![]() ![]() How to Be Alone, a 2009 short film by Andrea Dorfman. in other media: How to Be Alone (film), a 2016 short film. 'How to be alone', a 2016 poem by Donika Kelly. How to Be Alone: If You Want To, and Even If You Don't, a 2018 book by Lane Moore. How to Be Alone, a 2014 book by Sara Maitland. The invitation to leave your depression behind, whether through medication or therapy or effort of will, seems like an invitation to turn your back on all your dark insights into the corruption and infantilism and selfdelusion of the brave new Me World. How to Be Alone (book), a 2002 book by Jonathan Franzen. You embrace what clinicians call “depressive realism.” It’s what the chorus in Oedipus Rex sings: “Alas, ye generations of men, how mere a shadow do I count your life! Where, where is the mortal who wins more of happiness than just the seeming, and, after the semblance, a falling away?” You are, after all, just protoplasm, and some day you’ll be dead. You decide that it’s the world that’s sick, and that the resistance of refusing to function in such a world is healthy. And if that flattening of the field of possibilities is precisely what’s depressing you, you’re inclined to resist participating in the flattening by calling yourself depressed. It’s the sense that we live in a reductively binary culture: you’re either healthy or you’re sick, you either function or you don’t. ![]() It’s not just that depression has become fashionable to the point of banality. Jonathan Franzens THE CORRECTIONS was the best-loved and most written-about novel of 2001. ![]() ![]() As the social stigma of depression disappears, the aesthetic stigma increases. “Even harder to admit is how depressed I was. ![]()
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