I’ve overcome a depression that was both debilitating and strangely vivid and creatively expansive. How do I step back into ordinary life without losing the parts that felt meaningful and alive?
During that time, I immersed myself in creative work, I was writing poetry, painting my feelings, and reading books that echoed my inner world, and I found a depth that felt honest, vivid and alive. I gravitated towards art and film that explored life’s darker edges and through them I gained a perspective that felt richer and more truthful than everyday chatter. Those pursuits became my comfort and my way of making sense of things.
Now that I’m feeling better I worry that intensity and clarity I felt in those times are slipping away. The wider world feels preoccupied with consumption, indifferent to injustice and lacking in empathy. How can I step back into daily life and routines without losing the emotional depth and cultural perspective that sustained me?
Eleanor says: I know what you mean about this. Depression can fuel its own expression. It’s not pleasant but it is absorbing, a secret unifying perspective on everything.
It’s worth remembering that this is a kind of magical thinking. One of depression’s greatest tricks is to convince you that you’ve seen the matrix and everything normal, loving, sunlit is in fact idle, surface, false. Darkness can present itself as truth.
But in reality there can be as much intensity and truth outside despair as there was within it. Are we really supposed to think there is less depth and vividity in Matisse’s chapel than Rothko’s because one is brighter? That Barber’s Adagio is richer or truer than Handel’s Zadok the Priest by virtue of its melancholy? For that matter, why is the inevitability of suffering meant to strike us as a more “profound” truth than the absurd contingency that we get to be alive after 13bn years of stars and rocks?
Depression is lying when it tells us that darkness is a guide to depth. Love, joy, relief, reflection, awe at nature and awareness of contingency can also oxygenate your creative blood. There’s Luis Barragán in a sunbeam, there’s Zadie Smith on joy, Clive James transfixed by a cicada, Ann Patchett on friendship, Annie Dillard on seeing, there’s Matisse at tea, Lucille Clifton celebrating, Octavio Paz between going and coming. You want intensity and clarity; what else but knowing we’re the lucky ones? You want things that feel meaningful and alive; what else but a shared glance with someone else who gets this?
Immersion and reflection don’t have to stop just because acute suffering has. Coming back to a more normal affective life just means that the experiences on which you reflect intensely and seek absorption in will be less about the darkness.
I wonder if it’d help to name the experiences you’re having now quite precisely. Depression is one of the worst things that can happen to a person. It sticks a negation in front of everything valuable. When it passes – when you finally get washed ashore, rinsed and exhausted – what do you feel? Tired? Relieved? Curious? Reborn? Older or younger? More fragile or stronger? Whatever your feelings are, there will be thoughts worth having about them and art worth encountering from within them.
I think part of the problem is we tend to think all happiness is the same. But there are so many different forms of non-suffering to be present with. If you can name them more precisely and bring the same quality of attention to them that depression demanded, that might help you hold on to the feeling of clarity and expansion.
It might also help to look for meaningful creative and intellectual perspectives that reject consumption and injustice in the same way you do. There’s no end of rich truth-telling voices on these subjects. And unlike depression, they don’t tell you you’re fundamentally alone – in fact they prove you’re not.
You have agency over how you step back into the world, which means you can try to bring that same sense of vividness partly by asking how you’d like to make life yours. Depression has a very one-dimensional view of truth and depth but you don’t have to.
This letter has been edited
