The Power of Different by Gail Saltz M.D

Author:Gail Saltz, M.D.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

GIFTS OF THE BRAIN WITH MELANCHOLY

While obsessiveness and persistence are not traits that are stereotypically associated with depression, these qualities run through the life stories of many high-functioning people with depression. These feelings of obsessiveness, fear of failure, and perfectionism can be deeply unpleasant, but they can also yield spectacular work.

When Evan Wright was reporting on a group of neo-Nazis, he was highly aware that he was alone and vulnerable in a group of dangerous people. “I felt that one slip-up, if I say the wrong thing, they’re going to beat me up.” It is “very similar to the experience that I had when I was in that program as a kid.” At that program, he was essentially “held prisoner by this group of people that were bigger and older and wouldn’t let me sleep and yelled at me and would put me in a boxing ring and beat me up every few days. I went through that, and so as a reporter, it gave me this sense of ‘I can do this.’ Because I’ve been through this gauntlet in the past and I know I survived. “

This persistence bordering on obsession is also a major part of his writing process. Wright says, “Some of my best work is because I researched the hell out of things, because I’m afraid to start writing. And it’s worked to my advantage, because my stories tend to be much better researched. And I’ll just spend infinite time with them. It’s not that I’m a patient person. It’s that I’m afraid to start writing. I’m afraid that once I start, the writing will reveal that it’s not going to be as great as I thought it was.” Wright’s standard for doing the best job possible is, “Did I exhaust myself and go beyond the limit of what I can do? It’s not so much the outcome. I’m very much interested in the process. I want to lose myself in the work.”

Andrew Solomon says that accomplishing the monumental task of writing Far from the Tree required “a lot of obsessionality. I would do nothing but write for fourteen or fifteen hours a day. And I felt, in some of those periods when I was doing that, I felt crazy. And I thought, in a way, I have to work myself into a state that is at least related to my depression, if it’s not identical to my depression, in order to generate all of this complicated material.”

Evan Wright combines his qualities of persistence and depressive realism while also drawing on the reserves of anger that are still a feature of his depression. In his view, he couldn’t have written his book Generation Kill, about a battalion of marines in the Iraq War, if this anger weren’t an ongoing part of him. “I also like being an outsider. I came to reporting via Hustler magazine. I didn’t have the background of a New York Times reporter, so I had a chip on my shoulder.”

James Kocsis, professor

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