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b3140af
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Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don't believe it. Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future. Be brave; be strong; take your pills. Exercise because it's good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds. Eat when food itself disgusts you. Reason with yourself when you have lost your reason.
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exercise
bravery
courage
memories
depression
future
reason
living
strength
life
love
medication
loved-ones
eating
food
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Andrew Solomon |
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92e395d
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I believe that words are strong, that they can overwhelm what we fear when fear seems more awful than life is good.
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words
depression
fear
life
speaking
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Andrew Solomon |
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d288ac9
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It is important not to suppress your feelings altogether when you are depressed. It is equally important to avoid terrible arguments or expressions of outrage. You should steer clear of emotionally damaging behavior. People forgive, but it is best not to stir things up to the point at which forgiveness is required. When you are depressed, you need the love of other people, and yet depression fosters actions that destroy that love. Depressed..
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feelings
depression
love
outrage
emotions
forgiveness
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Andrew Solomon |
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675783f
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Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair.
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loss
love
despair
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Andrew Solomon |
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59bab82
|
You are constantly told in depression that your judgment is compromised, but a part of depression is that it touches cognition. That you are having a breakdown does not mean that your life isn't a mess. If there are issues you have successfully skirted or avoided for years, they come cropping back up and stare you full in the face, and one aspect of depression is a deep knowledge that the comforting doctors who assure you that your judgment..
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present
depression
future
cognition
issues
troubles
judgment
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Andrew Solomon |
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f33e9cb
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Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance.
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grief
depression
proportion
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Andrew Solomon |
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a77cb77
|
Antonin Artaud wrote on one of his drawings, "Never real and always true," and that is how depression feels. You know that it is not real, that you are someone else, and yet you know that it is absolutely true."
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depression
reality
truth
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Andrew Solomon |
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f962151
|
The most important thing to remember about depression is this: you do not get the time back. It is not tacked on at the end of your life to make up for the disaster years. Whatever time is eaten by a depression is gone forever. The minutes that are ticking by as you experience the illness are minutes you will not know again.
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Andrew Solomon |
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23595df
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Since I am writing a book about depression, I am often asked in social situations to describe my own experiences, and I usually end by saying that I am on medication. "Still?" people ask. "But you seem fine!" To which I invariably reply that I seem fine because I am fine, and that I am fine in part because of medication. "So how long do you expect to go on taking this stuff?" people ask. When I say that I will be on medication indefinitel..
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Andrew Solomon |
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82468d4
|
The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality and my life, as I write this, is vital even when sad. I may wake up sometime next year without my mind again; it is not likely to stick around all the time. Meanwhile, however, I have discovered what I would have to call a soul, a part of myself I could never have imagined until one day, seven years ago, when hell came to pay me a surprise visit. It's a precious discovery. Almost eve..
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life
|
Andrew Solomon |
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1a1bcab
|
The people who succeed despite depression do three things. First, they seek an understanding of what's happening. They they accept that this is a permanent situation. And then they have to transcend their experience and grow from it and put themselves out into the world of real people.
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Andrew Solomon |
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3e02803
|
It is too often the quality of happiness that you feel at every moment its fragility, while depression seems when you are in it to be a state that will never pass. Even if you accept that moods change, that whatever you feel today will be different tomorrow, you cannot relax into happiness like you can into sadness. For me, sadness has always been and still is a more powerful feeling; and if that is not a universal experience, perhaps it is..
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Andrew Solomon |
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66cbce5
|
A sense of humor is the best indicator that you will recover; it is often the best indicator that people will love you. Sustain that and you have hope.
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sense-of-humor
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Andrew Solomon |
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8770992
|
I can see the beauty of glass objects fully at the moment when they slip from my hand
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Andrew Solomon |
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f781395
|
Depressed people cannot lead a revolution because depressed people can barely manage to get out of bed and put on their shoes and socks.
