I am reading this amazing book right now by Elizabeth Gilbert called "Eat, Pray, Love" about woman who travels for a year after a difficult and messy divorce. She spends four months in Italy, four months in Indonesia, and four months in India. Early in the book, she has a moment when she is sitting in the park and her familiar and hated companions, Depression and Lonliness, in the form of two pushy police detectives overtake her. They question her, they follow her back to her apartment, they won't leave her be.
I loved the idea of these two old companions in the form of two hated, overbearing policemen that a person cannot shake--they will follow you even to the most exotic destinations. They will overtake you in your most private and even happy moments. "Why do you deserve to be happy?" they sometimes ask. "Look at the people you've hurt, the things you've messed up."
I imagine most of us have had this dialogue with ourselves and far be it for me to advise anyone on how to make those voices stop. But reading Gilbert's words today really spoke to me. And then I realized why: just knowing that other people face those voices too makes the ones in my own head a little diminished.
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We read this in the memoir class I taught this summer and many of my students were annoyed by the author's way of coping, or not coping, with depression. Many felt she was a self absorbed escapist.
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