Maybe a word from you will save me
Letters from the shadows
The following letter excerpts all discuss depression, so I’d suggest proceeding with caution—especially if you happen to be in its grip at the moment. If you are struggling or need support, please consider reaching out to a mental health professional or visiting a website such as Mind or NAMI.
I write to you from the depths of one of my unholy depressions.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Letter to Maxwell Perkins
27th December 1925
I've been suffering my usual Yuletide despair, perhaps worse than usual this year; I think it’s like post-natal depression that seizes some women, only it’s annual. At its blackest depth, I feel that everyone I really love is dead. Then I can’t even remember love, what it is and does, and think: there it is, I have frozen up, I have become totally unloving.
Martha Gellhorn
Letter to Leonard Bernstein
27th December 1979
—Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn
I’m not sure there’s any specific advice I can give that will help bring life back its savour. Although they mean well, it’s sometimes quite galling to be reminded how much people love you when you don’t love yourself that much.
I’ve found that it’s of some help to think of one’s moods and feelings about the world as being similar to weather.
Here are some obvious things about the weather:
It’s real.
You can’t change it by wishing it away.
If it’s dark and rainy it really is dark and rainy and you can’t alter it.
But nor is it your fault that it’s dark and rainy, and it might be dark and rainy for two weeks in a row.BUT
It will be sunny one day.
It isn’t under one’s control as to when the sun comes out, but come out it will.
One day.It really is the same with one’s moods, I think. The wrong approach is to believe that they are illusions. They are real. Depression, anxiety, listlessness—these are as real as the weather—AND EQUALLY NOT UNDER ONE’S CONTROL. No one’s fault. Not yours.
BUT
They will pass: they really will.
Stephen Fry
Letter to a young fan
10th April 2006
—Read and listen to this letter here
I don’t think much of this life. I can’t say I hate it exactly. I can’t get it into focus to direct my hate upon it. It just surrounds me like a mist of dust. I twiddle my legs off in the morning & twiddle them back again at night, but what comes between or follows after I don’t really know. I have a vague recollection of having tried hard to concentrate and squeeze something out of my brain: but what or why, I don’t know.
John Middleton Murry
Letter to Katherine Mansfield
11th June 1918
—Letters Between Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murray
This depressed state began last fall, I think—with the return to the scenes of my childhood—or adolescence. Boston is really filled with sorrowful memories of my family, and my early self. I thought, because I had “insight” into it all, that I could rise above it. But Dr. H. has told me that a depression can seep through, as it were, in any case.
This is a most attractive set-up, with lovely views on all sides, and no grisly, sloppy hospital atmosphere. The patients are, of course, pretty mixed—with some exceedingly vocal ones. And the “treatments” include electric shock (which has been much “improved,” I hear—but Lord preserve us). Some young people receive these, as well as older types. I feel that they are not for me—since my mental confusion is nil.
Just let us hope that the “drugs” connect with the psyche.
Louise Bogan
Letter to Ruth Limmer
12th June 1965
—What the Woman Lived: Selected Letters of Louise Bogan
Because I have a need to speak frankly, I can’t hide from you that I’m overcome by a feeling of great anxiety, dejection, a je ne sais quoi of discouragement and even despair, too much to express. And that if I can find no consolation for it, it might all too easily overwhelm me unbearably.
Vincent van Gogh
Letter to his brother
26th September 1883
Now listen, life is lovely, but I CAN’T LIVE IT. I can’t even explain. I know how silly it sounds . . . but if you knew how it FELT. To be alive, yes, alive, but not be able to live it. AY that’s the rub. I am like a stone that lives . . . locked outside of all that’s real. AY! That’s the rub, locked out. Anne, do you know of such things, can you hear???? I wish, or think I wish, that I were dying of something for then I could be brave, but to be not dying, and yet . . . and yet to [be] behind a wall, watching everyone fit in where I can’t, to talk behind a gray foggy wall, to live but to not reach or to reach wrong ... to do it all wrong. . .
Anne Sexton
Letter to Anne Clarke
13th October 1964
—Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters
I’m writing to you today out of an emotional necessity—an anguished longing to talk to you. I have, in other words, nothing special to say. Except this: that today I’m at the bottom of a bottomless depression. The absurdity of the sentence speaks for me.
This is one of those days in which I’ve never had a future. There’s just a static present, surrounded by a wall of anxiety. The other side of the river, as long as it’s the other side, is not this side; that is the root cause of all my suffering. There are many boats destined for many ports, but no boat for life to stop hurting, nor a landing-place where we can forget everything. All of this occurred a long time ago, but my grief is even older.
