Reader's Digest: January 27, 2024
I am late to this electric essay by Mala Chatterjee in Aeon. It’s about severe depression and the timeline is—deliberately?—confused. Two bits stood out to me.
One is about reading David Foster Wallace in hospital, after a suicide attempt, in the company of a close friend:
It all felt a bit like Bible study or something, in the fluorescent sterility and chaos of that strange space, and I remember my friend making some fittingly dark joke about how this was probably how DFW would’ve most wanted the book to be read anyway: like the word of God, among rock bottoms, being involuntarily held.
I’m fascinated by the power of comedy to console—or more than console—in the face of trauma. Mala Chatterjee is, too:
Wallace’s raw hilarity … fills so much of Infinite Jest (1996)—a grotesque humour, one that could punctuate my otherwise continuously unbearable tenure on that sofa with stitches of transcendent laughter, and which not only kept me alive but sometimes feeling alive, wanting to be, hoping I do somehow make it through it all, if for no other reason than because laughing still felt like something worthwhile.
The other moment that sang out to me was about depression’s unreliable narrator:
One of the most harrowing things about mental illness is not anything captured by descriptions of its first-order symptoms, but rather the way it can convince you that these symptoms are just picking up on something that is and has always been the case, that was actually there all the time; and when you didn’t feel this way it was because you had been blind. Mental illness can persuade you that you’re now seeing the reality that had always been real, the Face that had always been there in the Floor…
You can tell yourself not to trust your inner monologue: your perceptions are not real. But they are still yours. What are you to do when self-doubt swallows up self-doubt, when you start to think, “the fact that I believe it doesn’t mean it’s true”?
Depression is like a logic puzzle in which you have to deduce the right answer from two voices, one of which always lies, while the other tells the truth—but the one who lies is you.
BONUS CONTENT: Prior ruminations on depression and the voice within.