The poet William Butler Yeats once wrote about a “centre that CANNOT hold,” and sometimes that is true for people, too.
Thirty-five years ago, I was hospitalized for severe depression. When I eventually picked up the traces of my life, I did what I do when I want to make sense of something: I also picked up my pen, this time to write about my experience with mental illness.
I don’t remember how this happened, but my essay came to the attention of the editor of a medical journal who asked if she could print it. Publishing the piece was not something I had intended. It felt too much like being asked to take off my clothes in public.
But almost all writers long for an audience, and, in truth, I knew that essay was some of the finest writing I had ever done. The journal was unknown to me, and I was persuaded to publish the essay after convincing myself that no one I knew would ever see it.
I was wrong about the audience. Some people I knew did stumble across the essay, but hundreds of others, whom I did not know, wrote to the journal to say how much it had meant to them to see their story in print. The essay won a national award and developed a life of its own.
After I saw its impact and realized that I could still walk the streets of my hometown with my head up, I agreed when two other magazines asked to reprint it.
My literary agent called to urge me to expand the essay into a book. He flattered me by comparing it to William Styron’s masterpiece “Darkness Visible” about his own battles with depression, and I was tempted by every writer’s dream of writing a book that would draw a national audience. But, in the end, writing the book was a bridge too far. My family’s privacy would not become scaffolding for my ambition.
With luck, that would have been the end of it, but as is true of many forms of mental illness, it was not. Several years later, I was back in the hospital, and, months after I was released, I wrote about my relapse for the same journal.
By then, I had learned that what I suffered from runs like a pox through generations of my extended family. Again, the letters readers wrote in response to the essay were overwhelming.
Eventually, I stopped trying to answer them. I also stopped writing about my episodes of depression, until this essay, because they have returned periodically over the years. Like any wound that takes a long time to heal, it doesn’t help to pick at the scabs.
One result of falling down a lot is that you can learn a thing or two about getting up, and I have learned a few things over the past 30 years. What has saved me, time and again, is my family, my friends, my doctors, meaningful work, the stability of my life circumstances, the wonder of nature, and even, perhaps, the grace of God.
My salvation, in a word, has been connection. When things are good, I am fastened in place by my connections like a fly caught in the tangle of a spider’s web. When they’re bad, I am a fly loosed in a hurricane, untethered, unbound.
I think about connection whenever I go downtown. Here the unhoused with nowhere else to go vie for space on the sidewalks next to tubs spilling over with extravagantly blooming flowers. Here a rotating cast of desperate people holding cardboard signs beg at the exit from Shaw’s, hoping someone with money left over from buying their own groceries is willing to share the change they have left in their pockets. Here are roaming men of indeterminate age, some of whom look as if they have not enjoyed the comfort of a warm bath since the invention of water. Here are children who need adult escorts to be safe on the bike path, and elderly parishioners tip-toeing their way through discarded needles behind the Catholic church just to reach a pew in which to pray. Here is the endless, unfolding saga of a police blotter that reads like a Greek tragedy.
Where I live, resilience does not mean just keeping the floodwaters at bay, it means trying to keep people afloat who are already half underwater from mental illness, lack of housing, addiction, and poverty.
As I have learned firsthand, even in a privileged life, that means finding and creating life-affirming connections. Mine is already a generous community that almost beggars itself to help those in need, providing food, as much shelter as it can, counseling, basic healthcare, education, job training, art, concerts, pet care, foster parents, clean clothing, Christmas gifts, and toothpaste.
But still, for too many, the connections need more connections. We need more spider webs.
