Creeping up on more difficult topics from my life history (along the lines of my 9/22 posting “Former Gifted Child”), here near-suicidal depression and bit of accompanying PTSD that’s still with me, almost 65 years later. The topics came up in an exchange with an old friend, a colleague in linguistics, and has finally moved me to talk about them on this blog, though the whole story is so long and complex — and throws up provocations to thought that hadn’t occurred to me before — that I’ll have to just jump in and write up chunks of it as best I can, building up the larger story.
The trigger was this 9/15 e-mail from my friend, who I’ll refer to as L (for linguist):
I only now checked your recent blog posts and found a mention of your work at the Reading Eagle [AZ: the afternoon and Sunday newspaper in Reading PA, where I worked from 1958 to 1961], where you stayed on even while studying at Princeton. All that work must have been a lot, though maybe something you handled by not wasting time on the more typical undergraduate frivolities.
And I jumped in with this answer to L:
You have no idea. I started work at the paper the week after graduating from high school, and worked there for four summers and during all vacations until the beginning of my senior year. Most of my time at Princeton I had three regular jobs (the Eagle, tech assistant at the Princeton Univ. Language Lab, and tutoring for Princeton math courses, mostly the intro to differential calculus for non-majors). For the first three years (until my parents moved to California), I also did various support work for them at their upscale costume jewelry store; they came from genuine working-class upbringings and kids were expected to pull full weight in the family business (originally, farm work) from an early age. It’s just what you did.
There was some excellent frivolity, and musical pleasure (have I mentioned that I started a career as a concert pianist? — but linguistics blew me away): a fabuous Mozart and Haydn course, concerts (if you performed in NYC, you probably took your program to Princeton as well), the Princeton Savoyards, a lot of American musical theatre (I lived in a kind of nest of fans and NYC performers; look up my old friend Clark Gesner, who lived next-door to me, and check out my recollection of him in my 12/28/22 posting “Building wealth”). But it was a literally traumatic social experience, and it was a mistake to major in mathematics at a university that (rightly) took itself to be the most distinguished math department in the world; the mathematicians couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to do anything but mathematics, so I had to fight to get music courses, the philosophy courses, the two linguistics courses, and a badly done sociology course that did, however, bring me to Erving Goffman’s work. These other courses changed my life, several times. And brought me to senior scholars who became my friends and my champions.
But there’s a good bit of the Princeton time that’s excruciating to talk about, even now.
… In particular, I’m not sure I want to expose an episode of near-suicidal depression and its lifelong sequelae. (Yes, I know. Writing about it might help others.) And I couldn’t take a break to get treated, but had to get propped up and pushed back into action, because a break would have dismantled the fragile improvised arrangement of scholarships, loans, and jobs that enabled this working-class kid to get through college.
I’ll write in a while about undergraduate life at Princeton in those days, noting here only that it was extraordinarily closed in, physically and socially, producing a young adult version of life at, oh, Andover or Exeter. A terrible place for a working class kid, studious, hard-working, nerdy, artistic, way off the norms of rugged masculinity, and accustomed to having close female friends. A young man who had gone to some lengths, in fact, to avoid being sent on scholarships to the actual Andover or Exeter for secondary school, by negotiating with his parents and his high school to get an adolescent life that was probably the best anyone could have managed. Nothing is perfect, but this was sweet, while Princeton turned out to be exactly the disaster that I’d gone to such lengths to avoid in high school. Everything was set to undercut my sense of worth and to convince me that there was no place for me.
Except that it did have the amazing faculty I was looking for (from whom I found my life’s work), and NYC to escape to when I could afford it, and some individual guys to forge friendships with. And I had enough resilience, eventually, to say, just short of literally, fuck it all to the system and to convince a dean to cut me free from the enforced collegiality among the undergraduates.
Telling this story in full will require me to expose more about the regulation of daily living at Princeton at the time than you really want to know, so I’ll put that off for a bit. But I was demanding freedoms — of association, and of choice of eating places — not generally accorded to undergraduates. As it turned out, the Reading Eagle figured prominently in my demands; I argued that I was, whatever my age, now a fully functioning adult with a real job, at which I had colleagues, real-world responsibilities and rewards, an actual reputation, and full freedom to run my daily life. I should not be treated as a child.
At some point, I think the dean appreciated my steely reserve; once I am in gear, you really don’t want to get in my way. I think he understood that I would be willing to tell Princeton to go to hell and go on to take a full-time editorial position at the paper. And that I would then probably write up my own story and make a stink for Princeton (I had zero social cachet there, but I was a first-class grind, as guys like me were called then — regularly with a gpa in the university’s top ten). Most of this I didn’t have to say out loud, but he could see the shape of things. And that the freedoms he would be granting were trivial.
The story from then on just got better and better, except of course for the PTSD.
But the story before that, before I found my strength, is dark. At the bottom, I didn’t actually want to die, but I wanted not to be. I was pretty much catatonic for a while, escaping into a dark hole of sleep. And then my roommate Frank summoned everyone (my parents, my teachers, my clutch of friends) to pull me out, and they got it just right. Nobody tried to talk me through the events that led to the depression, nobody tried to go through the feelings that I was having, nobody gave me arguments about how I had to change or made promises about how it would all get better.
Everybody, primed I think by Frank, just confronted the symptoms indirectly, by insisting that I do things, do pleasurable and useful things for their own sake, no analysis, no meta-talk. Frank took me out to lunch at my favorite local restaurant at the time and talked about current theatre in NYC — while my parents were driving to Princeton, to carry me away to NYC for a play and for dinner at my favorite deli; they talked about current events and the play, and eventually I had things to say. The next day, some of my teachers phoned me with extra notes on the assignments for the next class. They all went into hyper-normal drive, and it pulled me back, so that in a few days I looked a bit tired but was otherwise back on course. I missed a couple of class meetings.
They all had faith in my resilience, and contrived to wake it up from its dark sleep. It was a results-focused therapy suited specifically to me, and might not work for other people’s conditions; depression is the name of an assortment of symptoms, manifesting a variety of causes, causes that would call for a variety of treatments.
Now: I don’t talk about this episode much, because people are inclined to treat depressive conditions as weaknesses, defects, deficiencies, or even the faults of the sufferer — as failures of will, effort, or control. This only adds to the sufferer’s burden. It would be more helpful and more humane to think of them as like wounds and to seek ways of healing.
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