Quotes from Martha Manning

The bottom line is that my life has already almost slipped away from me. I have two choices: I can end it or I can fight like hell to save it.

Depression is such a cruel punishment. There are no fevers, no rashes, no blood tests to send people scurrying in concern, just the slow erosion of self, as insidious as cancer. And like cancer, it is essentially a solitary experience; a room in hell with only your name on the door

Just hold me, sit with me, put your arm around me. Listen as I struggle to tell you what it feels like, without thinking you have to tie it all up in some cohesive clinical bundle. I don't expect you to make this better. I know you can't.

When you're depressed, everyone has an opinion about what you should do. People seem to think that not only are you depressed, you are also stupid.

I didn't want to die because I hated myself; I wanted to die because I loved myself enough to want this pain to end.

In the middle of a night, hunched over my computer, with the rest of the house dark and quiet, I feel a certain moral superiority to the sleeping world.

My depression points to my not knowing how to lose - I have perhaps been unable to find a valid compensation for the loss. It follows that any loss entails the loss of my being - and of Being itself. The depressed person is a radical, sullen atheist.

In the psychological literature, depression is often seen as a defense against sadness. But I'll take sadness any day. There is no contest. Sadness carries identification. You know where it's been and you know where it's headed. Depression carries no papers. It enters your country unannounced and uninvited. Its origins are unknown, but its destination always dead-ends in you.

He throws a quick arm around me and quotes a line we've always loved from The New Hampshire Hotel, Keep passing the open windows.

But I keep going because I've learned over the past few months that as bad as things seem, they can always get worse.

Suffer from depression. That's right. It is suffering. A person does not just have depression. She suffers from it.

Call someone 'a schizophrenic' or 'a borderline' [and it] lulls us into a false sense that those words tell us who the person is, rather than only telling us how the person suffers.

I cried to her, Why did this have to happen? Why? I expected some plausible and complicated medical explanation. She shrugged and said gently, Because, Martha, it was just your turn.

I look at other people and think, He lives without meds. She does. What is wrong with me? Am I so biochemically screwed up, so neurotic, so narcissistically self-absorbed that every hour is an obstacle course for me?

She reports the breakup of the relationship as if she is presenting a case in court - all facts, no feeling. I lean forward in my chair and comment softly, "How painful that must have been for you.

I always feel bad laughing at people who act crazy. But sometimes the things they do are so damned funny. I wonder what I'd look like if I slipped a few notches on the mental-health index.