I chose fat and functional over slender and miserable.

Remember that writing things down makes them real; that it is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know; and, most of all, that even in our post-postmodern era, writing has a moral purpose....

You are constantly told in depression that your judgment is compromised, but a part of depression is that it touches cognition. That you are having a breakdown does not mean that your life isn’t a...

Love is circumstantial; we can love anyone if need be; and losing the one we love is the singular catastrophe. Time does not heal it. Every present moment yearns for even the roughest past.

It is important not to suppress your feelings altogether when you are depressed. It is equally important to avoid terrible arguments or expressions of outrage. You should steer clear of emotionally damaging behavior. People forgive,...

Despite every advancement, language remains the defining nexus of our humanity; it is where our knowledge and hope lie. It is the precondition of human tenderness, mightier than the sword but also infinitely more subtle...

Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance.

Those who believe their suffering has been valuable love more readily than those who see no meaning in their pain. Suffering does not necessarily imply love, but love implies suffering

Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don’t believe it. Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future. Be brave;...

Well, I sure hope you get off it sometime soon,” they say.

If you banish the dragons, you banish the heroes…

Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair.

People with family histories of alcoholism tend to have lower levels of endorphins- the endogenous morphine that is responsible for many of our pleasure responses- than do people genetically disinclined to alcoholism. Alcohol will slightly...

In retrospect, it seems obvious that my research about parenting was also a means to subdue my anxieties about becoming a parent…. I grew up afraid of illness and disability, inclined to avert my gaze...

Antonin Artaud wrote on one of his drawings, “Never real and always true,” and that is how depression feels. You know that it is not real, that you are someone else, and yet you know...

A sense of humor is the best indicator that you will recover; it is often the best indicator that people will love you. Sustain that and you have hope.

To look deep into your child’s eyes and see in him both yourself and something utterly strange, and then to develop a zealous attachment to every aspect of him, is to achieve parenthood’s self-regarding, yet...

While people argue with one another about the specifics of Freud’s work and blame him for the prejudices of his time, they overlook the fundamental truth of his writing, his grand humility: that we frequently...

The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality and my life, as I write this, is vital even when sad. I may wake up sometime next year without my mind again; it is not...

The Internet,” [Judy] Singer said, “is a prosthetic device for people who can’t socialize without it.” For anyone challenged by language and social rules, a communication system that does not operate in real time is...

I believe that words are strong, that they can overwhelm what we fear when fear seems more awful than life is good.

Life itself seemed so alarmingly exigent, to require so much of the self. It was too difficult to remember and think and express and understand – all things I needed to be able to do...

Some people are trapped by the belief that love comes in finite quantities, and that our kind of love exhausts the supply upon which they need to draw. I do not accept competitive models of...

John [the father] kept saying, “You have a penis. That means you’re a boy.” One day, Shannon noticed that her son had been in the bathroom an awfully long time and pushed the door open....

Mild depression is a gradual and sometimes permanent thing that undermines people the way rust weakens iron. It is too much grief at too slight a cause, pain that takes over from the other emotions...

It is not true that “love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.” Love alters all the time; it is fluid, in perceptual flux, an evolving business across a lifetime.

I met people on college campuses who were defining themselves as genderqueer to express revolutionary feelings, or to communicate their individuality; they were gender fluid without being gender dysphoric. This phenomenon may be culturally significant,...

There is so much pain in the world, and most of these people keep theirs secret, rolling through agonizing lives in invisible wheelchairs, dressed in invisible bodycasts.

As you ripen, you’ll notice that time is the weirdest thing in the world, that these surprises are relentless, and that getting older is not a stroll but an ambush.

Life is most transfixing when you are awake to diversity, not only of ethnicity, ability, gender, belief, and sexuality but also of age and experience. The worst mistake anyone can make is to perceive anyone...