Sometimes I think that I was forced to withdraw into depression because it was the only rightful protest I could throw in the face of a world that said it was alright for people to come and go as they please, that there were simply no real obligations left.
We would go down to Riverside, California, which is very poor now, but that's where my grandfather grew up. He grew up during the Depression in Riverside.
Well over fifty years ago I was making radio loudspeakers and radio sets in Rochester, New York; pretty young and inexperienced; but we survived the depression.
I didn't know my mother had it. I think a lot of women don't know their mothers had it; that's the sad thing about depression. You know, you don't function anymore. You shut down. You feel like you are in a void.
I actually found it very moving how destructive depression is. I was really saddened by this burden people have to handle.
Perhaps the saddest irony of depression is that suicide happens when the patient gets a little better and can again function sufficiently.
I thought depression was the part of my character that made me worthwhile. I thought so little of myself, felt that I had such scant offerings to give to the world, that the one thing that justified my existence at all was my agony.
Even though loneliness affects so many of us, it has gotten scant research attention compared to related conditions like depression or anxiety.
It's a scary thing going into the workforce with a $50,000 debt and you've been trained as a classical theatre actor. There's always a depression in the theatre.
As far as I was concerned, the Depression was an ill wind that blew some good. If it hadn't occurred, my parents would have given me my college education. As it was, I had to scrabble for it.
The truth is, I've always been wracked with self-loathing and terrible, paralysing depression.
Art saved me; it got me through my depression and self-loathing, back to a place of innocence.
I don't fear death so much as I fear its prologues: loneliness, decrepitude, pain, debilitation, depression, senility. After a few years of those, I imagine death presents like a holiday at the beach.
Depression, for me, wasn't a dulling but a sharpening, an intensifying, as though I had been living my life in a shell, and now the shell wasn't there. It was total exposure.
Shutting out the depression strengthens it. While you hide from it, it grows.
My own life was filled with so much love and joy that when depression struck, it was like a prison door slamming shut and I was being placed in an isolation cell. No one else could possibly be feeling what I was. I hated my depression and all of its symptoms.
Because its hard to realize now that that was the end of the great depression, you know. All of a sudden all of this is in front of me and I'm solvent, you know. I'm making some money and I know where my next meal is coming from, and I have a new pair of shoes and that's it.
'Up in the Air' may be a glossy production sprinkled with laughter and sex, but it captures the distinctive topography of our Great Recession as vividly as a far more dour Hollywood product of 70 years ago, 'The Grapes of Wrath,' did the vastly different landscape of the Great Depression.
When I'm depressed is when I'm not interested in writing anything, whereas some people, I think, are spurred to creativity through their personal experiences and through depression. And for me, it's a very low place, and it's not fruitful.
In a strange way, I had fallen in love with my depression.
