Getting help for substance abuse can be reduced to the deceptively simple focus of ‘keeping away from the dope.’ But what does getting help with depression mean? Learning to keep away from your own mind?

Woke up this morning afraid I was gonna live.

People who think that Sylvia Plath was a poor, sensitive poet are not getting that she had great amounts of ambition and anger that moved her along, or she wouldn't have been able to fight against that depression to produce such an incredible body of work by the age of thirty.

I was so scared to give up depression, fearing that somehow the worst part of me was actually all of me.

I am fortunate to have been well paid for an almost pathological honesty.

The measure of our mindfulness, the touchstone for sanity in this society, is our level of productivity, our attention to responsibility, our ability to plain and simple hold down a job. If you're still at the point when you're even just barely going through the motions--showing up at work, paying the bills--you are still okay or okay enough. A desire not to acknowledge sadness in ourselves or those close to us--better known these days as denial, is such a strong urge that plenty of people prefer to think that until you are actually flying out of a window, you don't have a problem.

The voices in my head, which I used to think were just passing through, seem to have taken up residence.