What is a Life After Depression Meant to Look Like?
Recently I attended an event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival at which the author and Princeton academic Yiyun Li was being interviewed about her latest novel, The Book of Goose (2023). The discussion was wide-ranging, but what didn’t come up was that, in 2012, she had a breakdown, attempted suicide twice, was hospitalized, eventually recovered, and shortly after she returned to the land of the living to pick up the pieces of her life, her sixteen-year-old son killed himself.I found out these aspects of her biography after the event, and I couldn’t square it. How could someone who had endured such terror and torment summon the joy with which she spoke? She was so full of grace, quick to find the humor in the moment, worldly-wise but not at all cynical. There was not even a whiff of cynicism.The closest she came to offering advice on how to live a joyful and meaningful life was in the context of creative writing. There is a very human tendency to look inwards, she said. Lightly but emphatically, she told us: “Don’t forget to look out.”Depression, it so often turns out, is a useful precursor to living a life of excellence. It’s an instruction manual, of sorts, on how to filter out the flotsam and then to hero what’s left. It’s a well-trodden path; dig into the past of people who have achieved truly amazing things, and you will almost always find trauma or hardship or terror. Abraham Lincoln experienced two major depressive breakdowns as a young man, but went on to become President of the United States. Beethoven endured terrible depressive episodes after he started losing his hearing early on in life, but he…
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