The Sound of Written Words

Posted by JohnD Sat, 25 Oct 2008 17:09:00 GMT

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Have you ever wondered what the sound of hundreds, no thousands of blogs on depression and mental health is like? I was looking over these sites at one of the blog rating communities the other day and was struck by the differing tones of so many voices sampled in clipped excerpts and thumbnail images which I could quickly scan in page after endless page. Though they differed in many ways, all were calling out in a chorus of pain. Some recounted the daily accumulation of misery, some seized on signs of hope that they had at last turned a corner because of the latest medication or alternative treatment, some campaigned for the cure that had worked for them or shouted out against the treatments that had nearly killed them. So much hurt, so much determination flipped before my eyes in deceptive ease.

I thought of the opening scene of the movie, Contact – based on Carl Sagan’s book. It begins with swift camera sweeps across ordinary life, people gossiping into phones, radios crackling the news, families arguing, couples pouring out earnest wordstreams while passing in the street. Then the camera starts to pull away from eye level, to ascending aerial views in which the voices and broadcast sounds begin to merge into an indistinguishable mix, then finally, as the view orbits into space and gives us a look at the entire globe, we hear all those voices as one signal broadcast into the universe.

I thought of the thousands of blogs of anguish and the surging efforts to find relief projecting their own part of that signal from the soul-depths of millions whose lives are represented in these communities of written, muted screams. Is that a sound of purgatory, hell close behind, the promise of paradise off in a spiritual vastness we are trying to reach with this sharp chorus? Or is it a sound of hope, a hard-edged song of all trying to exorcise the most powerful demons they will ever know?

It was overwhelming but also in a strange way comforting to be one whisper in that huge, surging flow of sound.

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Dropping Depression

Posted by JohnD Thu, 31 Jul 2008 04:15:00 GMT

Photo Credit: JesterArts at Stockxpert

As she often does, Stephany put a thought in my mind that I haven’t been able to shake. It was a three-word comment: “You have recovered.” Nice wish, I thought, if only – ! I’ve been working on recovery so long – it just isn’t happening consistently. But the problem with interpreting this as a wish was her strange use of past rather than future tense (You have recovered). So the words kept coming back to me, and I didn’t know what to do with them. Finally, I started thinking: Well, what if we suppose for a minute or an hour that the statement – all three words of it – were true, not so much for me, but for someone? After all, decades ago I did some acting. Couldn’t I just play this part for a while? And if I did, how exactly would I, as this someone, feel? And what would I say? This could take a lot of research, I thought, but I needed to start somewhere. And the first thing would be – kicking that idiot Depression out of my life – I mean his life – the life of the guy I would pretend to be.

After jotting down a few words for this character to say, I kind of caught the spirit of this recovered thing and started to feel something unusual stirring. I heard odd bursts of laughter and then realized with a shock – hey, that’s me – I mean, of course, he, the guy I was portraying. I – he – felt really good, giggly, smiley – bizarrely out of character – my character, that is. This character, however, was recovered and so could be expected to be happy, giddy even, at having pushed depression out of his life after decades of doom and gloom. Here’s the sort of thing he (well, I, acting in the role of recovered person) might well be saying:

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