Depression is smaller than you. Always, it is smaller than you, even when it feels vast. It operates within you, you do not operate within it. It may be a dark cloud passing across the sky, but – if that is the metaphor – you are the sky. You were there before it. And the cloud can’t exist without the sky, but the sky can exist without the cloud.
(..)
I have gone from never feeling happy to feeling happy – or at last somewhere in the ballpark – most of the time. So I am lucky. But I have blips. Either blips when I am genuinely depressed/anxious or blips caused by me fighting the onset of depression/anxiety by doing something stupid (getting excessively drunk and coming home at five in the morning after losing my wallet and having to plead with taxi drivers to take me home). But generally, day to day, I don’t fight it. I accept things more. This is who I am. And besides, fighting it actually makes it worse. The trick is to befriend depression and anxiety. To be thankful for them, because then you can deal with them a whole lot better. And the way I have befriended them is by thanking them for my thin skin. (..) [Because] you need to feel life’s terror to feel its wonder.

Feeling. That is what it is about. People place so much value on thought, but feeling is as essential. I want to read books that make me laugh and cry and fear and hope and punch the air in triumph. I want a book to hug me or grab me by the scruff of my neck. I don’t even mind if it punches me in the gut. Because we are here to feel.

I want life. I want to read it and write it and feel it and live it. I want, for as much of the time as possible in this blink-of-an-eye existence we have, to feel all that can be felt. I hate depression. I am scared of it. Terrified, in fact. But at the same time, it has made me who I am. And if – for me – it is the price of feeling life, it’s a price always worth paying. I am satisfied just to be.


ja nu vēl kādu interesē, šeit vienu nedēļu būs pieejama šī grāmata, ko sarakstījis vīrietis, kas izcīkstējies ar depresiju un anxiety - https://we.tl/3dZlrtAiKS