that instantly relate everything to themselves, I immediately pondered whether there were signs of depression in my own work.

I don’t think so. Nothing definitive, anyhow. What I write is sometimes tragic and/or sad, but then again, a lot of the time, it’s funny. I am generally a positive writer, looking to make the reader happy.

Then again, I have this space in which to talk (incessantly) about my depression, so perhaps that frees me somehow from putting it into my writing. Who knows.

And if you really want to go down the endless twisting road of psychosocial literary analysis, absolutely anything can be construed as a sign of anything. It just takes imagination and a will to believe in your own bullshit. Much like religion, really.

But if there is a link between being a writer and being suicidally depressed, I suspect it has to do with the sort of person who becomes a writer, as opposed to something about writing that makes people depressed and maybe even suicidal.

I have said this many times before : writers are not normal people. If we were, we would likely not be writers. Writing means spending a heck of a long time completely alone, typing away, sweating little details and making whole worlds come to life with nothing but our words as tools.

All because we have this deep down feeling that we have something we want to say.

And yet, it is often the case that we have no idea what it truly is we want to say, and have to write story after story, book after book, just to find out.

And meanwhile, we are spending all that time alone. And that leads me to my first conclusion : to write, you must be an introvert.

Extroverts simply would not have the patience to spend that much time alone. They would want to be out interacting with people. Whatever they had to say, they would say it to their wide circle of friends. They would not feel the need to write it all down and make their point through narrative or essay.

Of course, nobody is one hundred percent introvert or extrovert, and I am sure there are lots of extroverted writers out there.

But just as not every old sailor was gay but there was a certain sort of person who didn’t mind spending months at sea with only men on board (women are… um…. bad luck?), I think you will find that the sort of person willing to be a writer is a lot more likely to be introverted.

There has to be something that makes us communicate with the world by this elaborate, laborious, and extraordinarily indirect route, instead of, say, just saying things.

Now let’s look at depression. One of its most salient attributes for this discussion is that it tends to make people want to isolate themselves, and makes it hard for the depressive to connect with others.

At least, not in the normal way. But perhaps, through writing? That way the over-stimulating, frightening others are kept safely far away, and the writer can mostly engage with their richly detail inner life.

Thus, the others are a largely imaginary inner audience, and this provides enough distance for the writer to write for an audience which is mostly a reflection of their own imagination and standards.

But some day, if things go way, the writing will be read, and that tiny amount of social connection is low enough in wattage that the introverted, depressed writer can handle it.

Then add in the sensitivity that is required to be any sort of decent writer. This is another factor which selects towards both writing and depression. Being extremely sensitive is both a gift and a curse. It allows the writing to develop the kind of deep understanding and true compassion required to write realistic worlds with living, breathing characters that good writing requires.

But the curse is profound. The world is a very rough and dangerous and painful place for the truly sensitive. Like the doomed denizens of the House of Usher, the sensitive person finds the world loud and bright and harsh, and often must go through elaborate measures to turn that volume down enough to let them function and cope.

And sadly, for many writers, those measures include drinking or drugs, also a sign of depression.

So to somewhat sum up, I think the link between writing and depression mostly has to do with the sort of people who become writers in the first place.

Happy, cheerful people brimming with optimism and faith are too busy living life and socially connecting with others to spend dozens of hours writing.

Sad, depressed people full of pessimism and despair, on the other hand, are left with writing.

Of course, these are all broad and in some cases wild generalizations. I am trying to define why there might be more depressives than the statistical average in the writing game, rather than explain every single case of a writer who is depressed.

That said, writing is a good profession for the depressed.

Or at least, I hope it is!

Feeling crappy and low again, although I figure I will get over it once I have been up and about for long enough. Have to put some miles between me and all that mad, bad sleep.

So yup, spent most of today asleep. Yaaay. And each time I awoke to eat and/or eliminate, I felt like I had been slow roasting on a spit in the fires of Hell. And now that I am awake, I feel like shit.

