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f512039
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Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger, and the more alien the stranger, the stronger the whiff of negativity. We depend on the guarantee in our children's faces that we will not die. Children whose defining quality annihilates that fantasy of immortality are a particular insult; we must love them for themselves, and not for the best of ourselves in them, and that is a great deal harder to do. Loving ..
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Andrew Solomon |
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f8c33fc
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The things that save you are as frequently trivial as monumental.
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Andrew Solomon |
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8451ebf
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There is no life that does not have the material for despair in it, but some people go too close to the edge and others manage to stay sometimes sad in a safe clearing far from the cliffs. Once you cross over, the rules all change.
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Andrew Solomon |
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6b1cf64
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There is something ironic in prejudice against the disabled and their families, because their plight might befall anybody. Straight men are unlikely to wake up gay one morning, and white children don't become black; but any of us could be disabled in an instant. People with disabilities make up the largest minority in America; they constitute 15 percent of the population, though only 15 percent of those were born with their disability and a..
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Andrew Solomon |
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c779a45
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My depression had grown on me as that vine had conquered the oak; it had been a sucking thing that had wrapped itself around me, ugly and more alive than I. It had had a life of its own that bit by bit asphyxiated all of my life out of me. At the worst stage of major depression, I had moods that I knew were not my moods: they belonged to the depression, as surely as the leaves on that tree's high branches belonged to the vine. When I tried ..
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Andrew Solomon |
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5c3d34e
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The Internet," [Judy] Singer said, "is a prosthetic device for people who can't socialize without it." For anyone challenged by language and social rules, a communication system that does not operate in real time is a godsend."
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communication
internet
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Andrew Solomon |
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6c864ad
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Absence does not so much make the heart grow fonder as give the heart time to integrate what it has not previously absorbed, time to make sense of what happened too quickly to have any meaning in the instant. This is always true. If it is in absence that people forget each other, it is also in the quiet pause of absence that, minds running in symmetry, people come to know each other; there is sometimes as much intimacy in the span of contin..
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Andrew Solomon |
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a10a1d2
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Belonging is one of the things that makes life bearable, and it can be tough to look at a binary world and choose against both sides.
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Andrew Solomon |
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ab09273
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If we tolerate prejudice toward any group, we tolerate it toward all groups," he said. "I couldn't have relationships that were conditional on excluding my brother--or anyone else. We are all in one fight, and our freedom is all the same freedom."
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Andrew Solomon |
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c838067
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I told her that what was most important to me was not whether she loved a man or a woman, but that she loved and was loved well--that she experience passion, and the wonderful surprise of finding that someone feels about you as strongly as you do about them, lucky and full-hearted.
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andrew solomon |
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0360f73
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The worst of depression lies in a present moment that cannot escape the past it idealizes or deplores.
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Andrew Solomon |
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7ba3671
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There is no essential self that lies pure as a vein of gold under the chaos of experience and chemistry. Anything can be changed, and we must understand the human organism as a sequence of selves that succumb to or choose one another.
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Andrew Solomon |
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336f86a
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I met people on college campuses who were defining themselves as genderqueer to express revolutionary feelings, or to communicate their individuality; they were gender fluid without being gender dysphoric. This phenomenon may be culturally significant, but it has only a little bit in common with the people who feel they can have no authentic self in their birth gender.
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sex
genderqueer
transgender
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Andrew Solomon |
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27610c5
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It is a surprise to me to like myself; among all the elaborate possibilities I contemplated for my future, that never figured. My hard-won contentment reflects the simple truth that inner peace often hinges on outer peace. In the gnostic gospel of St. Thomas, Jesus says, "If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you."
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andrew solomon |
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7cf9143
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Fixing is the illness model; acceptance is the identity model; which way any family goes reflects their assumptions and resources.
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Andrew Solomon |
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51a2797
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Everything passes away--suffering, pain, blood, hunger, pestilence. The sword will pass away too, but the stars will still remain when the shadows of our presence and our deeds have vanished from the earth. There is no man who does not know that. Why, then, will we not turn our eyes toward the stars? Why?
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Andrew Solomon |
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7d42fdd
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Grief is a humble angel who leaves you with strong, clear thoughts and a sense of your own depth. Depression is a demon who leaves you appalled.
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Andrew Solomon |
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d99455d
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Treating an identity as an illness invites real illness to make a braver stand.
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Andrew Solomon |
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e1fa051
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There is no contradiction between loving someone and feeling burdened by that person; indeed, love tends to magnify the burden.
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Andrew Solomon |
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1cec467
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Defective is an adjective that has long been deemed too freighted for liberal discourse, but the medical terms that have supplanted it--illness, syndrome, condition--can be almost equally pejorative in their discreet way. We often use illness to disparage a way of being, and identity to validate that same way of being. This is a false dichotomy. In physics, the Copenhagen interpretation defines energy/matter as behaving sometimes like a wav..
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Andrew Solomon |
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e382550
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everything. I would never want depression to be a public or political excuse, but I think that once you have gone through it, you get a greater and more immediate understanding of the temporary absence of judgment that makes people behave so badly--you learn even, perhaps, how to tolerate the evil in the world." On the happy day when we lose depression, we will lose a great deal with it. If the earth could feed itself and us without rain, a..
