Why you will never be famous, and should consider getting serious about your writing. Or stopping.

There are so many great prose writings on depression and loss and living with pain or illness or severe setback.

Joan Didion.  James Baldwin.  William Styron.  Sylvia Plath.  Terry Tempest Williams. Even Fitzgerald comes to mind. I treasure the courage and introspection of these inspiring scribes.

Here's something David Foster Wallace wrote about his depression and loss:

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows.

"Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”

 

                                                                            — Infinite Jest

Unless you're hiding something, you are writing about CrossFit and gear ratios on your mountain bike (do you still have the one with the green floral pattern you painted?  I loved those!)

Any other questions?  I have lived with David Foster Wallace's terrors and I know them.  What do you know?

Step up, OK?  Who lives inside you?  Anyone? Age gracefully and let something out of the pressure cooker in your head that teaches the universe something profound. Take the challenge.  You are your own queen and you do not know who you are.