Depression and Writing
Posted: Mon Mar 30, 2009 12:31 am
We all have our stories, here's my own.
To begin, I’ve always wanted to be a writer, or at least ever since I was fifteen-years-old. I remember the time that I was inspired to be a novelist type of writer. I had read my first Stephen King book, Cycle of the Werewolf, the story is that each month during the week of the full moon; the wolf comes out to kill. After reading that, I was enthralled; it wasn’t the thing that inspired me to be a writer. Ironically, it was a movie, starring the novelist and monologist named Spalding Gray. The movie was called Monster in a Box, in that Spalding Gray from behind his stage desk where he has his 1900 page handwritten “monster”, a glass of water, a paperback copy of his novel, and a microphone, he describes the stories behind the writing of his book, Impossible Vacation.
Hearing his stories from his cabin in the McDowell Writers Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, the streets of Hollywood, and the neighborhoods of New York as well as hearing the story progression of the novel Impossible Vacation, I began to love the idea of writing more and more. I had always known that I had all these thoughts, ideas, stories, and adventures in my head, but no way to get them out or the proper way to put them down, and it was through these two men that I found a way to set them down. To bring all the ideas in my head into something solid rather than passing daydreams.
However, I didn’t decide on writing as a career right away. It was a rather long and very crooked road to get to that point. After getting out of High School and coming to college, my first career choice was computer programming, but then I found out how bad I was at Math. My reason for choosing that area was mainly with how much I work with computers, but the reality was I only know enough about the machines to get by. Since, computer programming was a bad idea, I tried the sciences, and I was even worse there. Mainly, because of how bad I can be with exact numbers and figures, since if one is off by a digit or a decimal the project becomes a failure.
After that, I tried the technical college, after a few months of enormous class work and asshole classmates there came a point in there that I thought, “Why in the hell did I choose this?” Finally, I came back to the lower campus and to the liberal arts, only took me about 4 years to get there, but I did get there.
During my time there, I had learned so much about writing as well as literature itself. The literatures of the world, the literature of the fantastic, and the creative writing workshops. I had also begun to build my own library at home, filled with all kinds of books by different authors. Stephen King. Anne Rice. Chuck Palahniuk. Douglas Adams. Brian Jacques. Michael Chricton. J.K. Rowling. Christopher Paolini.
Though, what kind of writing did I do? I mainly did what’s called “Fan Fiction”, which is essentially a broad term for “fiction about characters or settings written by fans of the original work, rather than by the original creators” (Wikipedia). At least that’s how Wikipedia defines it. I did a wide variety of different works, depending on what I felt like writing about. At the time I was writing fan fiction, I had created an account at the website called where I called myself “TattooAlchemist”. In all I had written over ten novel length stories, although fan fiction was more of an exercise for my skills in fiction writing.
For my original works I mainly focused in the areas of fantasy. One of these is called “The Swan and the Crow”, a story set in a place of warring countries and their armies consisted of magic users. Within one of these is a man who falls in love with a woman who has the power to change herself into a swan. Even though fantasy is my best genre, I had also done a few others outside this genre. One of them was a semi-autobiographical story called “No Name” about a bullied high school boy who after he teams up with a kind hearted lesbian friend commits all kinds of mischief around the school. Although, that’s not to say I did any of the stuff I wrote in it, but I did have a lesbian friend during my high school time.
And for a while, I thought that I had found my spot in the greater scheme of things, but then a serious shadow of doubt came over me. Mainly from my family, such as my brother Paul who once said to me, “Writing is such a lofty profession”, and by an ironic coincidence he’s an Art Major and became a graphic designer. Then another doubt came from my own mother, who wanted me to be in any other profession except, what she calls, in a rather condescending way, the “soft sciences”. On the surface she said that she wanted me to support myself, but the truth is she wanted me to be in the sciences.
She would give such hints as saying, “Try microbiology, you might love it.” If I even had any love for the sciences, I would have stayed there in the first place. Yet, they weren’t the biggest sources of doubt for me, it came from a teacher. Even though it is said that everyone has moments like this, in other words bad times, unfortunately in my case its more like several long years of bad times.
