![]() ![]() Depression told me I wouldn’t make my 25th birthday, then I made my 25th … and then I made my 30th. The critical thing was that I had people I could talk to around me. Staying sane and well is a complicated, never-ending process. I still get bouts of depression but I am a lot better than I was. At 31, Abraham Lincoln wrote: “I’m the most miserable person now living.” That is the drama of being a young man. Words are a shared thing – depression lends itself to melodrama: you believe you’re going through something no one else has been through. Articulating what is in your head is therapeutic. I started writing bits and pieces – unreadable, angsty stuff. I was 24 and back from Ibiza, living at home in Newark, in my childhood bedroom. In February 2000, I was in the depths of depression. ![]() ![]() ![]() Everybody has a story about depression yet, for decades, we have been silent about it. And I got an incredible response, not because the blog was great but because I’ve noticed when anyone talks honestly about depression, it breeds a warm, sincere response from people. So I thought: OK, I’ll write about depression, this thing I had always had inside me and wanted to get out. I was meant to be writing a blog for the Books Trust, as their writer in residence, about novel writing but ran out of things to say and was starting to repeat myself. Why did it take you 15 years to get the courage to write about depression? ![]()
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