🔗 Gone Bad, Come to Life

Dang. This is a wildly curmudgeonly but endlessly fascinating essay that’s sort of about drinking but mostly about depression and “society’s cult of ‘experience’.”

I never liked the French habit of referring not to “depression”, but to “a depression” —“Il a subi une dépression”—, as if this were the sort of thing that could be counted. To say that one may experience “a depression” in life is somewhat like saying that a river may have “a water” flowing in it. And yet I can’t deny that there was something punctuated, événementiel, about what I lived through for the year or so after I quit drinking. As I see it now, what happened is that I was cut off from my long-familiar source of hope, however meager, for transcendence, and was dismally under-practiced in detecting other sources. I got better at that, am still getting better at it.

Rian van der Merwe Elezea // The B-Sides