It was during the spring semester of 2006. I had taken an Independent Studies course in which I had to write a novel. The advisor I had at the time was Doctor Kathleen King. I thought that things would be wonderful, it would be great and that I would be told that I had potential as a great writer. However, in the words of Chuck Palahniuk in his book Choke, “Nothing is as good as you imagine”. The reality began to set in after each weekly office trip that I had no real potential. It especially came to a head when I was discussing style of writing with my advisor and using Stephen King as an example and hearing her say to me, “You’re not Stephen King”. It was like a watch battery slowly dying down and winding down the gears to a halt that my writing suffered in the same way. Even though I had gotten through the semester with a passing grade, I still had that doubt that wouldn’t go away, like an infection of the mind.
After a while, I began to develop a more nihilistic view to life. In doubt I trust. The only thing that I don’t doubt is my doubt. It seems that from the experience that I’ve had, that I’m usually wrong about things that I hope that I’m right about. Such as how during my early years of college, I thought I was right in the college areas that I went into but I was very wrong. So really what’s to say that I’m wrong across the board?
During that time, in the spring of 2006, I had gone into counseling, as many of my family members and classmates had suggested. While I was in the counseling office from week to week I started to consider if there was really something wrong with me or did I just have really bad luck? It’s always said that you should work hard and do your best, but the reality is that its just luck; being in the right place and at the right time. If there are any arguments about that, just look at people like J.K. Rowling. The right place. The right time. A time when children weren’t reading then she creates Harry Potter and suddenly all children are reading it.
The really shitty part is that I do want to be a writer, and yet I’m in a time and place where my kind isn’t needed anymore. It was that particular thought that truly began to twist at me like indigestion turned by a corkscrew. The only thing that has kept me going on and on is that there really is nothing else that I can do at least very well.
In the counseling sessions, instead of getting better or finding out some great revelation or coming to a moment of clarity, I simply grew worse and worse. So I stopped going because it was better to suffer the wounds as they were instead of pouring salt on them each week.
During the summer of 2006 that I began my treatment.
Prescription: Cymbalta 60 mg
Treats: Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) and Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD)
Side-effects: Insomnia, Weight Gain or Loss, Dry mouth, headache, fatigue, vivid nightmares, increased sweating, tremor, Depersonalization, Hypomania, etc…
My family had said that I needed something since apparently I was moping a lot. Though inside, an even grimmer reality was starting to take hold. It had occurred to me that I had been through most of the campuses and I barely got through them. So, a pretty hard question came over me; if I can’t be anything then is there really any point in keep on going through life?
To paraphrase a quote from Nietzche’s work Human, All Too Human, he had said that there were only two kinds of people. There are those who are destined for greatness, examples of this greatness can be seen all around us, such as Stephen King and J.K. Rowling. Then there are the rest of us. Do you know what he called us? He called us “The Bungled and the Botched”. Then there was someone else, I can’t remember who it was who said that, “A life without purpose is a life not worth living”. Keeping these thoughts in mind, it started to make me wonder about my own spot in all this. Especially since I had walked this crooked road to get to where I thought would be the right place. Then something comes down and says, “Sorry kid, you don’t have it.”
I've told my story online to a lot of people and I have gotten some pretty insensitive responses. Such as “He’s whining too much”, “He should get a job and see what the real world is like”, or “Try joining the military and get a reality check”. I even had one guy say to me, "Words of advice: stop being a pussy. Get a spine. Man up. And grow a pair." Really does seem like the internet gives people liscence for cruelty doesn't it? It’s always easier to sit from a distance and point the finger at someone else telling them what to do. It’s the same as it is for someone who has had no stable relationship, or a bad marriage, to give advice on love.
It’s easy to criticize when one isn’t inside.
And so, here I am once again, exposing my soft underside online. Two years after I've started my treatment with the drug Cymbalta but unfortunately it seems like the condition is growing worse. Especially after the beginning of another writing project which was said by someone else online that it was "God awful." That I had "the pacing of a three year old trying to re-enact a Midsummer Night's Dream." But since I too suffer depression and I'm here with others like me - I hope that there will be those who can understand.
