Heather Bauchop
Only in silence the word,
only in dark the light,
only in dying life:
bright the hawk’s flight
on the empty sky.”
I have always loved writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s opening to her novel A Wizard of Earthsea. It is the perfect epitaph. In these five lines is the enormity of life and both the vitality and emptiness of existence. Le Guin confronts the value of turning to life’s turmoil and recognising that only in each imperfect moment are we alive. Thinking about Le Guin’s trilogy and the meaning we attribute to our lives, I wondered about my life and the intersection of meaning, voice and truth.
When I was 25 I was diagnosed with ‘long-standing dysthymic disorder’ (also called dysthymia – a beautiful word meaning ‘ill-humoured’ that now wears the tedious label ‘Persistent Depressive Disorder’). I was (perversely) quite happy about this – this wasn’t depression, but a persistent low mood. The diagnosis seemed less dramatic, like being in a valley rather than at the bottom of a pit. The low mood (the low mood – something distanced from the self) responded to Prozac – a new drug at the time, requiring a $200 visit to a psychiatrist to authorise the prescription. It is not until recently I realised that such a diagnosis could be a life sentence, indeed a sentence I’ve been serving out for twenty-five years.
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