When I was 16, I read The Savage God, by A. Alvarez. The book was a study of suicide, and the author had been great friends with Sylvia Plath. I remember little of the book, only that it unsettled everyone around me. Why was an otherwise vibrant young girl obsessed with suicide? My mother especially was panicked. “You won't really do anything, will you?” she begged.
I didn't want to “do” anything; I never considered suicide. I just read about it, and thought myself moody and creative.
Being at Stanford intensified my “moodiness.” I went to Student Health and poured out my fears to a counselor: What is the meaning of life? How can there be war and torture in the world? Why was I born a woman in the 20th century, not a serf in the 12th? I thought the counselor would brand me crazy and lock me up, despite looming term papers.
I was not crazy. “You're only dealing with questions that great minds have always grappled with,” I was told. I was turned out of Student Health with little more than a pat on the back. Other students suffered from the same subtle malady. When asked if she was happy, a friend answered, “I'm happier.” A quarter's rigid three-month structure and deadlines made us happier.
The words of King Solomon came to haunt me: This too shall pass. If happy (or happier), I would someday become sad. If sad, this too would pass. The impermanence was both cheering and dismal. I remained moody and wondered what to do with my life. I'd always loved movies, so I ventured to Hollywood to try my luck at screenwriting.
Years passed, with a modicum of success. Then, at 31, I suffered a stroke. The sudden, devastating brain attack left one side of my body paralyzed. I had to relearn to walk and swallow, to hold a fork and a pencil. My recovery—physical, mental and emotional—took many years. And, oddly enough, I was never depressed throughout that time. There was meaning in each and every day. As I explained to friends and family: in depression, your insides are weak. With stroke, your outsides are broken but your insides are strong.
I would learn to run again! I would learn to move each of the 27 bones of my hand! And so I did. To look at me now, you'd never know. I even managed, post-stroke, to sell a screenplay, though it hasn't (yet) made it to screen.
Life returned to normal, meaning depression crept back. Earlier this year, I was on strike, and that brought its own revelations. “Pencils down!” was the Writers Guild of America rallying cry, and not being allowed to write turned out to be a lot of fun. I met other writers, I got regular exercise pacing with a picket sign, and creative juices flowed as we played movie trivia games and drafted slogans. Several new psychiatric syndromes were coined, among them Labor Action Euphoria Disorder (LAUD), the elation experienced when a usually isolated writer joins the picket line and forges new relationships, and Post-Contract Depression (PCD), the dysphoria that afflicts a writer who, when a strike is settled, misses the camaraderie of the picket line. Learning that depression is a common problem following a stroke, or that writers are 23 percent more likely to be depressed than nonwriters, doesn't help. I'm in the midst of my depression, not outside looking in.
At 16, I read The Savage God. Now I'm so raw and depressed that even Time and Newsweek overwhelm me. The best part of my day is bedtime, when I reread Harry Potter (the mental equivalent of comfort food) and pretend that wizards exist and depression doesn't.
I'm desperately trying to climb out of this black hole. My Stanford, stroke and strike experiences have taught me to cherish my friends and family, get daily exercise, and try to create meaning to help me out of bed each morning. It may be impossible to discern the ultimate meaning of life, but it's imperative to find meaning in my life. On the days when that's elusive, I cling to the hope that “this too shall pass.” No longer a cliché, the phrase is the only nonmagical comfort I've got.
DIANE SALTZBERG, '78, is a writer in Los Angeles.