To begin, I’ve always wanted to be a writer, or at least ever since I was fifteen-years-old. I remember the time that I was inspired to be a novelist type of writer. I had read my first Stephen King book, Cycle of the Werewolf, the story is that each month during the week of the full moon; the wolf comes out to kill. After reading that, I was enthralled; it wasn’t the thing that inspired me to be a writer. Ironically, it was a movie, starring the novelist and monologist named Spalding Gray. The movie was called Monster in a Box, in that Spalding Gray from behind his stage desk where he has his 1900 page handwritten “monster”, a glass of water, a paperback copy of his novel, and a microphone, he describes the stories behind the writing of his book, Impossible Vacation.
Hearing his stories from his cabin in the McDowell Writers Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, the streets of Hollywood, and the neighborhoods of New York as well as hearing the story progression of the novel Impossible Vacation, I began to love the idea of writing more and more. I had always known that I had all these thoughts, ideas, stories, and adventures in my head, but no way to get them out or the proper way to put them down, and it was through these two men that I found a way to set them down. To bring all the ideas in my head into something solid rather than passing daydreams.
However, I didn’t decide on writing as a career right away. It was a rather long and very crooked road to get to that point. After getting out of High School and coming to college, my first career choice was computer programming, but then I found out how bad I was at Math. My reason for choosing that area was mainly with how much I work with computers, but the reality was I only know enough about the machines to get by. Since, computer programming was a bad idea, I tried the sciences, and I was even worse there. Mainly, because of how bad I can be with exact numbers and figures, since if one is off by a digit or a decimal the project becomes a failure.
After that, I tried the technical college, after a few months of enormous class work and asshole classmates there came a point in there that I thought, “Why in the hell did I choose this?” Finally, I came back to the lower campus and to the liberal arts, only took me about 4 years to get there, but I did get there.
During my time there, I had learned so much about writing as well as literature itself. The literatures of the world, the literature of the fantastic, and the creative writing workshops. I had also begun to build my own library at home, filled with all kinds of books by different authors. Stephen King. Anne Rice. Chuck Palahniuk. Douglas Adams. Brian Jacques. Michael Chricton. J.K. Rowling. Christopher Paolini.
Though, what kind of writing did I do? I mainly did what’s called “Fan Fiction”, which is essentially a broad term for “fiction about characters or settings written by fans of the original work, rather than by the original creators” (Wikipedia). At least that’s how Wikipedia defines it. I did a wide variety of different works, depending on what I felt like writing about. At the time I was writing fan fiction, I had created an account at the website called where I called myself “TattooAlchemist”. In all I had written over ten novel length stories, although fan fiction was more of an exercise for my skills in fiction writing.
For my original works I mainly focused in the areas of fantasy. One of these is called “The Swan and the Crow”, a story set in a place of warring countries and their armies consisted of magic users. Within one of these is a man who falls in love with a woman who has the power to change herself into a swan. Even though fantasy is my best genre, I had also done a few others outside this genre. One of them was a semi-autobiographical story called “No Name” about a bullied high school boy who after he teams up with a kind hearted lesbian friend commits all kinds of mischief around the school. Although, that’s not to say I did any of the stuff I wrote in it, but I did have a lesbian friend during my high school time.
And for a while, I thought that I had found my spot in the greater scheme of things, but then a serious shadow of doubt came over me. Mainly from my family, such as my brother Paul who once said to me, “Writing is such a lofty profession”, and by an ironic coincidence he’s an Art Major and became a graphic designer. Then another doubt came from my own mother, who wanted me to be in any other profession except, what she calls, in a rather condescending way, the “soft sciences”. On the surface she said that she wanted me to support myself, but the truth is she wanted me to be in the sciences.
She would give such hints as saying, “Try microbiology, you might love it.” If I even had any love for the sciences, I would have stayed there in the first place. Yet, they weren’t the biggest sources of doubt for me, it came from a teacher. Even though it is said that everyone has moments like this, in other words bad times, unfortunately in my case its more like several long years of bad times.