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Andrew Solomon |
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15d5a74
|
It is not pleasant to experience decay, to find yourself exposed to the ravages of an almost daily rain, and to know that you are turning into something feeble, that more and more of you will blow off with the first strong wind, making you less and less. Some people accumulate more emotional rust than others. Depression starts out insipid, fogs the days into a dull color, weakens ordinary actions until their clear shapes are obscured by the..
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Andrew Solomon |
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a480bd7
|
People with family histories of alcoholism tend to have lower levels of endorphins- the endogenous morphine that is responsible for many of our pleasure responses- than do people genetically disinclined to alcoholism. Alcohol will slightly raise the endorphin level of people without the genetic basis for alcoholism; it will dramatically raise the endorphin level of people with that genetic basis. Specialists spend a lot of time formulating ..
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depression
disease
|
Andrew Solomon |
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b96265e
|
In the throws of depression, one reaches a strange point at which it is impossible to see the line between ones own theatricality and the reality of madness. I discovered two conflicting qualities of character. I am melodramatic by nature; on the other hand, I can go out and "seem normal" under the most abnormal of circumstances. Antonin Artaud wrote on one of his drawings, "never real and always true", and that is how depression feels. You..
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Andrew Solomon |
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86245cd
|
I was overpowered by being in the world, by other people and their lives I couldn't lead, their jobs I couldn't do - overpowered even by jobs I would never want or need to do.
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Andrew Solomon |
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d1d2ee0
|
I regret everything because it has just finished, and already when I was twelve, I lamented the time that had gone by. Even in the best of spirits, it's always been as though I wrestle with the present in a vain effort to stop its becoming the past.
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Andrew Solomon |
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7dffb6e
|
Psychologically, I will not have to seek far if I decide to kill myself, because in my mind and heart I am more ready for this than for the unplanned daily tribulations that mark off the mornings and afternoons.
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Andrew Solomon |
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be892ed
|
If you wake up feeling no pain, you know you're dead. (Russian expression)
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Andrew Solomon |
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9572167
|
I wish I'd been accepted sooner and better. When I was younger, not being accepted made me enraged, but now, I am not inclined to dismantle my history. If you banish the dragons, you banish the heroes--and we become attached to the heroic strain in our personal history. We choose our own lives. It is not simply that we decide on the behaviors that construct our experience; when given our druthers, we elect to be ourselves. Most of us would ..
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Andrew Solomon |
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772eb82
|
While people argue with one another about the specifics of Freud's work and blame him for the prejudices of his time, they overlook the fundamental truth of his writing, his grand humility: that we frequently do not know our own motivations in life and are prisoners to what we cannot understand. We can recognize only a small fragment of our own, and an even smaller fragment of anyone else's, impetus.
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understanding
prejudice
truth
impetus
motivations
humility
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Andrew Solomon |
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34b46c2
|
Some people are trapped by the belief that love comes in finite quantities, and that our kind of love exhausts the supply upon which they need to draw. I do not accept competitive models of love, only additive ones.
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love
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Andrew Solomon |
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e5d5e27
|
In the heat of an argument, my mother once told me, "Someday you can go to a therapist and tell him all about how your terrible mother ruined your life. But it will be your ruined life you're talking about. So make a life for yourself in which you can feel happy, and in which you can love and be loved, because that's what's actually important." You can love someone but not accept him; you can accept someone but not love him. I wrongly felt ..
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Andrew Solomon |
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9a25279
|
Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair. When it comes, it degrades one's self and ultimately eclipses the capacity to give or receive affection. It is the aloneness within us made manifest, and it destroys not only connection to others but also the ability to be peacefully alone with oneself. Love, though it is no prophyl..
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Andrew Solomon |
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ea5b767
|
I hit walls of past pleasure all the time, and for me past pleasure is much harder to process then past pain...for me the traumas of the past are mercifully far away. The pleasures of the past however, are tough...the worst of depression lies in a present moment that cannot escape the past it idolizes or deplores.
