I may have lent the wrong impression with my earlier posts about depression. Let me clarify a few things.<\/p>\n
Depression has always been a problem for me, but some times have been better and others worse. It’s mostly been varying degrees of worse since the late 1980s.<\/p>\n
Sometimes my creative focus has been more clouded, sometimes less. Sometimes inspired work has battled its way out of the fog; sometimes work that’s been mediocre, or just flat; sometimes work with intermittent flashes of inspiration; sometimes no work at all.<\/p>\n
The last two years or so have been especially difficult. Just about the time I was beginning work on *Hard Time*, I fell — or was pushed, depending on how you look at it and whose story you believe — into a very deep emotional pit. I’ve spent the time since then climbing out. Recently, I’ve seen indications that I’m nearing the top. It’s been a slow, arduous climb, but I think I’ve learned something about the *character* of depression as an illness at various stages of the ascent.<\/p>\n
I don’t consider myself expert enough or articulate enough to write about it in real depth yet, but this much I can tell you from long and sufficiently bitter experience:<\/p>\n
If you suffer from depression — get help<\/strong>. Find a good therapist, even if you have to go to a city- or state-funded facility. Find an antidepressant that works for you. (And no excuses about not wanting to put chemicals in your body; St. Johns Wort and SAM-e can be very effective if you don’t want to go the prescription route.)<\/p>\n Don’t indulge depression. Don’t romanticize it. Don’t glamorize it. Don’t believe it makes you more creative. Don’t believe it makes you more attractive. Don’t believe you can’t keep your cynical edge without it. (Trust me. You can.) Don’t make it your hobby. Don’t make it your buddy. Don’t let it define your life.<\/p>\n Depression just isn’t worth the time and energy it takes to maintain it. There are better things y0u can do with your existence. And there’s more than enough *real* sorrow to experience in the world without sitting around and manufacturing more of it neurochemically.<\/p>\n That’s what I’ve been trying to share with you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I may have lent the wrong impression with my earlier posts about depression. Let me clarify a few things. Depression has always been a problem for me, but some times have been better and others worse. It’s mostly been varying degrees of worse since the late 1980s. Sometimes my creative focus has been more clouded, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":41,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/41"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=81"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=81"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=81"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=81"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}