An Animated Short Film About Depression and What It Takes to Bring Back the Light of Being – The Marginalian
Written by Maria Popova
“Sometimes one has to endure a period of depression for what might be in the light if one can live in it, paying attention to what it reveals or wants,” wrote the poet May Sarton as she pondered the antidote to despair during a dark period of the spirit. But what does it take to get such a dangerous perch if in the direction of light? When we are in that dark and empty place, that place of leaden loneliness and isolation, where “the gray dripping of depression takes the level of physical pain,” as William Styron wrote in his classic book about this disease – the indiscriminate disease that tormented Keats and tormented Nietzsche and the tortured Hansberry – what causes fear and painful looks in disbelief, and the poet Jane Kenyon: “What has hurt me so much … until now?”
During a recent dark period of the spirit, a dear friend encouraged me with a very wonderful story, giving hope, renewing humanity: Some years before, when a colleague – another physicist – was going through such a period, he gave him an amaryllis lamp in a small pot; the effect it had upon him was unexpected and profound, as the effect of uncounted acts of kindness is always — deep and far-reaching, the way a stone of kindness moves widening circles of glory. As light slowly returned to his life, he decided to teach a class on the physics of animation. And so it was that one of his students, Emily Johnstone, came to do it blooming – a touching short film, which takes from personal action a universal metaphor for how we survive in the darkest of secrets, echoing Neil Gaiman's insistence that “sometimes it takes a stranger, in a dark place… to keep us warm in the coldest of times.”
Coach Tim Ferriss on surviving suicidal depression and Tchaikovsky on depression and finding beauty in the midst of depression, then revisit “Having It Out With Melancholy” – Jane Kenyon's epic poem about life with and after depression.
