For the twenty-four years that I’ve lived on this earth, only about a quarter of which in full consciousness, I’ve come to befriend some of the grave experiences that this world has to offer. Being the youngest of four brothers, I lived my childhood under more commands and expectations than someone with two parents would. When I look back, I see myself trying to live like those above me, elder than me, and in doing so, never really developing a model of my own life and experiences.
I was also my mother’s most facilitated and thereby most loved son, because by my childhood, my mother had the money to fulfill her dreams of raising a son as she desired to, which she couldn’t when raising my three elder brothers in poverty. While I don’t know how exactly, in my earliest years, I was taken care of emotionally and how my relationship was with my mother and elder siblings, some of whom might have been jealous of my ‘better’ upbringing, what I know is that however facilitated and loved I might have been, in some cases it didn’t do me the good which was intended for.
The love might’ve taken the shape of ‘pampering’ which made me more vulnerable to the adversities of life ahead; being the youngest and not having to do labor did inversely condition me to become an indecisive, highly dependent, and expectation-meeting person; and having so many elders might have pushed me to be more prudent, over-obedient, and always good. Thereby, the consequences that followed were loneliness, introversion, lack of belonging, shyness, high sensitivity, self-criticism, self-doubt, self-hatred, and so on; things I suffered from throughout my teenage and adolescent years.
Depression, however, was my first major and outward response that was cumulative of all the piled-up weight of every character flaw I had suffered from previously. Much like Styron, who mentions in this ‘memoir of madness’ about not knowing he was suffering from depression when he in-fact was, I too didn’t know I had depression a few years ago – I also didn’t know what depression was either. And while suffering from depression is one of the worst experiences in itself, suffering from it without the awareness, is even more torturous.
Styron’s memoir of his struggle with depression and nearly-escaped suicide is only my second book that I’ve read about depression since my own devasting episode; first being Andrew Solomon’s masterpiece ‘The Noonday Demon’. It’s a small book that contains Styron’s learned and personal views about the illness – its progressively dark and lifeless nature, its spread-out causes and indescribability, its dominance over our mindset and our defeated submission to it, and so on – all expressed with incredible accuracy and atmospheric gloom.
Suicide, the sadest end to possible to depression, is also captured with brilliant psychological insight and heartbreaking detail. As for its cure, Styron’s personal accounts reject the effectiveness of psychotherapy or medicine, of the 1990s, for the severe stages of depression, where Styron was when he started his treatment. Hospitalization, which eventually becomes Styron refuge, is convincingly presented as more effective, for its ‘seclusion and time’.
Thinking about it now, I’m awed by Styron’s ability to pen down his own suffrage from a difficult and lifeless an illness as depression with such profound clarity and depth; with prose that emits darks rays as well as warmth of understanding, producing a surrounding experience of atmospheric reading.
Ratings: 4/5 **** August 30, 2021_