You don't think in depression that you've put on a gray veil and are seeing the world through the haze of a bad mood. You think that the veil has been taken away, the veil of happiness, and that now you're seeing truly.
I often say that the opposite of depression is not happiness but vitality.
My risk tolerance is higher than some people's, but it's not nearly as high as some people's. I don't want to exaggerate my bravado. I haven't been on the front lines. I haven't ever stepped on a land mine.
Kids with Down syndrome are, by and large, quite affectionate and relatively guileless, and frequently, the attachments to them grow and deepen. And the meaning that parents find in it grows and deepens.
I would have had an easier life if I were straight, but I would not be me. And I now like being myself better than the idea of being someone else, someone who, to be honest, I have neither the option of being nor the ability fully to imagine.
There is enormous shame around depression of any kind and at any time. And there's enormous social stigma attached to it, which we need to go on fighting. But I think that the sense of depression during pregnancy and early motherhood has been particularly stigmatized, that people especially feel that should be the happiest time of your life.
Shutting out the depression strengthens it. While you hide from it, it grows.
Sleep is my great indulgence, and I get eight hours every night. Being chronically overtired raises stress levels in a bad way and is responsible for a lot of depressive breaks.
Forging meaning is about changing yourself. Building identity is about changing the world.
My father's an opera nut, and my stepmother used to work at the Metropolitan Opera, so I had a lot of opera immersion. I like the grandness and pretention of it.
A great hope gets crushed every time someone reminds us that happiness can be neither assumed nor earned; that we are all prisoners of our own flawed brains; that the ultimate aloneness in each of us is, finally, inviolable.
I'm endlessly intrigued by stories, and I love helping someone to formulate his or her story. I can drift off when I'm reading pure abstraction, but the narratives of human lives hold my attention every time.
Parenting involves two separate activities. You have to change your child in that you need to educate your child and instill moral values in them. But you also need to celebrate your child for who he or she is and make them feel really good.
Oh yes, I certainly have low days. I feel that in treating the depression, it's not so much that I've become happier as it is that I can be unhappy in better ways.
Now, it's not that I think that being gay is the most amazing, wonderful thing in the world, but I have a husband; I have a life; I have friends who I've met through this. It's who I am.
I had always thought of myself as fairly tough and fairly strong and fairly able to cope with anything. And then I had a series of personal losses. My mother died. A relationship that I was in came to end, and a variety of other things went awry.
No perfectionist has ever met his own benchmarks, and no one so famished for admiration has ever received enough of it.
Every stage of life longs for others. When one is young and eager, one aspires to maturity, and everyone older would like nothing better than to be young.
Nowadays, people often ask me when I came out, generalising from the experience of many young people who announce themselves to the world on a particular afternoon. But I did not divorce my reticence in a single sharp break. Rather, I seeped out like a spreading wine stain.
As a little kid in the late 1960s, I was afraid of the world. Even if I didn't get caught in the draft that was sending American teenagers to Vietnam, there was always the possibility of a Soviet nuclear attack. I made constant escape plans and imagined a life going from port to port.