No wonder I often succumb to the desire to go right back to sleep wen I am in this state. I feel like crap, why be awake for that? But especially if I am dehydrated, that will only make things worse in the long run.

Or maybe not. It is possible that I genuinely need all this sleep and I should not be berating myself over it or pitying myself for this sleepy senseless life.

Perhaps when I “go to sleep when I am not all that sleepy”, what I am really doing is acting on my lack of deep sleep and trying to fulfill that need, despite the fact that the rest of my sleep needs are met.

And I should just relax and do what I gotta do to get enough REM sleep points to keep the sleep debt at bay, and not worry too much about the hours spent dreaming.

But it just bugs me to spend mst of a day asleep. I am a middle aged guy and I don’t really want to waste what time I have left sleeping.

But then, when it comes to figuring out what the heck else to do with my life, I tend to come up empty. Or rather, when it comes time to motivate myself to do other things.

I am stranded on this lonely little island of a life for now, cut off and confused, and I will stay here till I find the motivation to get into my little boat and row, row away.

Or at least work to make the island bigger, dammit.

I keep nudging myself to at least download some recipes and bake desserts for myself. That way I have an activity to do to keep myself awake and active and moving.

Plus, I get the sense of accomplishment of having made something for myself, and of course, I get the desserts themselves as well, and the little happinesses they bring.

All very logical and sensible reasons to do it. But if the motivation is not there, it’s just plain not going to happen, and all the logic and reason in the world can go disappear up its own asshole, for all the fucking good it will do.

There are no logical motives. Only emotional motives pursued via logical means.

Logic is method, not motive.

So what I really want next is to connect with my emotional self better, and release my grip on this intellect-heavy paranoid mistrustful world-view in which the world is a hostile entity just waiting for my guard to drop for just a second and then it will get me.

That shit done drive me crazy, mama. There has to be a path to a more relaxed, accepting, positive, harmonious, and peaceful being. Something that can make it through the ferocious guardians of my internal self, the giants of my intellectual rigor and suspicious nature, and yet which can provide the sort of soul solace that my parched and pockmarked intellectual landscape cannot.

I just think too damned much, and feel too damned little.

But of course, just realizing that does not solve the problem. And the idea that revelation is the solution to everything is the exact sort of illusion to which the overly intellectual types like myself fall prey in droves.

We act like all our problems are just puzzles to be solved, issues to resolve, problems to fix. Like if we think long enough, we will hack the password to ourselves and be able to just go in there and repair ourselves. But it just does not work like that.

The pleasure of revelation plus the emotional release that occurs when the revelation is of true psychological impact fools us into think that it is the thinking which got us there, and that this pleasure is the point of a whole process.

But that revelation came just as much from feeling and emotional (and spiritual) growth as it did from any act of thought, perhaps even more so.

That is why standard advice which we evaluate as being quite probably true does nothing for us. All the usual advice for depressives just freezes in midair and shatters at our feet, and we just look at it dying there and shrug.

Because until you are at the right place emotionally, all the words in the world will be absolutely useless. It is not a problem accessible via the rational mind, the left side of our brain.

The left brain is powerful but very cold. The right brain is diffuse and lives entirely in the present, but it is also the seat of all emotional warmth and renewal.

So by being such left-brained intellectual types, all about the logic and the rationality and so on, we think we are being sensible and smart, but we are are actually leaving ourselves freezing in the dark.

I am not sure how to escape that. But I think it starts with trying to remember who you were before you constructed this massive set of armor out of the cold steel of intellect for yourself, and to reconnect with that person, and start the process of convincing yourself that you can be that way and still be safe.

That is why helping a depressive is such a crapshoot. All you can do is try to say things that might be what they need to hear at that moment to start the emotional healing process. You can say the truest, wisest things in the world to a depressive, and if it not exactly what they need to hear at that moment, it will be completely useless.

Same as these words, right now.