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Andrew Solomon |
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ec5252c
|
You don't think in depression that you've put on a grey veil and are seeing the world through the haze of a bad mood. You think that the veil has been taken away, the veil of happiness, and that now you're seeing truly.
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Andrew Solomon |
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a18df4b
|
To look deep into your child's eyes and see in him both yourself and something utterly strange, and then to develop a zealous attachment to every aspect of him, is to achieve parenthood's self-regarding, yet unselfish, abandon. It is astonishing how often such mutuality had been realized - how frequently parents who had supposed that they couldn't care for an exceptional child discover that they can. The parental predisposition to love prev..
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love
parenting
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Andrew Solomon |
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a417518
|
Then I repeated these words to my spirits: 'Leave me be; give me peace; and let me do the work of my life. I will never forget you.' Something about that incantation was particularly appealing to me. 'I will never forget you'-- as though one had to address the pride of the spirits, as though one wanted them to feel good about being exorcised.
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Andrew Solomon |
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ec901dc
|
I chose fat and functional over slender and miserable.
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medication-side-effects
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Andrew Solomon |
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fa58135
|
There is so much pain in the world, and most of these people keep theirs secret, rolling through agonizing lives in invisible wheelchairs, dressed in invisible bodycasts.
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Andrew Solomon |
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57337f0
|
All parenting turns on a crucial question: to what extent parents should accept their children for who they are, and to what extent they should help them become their best selves.
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Andrew Solomon |
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30cbbc7
|
My goal is to stay safely in between self-analysis and self-destruction.
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Andrew Solomon |
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e7f89da
|
Having always imagined myself in a fairly slim minority, I suddenly saw that I was in a vast company. Difference unites us. While each of these experiences can isolate those who are affected, together they compose an aggregate of millions whose struggles connect them profoundly. The exceptional is ubiquitous; to be entirely typical is the rare and lonely state.
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Andrew Solomon |
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d1eda52
|
That, in essence, is the catastrophe of suicide for those who survive: not only the loss of someone, but the loss of the chance to persuade that person to act differently, the loss of the chance to connect.
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Andrew Solomon |
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a824c95
|
Life is enriched by difficulty; love is made more acute when it requires exertion.
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andrew solomon |
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d02a038
|
You lose the ability to trust anyone, to be touched, to grieve. Eventually, you are simply absent from yourself.
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Andrew Solomon |
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21b22dc
|
When parents say, 'I wish my child did not have autism,' what they're really saying is, 'I wish the autistic child I have did not exist, and I had a different (non-autistic) child instead.' Read that again. This is what we hear when you mourn over our existence. This is what we hear when you pray for a cure. This is what we know, when you tell us of your fondest hopes and dreams for us: that your greatest wish is that one day we will cease ..
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andrew solomon |
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ffe30fd
|
John [the father] kept saying, "You have a penis. That means you're a boy." One day, Shannon noticed that her son had been in the bathroom an awfully long time and pushed the door open. "He had a pair of my best, sharpest sewing scissors poised, ready to cut. Penis in the scissors. I said, 'What are you doing?' He said, 'This doesn't belong here. So I'm going to cut it off.' I said, 'You can't do that.' He said, 'Why not?' I said, 'Because ..
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sex
scissors
transsexual
penis
gender-identity
transgender
vagina
|
Andrew Solomon |
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8e6e29e
|
Those who believe their suffering has been valuable love more readily than those who see no meaning in their pain. Suffering does not necessarily imply love, but love implies suffering
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suffering
|
Andrew Solomon |
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db4f7cd
|
Perhaps the immutable error of parenthood is that we give our children what we wanted, whether they want it or not. We heal our wounds with the love we wish we'd received, but are often blind to the wounds we inflict.
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Andrew Solomon |
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1c887e4
|
It is not true that "love is not love which alters when it alteration finds." Love alters all the time; it is fluid, in perceptual flux, an evolving business across a lifetime."
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parenthood
|
Andrew Solomon |