I read this last night in a brilliant collection of essays by Parker J Palmer. ‘Many young people today journey in the dark, as the young always have, and we elders do them a disservice when we withhold the shadowy parts of our lives.’ He goes on to say that when he got depressed in […]
Category: Mental health
A tale of two cities
Ten years ago, I spent a month in New York with my sister, who lives there. It was Spring. The city was fizzy and infused with life – times a gazillion. I was in an exploratory mood and opened myself up. I studied everything and everyone around me; tiny things like how an older lady […]
Vigilance on all fronts
I went to see author of Mind On Fire: A Memoir of Madness and Recovery, Arnold Thomas Fanning, speak yesterday. Something he said about his recovery struck me: he used the word vigilance. He’s been well for years now; he’s on medication, he’s had therapy – but he also said he has to remain vigilant […]
You’re ok – I’m not ok
‘I assert that life is beautiful in spite of everything!’ says Tchaikovsky in one of his letters which I read here, in an article written by the impeccable Maria Popova. Tchaikovsky had lapses of stinking depression, too. Maria notes that what was ‘most remarkable yet quintessentially human about his disposition was the ability to assure […]
What time is it, Mr Wolf?
I’ve just finished Dolly Alderton’s book Everything I Know About Love, a beautifully honest, funny love song to her 20s and to her coterie of female friends. It wasn’t one of those happy, jaunty love songs though – rather a gritty raw one; she suffered, she shagged, she loved, she got dumped, she drank, she […]
Jabba on your shoulder
‘My mouth isn’t asking for chocolate, my whole body is asking for it,’ said my son recently, totally disassociating himself from his need for the sweet stuff. Nope, nothing to do with him. At the age of three, he nailed it: how cravings work. As an adult, you can test it out. Go on. ‘My […]
I see you
I’m rereading a book I read when I was about 16, The Catcher in the Rye. If you took refuge in books as a teenager, then you probably know about Holden Caulfield and his beef with ‘phonies’; they were mostly adults, and they were mostly bullshitting him. If your parents or the adults in your […]
Wake up call
‘You can’t beat death/ but you can beat death in life, sometimes’ How cool is this? Charles Bukowski wrote it in 1993. He died in 1994, at the age of 74. A friend sent his poem The Laughing Heart to me this morning, and it illuminated a sentence, or instruction, that has been reverberating around […]
Seek and ye shall find
I love that quote from Rumi: What you seek is seeking you. When you hear it, your heart relaxes a little. You stop trying to shove the smudgy roundness of yourself, edges all blurred from life’s sweet and shocking other plans, into a stark square of expectation. It means that you don’t have to strive […]
Big life
In another life, I lived on a tiny island called La Maddalena. One summer evening, the heady scent of wild gorse in the air, I flew around the island on the back of a friend’s scooter. ‘Che vuoi fare da grande?’ he yelled into the sea-fresh wind, thousands of tiny stars twinkling in the sky […]