On days of the soul like today I feel, in my awareness of every bodily pore, like the sad child who was beaten up by life. I was put in a corner, from where I can hear everyone else playing. In my hands I can feel the shoddy, broken toy I was given out of some shoddy irony. Today, the fourteenth of March, at ten after nine in the evening, this seems to be all my life is worth.
Fernando Pessoa
Letter to Mário de Sá-Carneiro1
14th March 1917
—The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa
Sorrow comes in great waves—no one can know that better than you—but it rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us it leaves us on the spot and we know that if it is strong we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain. It wears us, uses us, but we wear it and use it in return; and it is blind, whereas we after a manner see. My dear Grace, you are passing through a darkness in which I myself in my ignorance see nothing but that you have been made wretchedly ill by it; but it is only a darkness, it is not an end, or the end. Don't think, don't feel, any more than you can help, don't conclude or decide—don't do anything but wait. Everything will pass, and serenity and accepted mysteries and disillusionments, and the tenderness of a few good people, and new opportunities and ever so much of life, in a word, will remain.
Henry James
Letter to Grace Norton2
28th July 1883
Struggling not to be depressed, I find whatever beauty I can and cling to it, to keep from falling.
Nikos Kazantzakis
Letter to Eleni Samiou
16th February 1929
—The Selected Letters of Nikos Kazantzakis
Just now it is torture to me to dress, plan meals, put one foot in front of the other. Ironically my novel about my first breakdown is getting rave reviews over here. I feel a simple act of will would make the world steady & solidify. No-one can save me but myself, but I need help…
Sylvia Plath
Letter to Dr. Beuscher
4th February 1963
—The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Vol.2
I am miserable, horney, lonely, depressed and unshaven and it all must be because I smoke too much. This is the beginning of the year and I've spaded the garden, brush-hooked the woods and will point some stones this afternoon but I feel like shit. At nightfall I will put on my only suit and drive to Caldors in Bedford Hills where I will be displayed, rather like an egg-beater, somewhere between the Tobacco Shoppe and Household Utensils. Twenty-five books-sellers with shopping bags filled with out of print editions will appear and by the time I have autographed these all the lonely, lonely people who hoped to meet a man as lonely as they will have to go home.
John Cheever
Letter to his unnamed lover
May 1978
Oh darling, I am so sorry about the depression. I guess we have to die over and over again and be reborn over and over again — and it is so exhausting a process that I wonder that either you or I is still alive and working well, as we are.
May Sarton
Letter to BB
16th February 1971
—May Sarton: Among the Usual Days
Terrible happenings. Got drunk Sunday night and thrown in jail. Must see judge on Wednesday. Fell and twisted ankle—swollen now, might be broken. Missed 2 days work. Judge might give me 120 days. This is not first offense. Will mean loss of job, of course.
Have been laying here in horrible fit of depression. My drinking days are over. This is too much. Jail is a horrible place. I almost go mad there. I don’t know what is going to become of me. I have no trade, no future. Sick, depressed, blackly, heavily depressed.
Write me something. Maybe a word from you will save me.
Charles Bukowski
Letter to Ann Bauman
18th December 1962
—Screams from the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960-1970
Nobody has suffered more from low spirits than I have—so I feel for you. Here are my prescriptions.
Live as well as you dare.
Go into the shower-bath with a small quantity of water at a temperature low enough to give you a slight sensation of cold.
Amusing books.
Short views of human life—not further than dinner or tea.
Be as busy as you can.
See as much as you can of those friends who respect and like you.
And of those acquaintances who amuse you.
Make no secret of low spirits to your friends, but talk of them freely— they are always worse for dignified concealment.
Attend to the effects tea and coffee produce upon you.
Compare your lot with that of other people.
Don’t expect too much from human life—a sorry business at the best.
Avoid poetry, dramatic representations (except comedy), music, serious novels, melancholy sentimental people, and every thing likely to excite feeling or emotion not ending in active benevolence.
Do good, and endeavour to please everybody of every degree.
Be as much as you can in the open air without fatigue.
Make the room where you commonly sit, gay and pleasant.
Struggle by little and little against idleness.
Don’t be too severe upon yourself, or underrate yourself, but do yourself justice.
Keep good blazing fires.
Be firm and constant in the exercise of rational religion.
Believe me, dear Georgiana, your devoted servant, Sydney Smith
Sydney Smith
Letter to Lady Georgiana Morpeth3
16th February 1820
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Read Smith’s letter in full here (having said that, the above excerpt is 95% of the letter).
Makes me feel better knowing I’m in such good company.
Likely my favorite “collection.” People really are human. The facade behind the mask behind the facade — hiding emotions and feelings. Insightful.