Bruce Springsteen on Surviving Depression and His Strategy for Living in Darkness – The Marginalian
It starts with a low hum that sticks for hours like no other. Slowly, subtly, the sound swells into a bass line, until it completes the symphony of life.
It may take days or months or entire seasons of existence. It visited Keats frequently in his short life, leaving him with a mind empty of ideas and hands as heavy as lead. It translated Lorraine Hansberry as “cold, useless, frustrated, helpless, disappointed, angry and tired.” It drove Abraham Lincoln to the brink of suicide.
If you're lucky enough, if you have the right scientific resources, social support, and opportunity, one day you look over the shoulder of time and, like the poet Jane Kenyon, gasp with grateful incomprehension: “What has caused me so much pain in all my life until now?” But until that moment comes, as William Styron so eloquently noted in his classic The Bridge of Sympathy, “the gray panic caused by depression assumes the level of physical pain.”
Among our drowned hero is one of the most beloved musicians of our time, whose music has made life bright and accessible for generations.
In his memory, Born to Run (public library), Bruce Springsteen he writes of his father's “long, protracted depression”, which often debilitated him to the point where he could not get out of bed for days, and of his own fall from the edge of the abyss held by his genetic inheritance and the darkness of his childhood, and what prevented him from falling. “God help Bruce Springsteen when they decide that he is no longer God,” John Lennon indicated in his personal interview, but no one outside “them” – no critic, no space from the public – ever moderates the inner voice of grief that brutally lowers the singer from the base of his creative power and enters the pit of depression.
In a particularly vivid vignette from the time before he finally sought help, Springsteen writes:
My depression comes out like an oil spill in every beautiful green canal of my well-planned and controlled life. Its black sludge threatens to consume every last part of my life.
Even Springsteen's favorite books reflect this dark undertone of life. But on his BBC Desert Island Discs a look he expressed very clearly about his experience of depression and his improved coping mechanisms. He shows:
I've developed some skills that help me deal with it, but still – it's a powerful, powerful thing that comes from things that remain inexplicable to me.
After realizing that a large part of it is pure biochemistry, so it can be largely saved by biochemical intervention, he looks at the psychological skills that helped him to temper the attack and offers a Buddhist-like strategy for the irresistible presence and flow of experience on its own terms, combined with a gentle admonition against the trap of projecting suspicion:
Just naming it [helps]… What most people tend to do is, when they're upset, the first thing you want to do is say the reason why you feel that way: “I'm upset because…” and you'll pass that on to someone else “…because Johnny said this to me,” or “this happened.” And, sometimes, that's true. But most of the time, you're just looking to name something that's not particularly well-known and if you name it wrong, it just makes everything worse.
So my “skill” is kind of like, “Okay, it's not this, it's not that—it's just that. this. This is something to come; and it's something that goes away – and maybe something I'll have to live with for a while.”
But if you can accept it and you can be a little more comfortable with it, it usually shortens its length.
Complete with Click it – a touching short film about depression and what it takes to recover from it – and Tim Ferriss about how he survived his suicidal depression, then re-examines Robert Burton's centuries-old alve for melancholy and two centuries of beloved writers – including Keats, Whitman, Hansberry, Carson, and Thoreauest antidote – in anti-depression.