It was during the spring semester of 2006. I had taken an Independent Studies course in which I had to write a novel. The advisor I had at the time was Doctor Kathleen King. I thought that things would be wonderful, it would be great and that I would be told that I had potential as a great writer. However, in the words of Chuck Palahniuk in his book Choke, “Nothing is as good as you imagine”. The reality began to set in after each weekly office trip that I had no real potential. It especially came to a head when I was discussing style of writing with my advisor and using Stephen King as an example and hearing her say to me, “You’re not Stephen King”. It was like a watch battery slowly dying down and winding down the gears to a halt that my writing suffered in the same way. Even though I had gotten through the semester with a passing grade, I still had that doubt that wouldn’t go away, like an infection of the mind.
After a while, I began to develop a more nihilistic view to life. In doubt I trust. The only thing that I don’t doubt is my doubt. It seems that from the experience that I’ve had, that I’m usually wrong about things that I hope that I’m right about. Such as how during my early years of college, I thought I was right in the college areas that I went into but I was very wrong. So really what’s to say that I’m wrong across the board?
During that time, in the spring of 2006, I had gone into counseling, as many of my family members and classmates had suggested. While I was in the counseling office from week to week I started to consider if there was really something wrong with me or did I just have really bad luck? It’s always said that you should work hard and do your best, but the reality is that its just luck; being in the right place and at the right time. If there are any arguments about that, just look at people like J.K. Rowling. The right place. The right time. A time when children weren’t reading then she creates Harry Potter and suddenly all children are reading it.
The really shitty part is that I do want to be a writer, and yet I’m in a time and place where my kind isn’t needed anymore. It was that particular thought that truly began to twist at me like indigestion turned by a corkscrew. The only thing that has kept me going on and on is that there really is nothing else that I can do at least very well.
In the counseling sessions, instead of getting better or finding out some great revelation or coming to a moment of clarity, I simply grew worse and worse. So I stopped going because it was better to suffer the wounds as they were instead of pouring salt on them each week.
During the summer of 2006 that I began my treatment.
Prescription: Cymbalta 60 mg
Treats: Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) and Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD)
Side-effects: Insomnia, Weight Gain or Loss, Dry mouth, headache, fatigue, vivid nightmares, increased sweating, tremor, Depersonalization, Hypomania, etc…
My family had said that I needed something since apparently I was moping a lot. Though inside, an even grimmer reality was starting to take hold. It had occurred to me that I had been through most of the campuses and I barely got through them. So, a pretty hard question came over me; if I can’t be anything then is there really any point in keep on going through life?
To paraphrase a quote from Nietzche’s work Human, All Too Human, he had said that there were only two kinds of people. There are those who are destined for greatness, examples of this greatness can be seen all around us, such as Stephen King and J.K. Rowling. Then there are the rest of us. Do you know what he called us? He called us “The Bungled and the Botched”. Then there was someone else, I can’t remember who it was who said that, “A life without purpose is a life not worth living”. Keeping these thoughts in mind, it started to make me wonder about my own spot in all this. Especially since I had walked this crooked road to get to where I thought would be the right place. Then something comes down and says, “Sorry kid, you don’t have it.”
I've told my story online to a lot of people and I have gotten some pretty insensitive responses. Such as “He’s whining too much”, “He should get a job and see what the real world is like”, or “Try joining the military and get a reality check”. I even had one guy say to me, "Words of advice: stop being a pussy. Get a spine. Man up. And grow a pair." Really does seem like the internet gives people liscence for cruelty doesn't it? It’s always easier to sit from a distance and point the finger at someone else telling them what to do. It’s the same as it is for someone who has had no stable relationship, or a bad marriage, to give advice on love.
It’s easy to criticize when one isn’t inside.
And so, here I am once again, exposing my soft underside online. Two years after I've started my treatment with the drug Cymbalta but unfortunately it seems like the condition is growing worse. Especially after the beginning of another writing project which was said by someone else online that it was "God awful." That I had "the pacing of a three year old trying to re-enact a Midsummer Night's Dream." But since I too suffer depression and I'm here with others like me - I hope that there will be those who can understand.
