Behold the Stars

While reading my favorite high-level, intellectual journal, I came across an article on J.K. Rowling’s depression.

Rowling professes that she experienced a brief bout with depression in 1994, during the time she was struggling to make ends meet for herself and her infant daughter. Her experience with depression made a lasting impact on her and inspired the Dementors that first appear in Prisoner of Azkaban. On depression, Rowling said, “It is that absence of being able to envisage that you will ever be cheerful again. The absence of hope. That very deadened feeling, which is so very different from feeling sad.” Rowling… admits that she contemplated taking her own life back in the early 1990s, after separating from her first husband, Portuguese journalist Jorge Arantes.

“We’re talking suicidal thoughts here, we’re not talking ‘I’m a little bit miserable,’ ” Rowling told [an Edinburgh University student magazine].

I love that the Dementers were inspired by her depression. Works for me.  But here’s what caught my eye:

“The funny thing is, I have never been remotely ashamed of having been depressed. Never,” she says. “I think I’m abnormally shameless on that account because what’s to be ashamed of?”

It’s an odd thing, really. After years of struggling with depression, I look back on that period not with shame, but with pride. I now understand that I went through something unique, something special, and survived. That is quite an accomplishment, and one, I’m learning, only understood by people who’ve experienced it. We’ve been tempered by a fire the intensity of which most people can’t imagine. It’s simply out of their realm of experience.

So what? Are we better than others? No. We’ve just gone through something unusual. I went through an intense breakdown and rebuilding of my dreams, values, self, finances, and relationships — with a dose of death thrown in for flavoring (What an education!). I’d rather have had my life go along swimmingly, but it didn’t. I went through what I went through, just like everybody else.

This year, just like every year, I’ll go through what I go through. I’ll set goals and succeed, and I’ll set goals and fail. I will love and hurt. I will be excited and bored and lonely and social. I’ll be confused and sure. I’ll wish for something better or be happy with what I have. And that’s just fine. As they say, “It’s all good.”

Make a great day.