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Andrew Solomon |
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65aafe0
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I had thought that when you feel your worst your tears flood, but the very worst pain is the arid pain of total violation that comes after the tears are all used up, the pain that stops up every space through which you once metered the world, or the world, you. This is the presence of major depression.
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Andrew Solomon |
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b75903e
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Rebuilding of the self in and after depression requires love, insight, work, and, most of all, time.
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Andrew Solomon |
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f2c079d
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I hate the loss of diversity in the world, even though I sometimes get a little worn out by being that diversity.
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Andrew Solomon |
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8353efe
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She looked at me - I was crying, though she was not - and she took on a tone of gentle reprimand. 'Don't think you're paying me some kind of tribute if you let my death become the great event of your life,' she said to me. 'The best tribute you can pay to me as a mother is to go on and have a good and fulfilling life. Enjoy what you have.
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Andrew Solomon |
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bd515cd
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Other illnesses, from alcoholism to heart disease, mask depression when it causes them; if one takes that into consideration, depression may be the biggest killer on earth.
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Andrew Solomon |
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a87a33e
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I realized that I had demanded that my parents accept me but had resisted accepting them.
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Andrew Solomon |
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ee569bf
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If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.
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Andrew Solomon |
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0436743
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If you stimulate seizures in an animal every day, the seizures eventually become automatic; the animal will go on having them once a day even if you withdraw the stimulation. In much the same way, the brain that has gone into depression a few times will continue to return to depression over and over. This suggests that depression, even if it is occasioned by external tragedy, ultimately changes the structure, as well as the biochemistry, of..
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Andrew Solomon |
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eec25d8
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Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and no power is more absolute than parenthood.
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Andrew Solomon |
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23582db
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There is a moment, if you trip or slip, before your hand shoots out to break your fall, when you feel the earth rushing up at you and you cannot help yourself, a passing, fraction-of-a-second terror. I felt that way hour after hour after hour. Being anxious at this extreme level is bizarre. You feel all the time that you want to do something, that there is some affect that is unavailable to you, that there's a physical need of impossible ur..
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depression
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Andrew Solomon |
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151e86f
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What to say? That I would have loved to make the trip but was busy staying out of the mental hospital? It's so humiliating--so degrading. If I knew I wouldn't get caught, I'd love to lie about it--invent an acceptable cancer, that recurs and vanishes, that people could understand--that wouldn't make them frightened and uncomfortable.
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Andrew Solomon |
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911f546
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that I would give up my life readily if I found myself in war, or if my plane crashed into a desert. I would struggle tooth and nail to survive. It's as though my life and I, having sat in opposition to each other, hating each other, wanting to escape each other, have now bonded forever and at the hip. 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..
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Andrew Solomon |
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1492f46
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Labeling a child's mind as diseased--whether with autism, intellectual disabilities, or transgenderism--may reflect the discomfort that mind gives parents more than any discomfort it causes their child. Much gets corrected that might better have been left alone.
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andrew solomon |
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6661d47
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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.
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Andrew Solomon |
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ebd0193
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Parents' early responses to and interactions with a child determine how that child comes to view himself. These parents are also profoundly changed by their experiences. If you have a child with a disability, you are forever the parent of a disabled child; it is one of the primary facts about you, fundamental to the way other people perceive and decipher you. Such parents tend to view aberrance as illness until habituation and love enable t..
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Andrew Solomon |
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4b01b89
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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.
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Andrew Solomon |
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c9dea6c
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If everyone has the capacity for some measure of depression under some circumstances, everyone also has the capacity to fight depression to some degree under some circumstances. Often, the fight takes the form of seeking out the treatments that will be most effective in the battle. It involves finding help while you are still strong enough to do so. It involves making the most of the life you have between your most severe episodes. Some hor..
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Andrew Solomon |
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af98395
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In depression, the meaninglessness of every enterprise and every emotion, the meaninglessness of life itself, becomes self-evident. The only feeling left in this loveless state is insignificance. Life
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Andrew Solomon |
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06897f0
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If something or someone doesn't work, it's in a state of grace, progress, and evolution. It will attract love and empathy. If it does work, it has merely completed its job and is probably dead.
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Andrew Solomon |
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1e0340c
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Life itself seemed so alarmingly exigent, to require so much of the self. It was too difficult to remember and think and express and understand - all things I needed to be able to do to talk. To keep my face animated at the same time was insult added to injury. It was like trying to cook and roller-skate and sing and type all at once.
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Andrew Solomon |
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8c936a6
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The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and my life, as I write this, is vital.
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Andrew Solomon |
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8e95838
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That is, perhaps, the greatest revelation I have had: not that depression is compelling but that the people who suffer from it may become compelling because of it.
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Andrew Solomon |
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1736062
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one loves and is loved in great pain, and one is alive in the experience of it. It is the walking-death quality of depression that I have tried to eliminate from my life;
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Andrew Solomon |