they will see us waving from suchgreatheights

"Depression in all its dreariness is an unlikely focus for literary or any other kind of intrigue, and yet it has structured the plots of lives and stories as juicy and jumbled as the freshest Hollywood gossip. It's sufferers have been cast into the roles of icons and idols, the brilliance of what some of the afflicted did in what little bit of life they lived was truly heoric and beatific, in the Christian sense of the word: even while they were still alive, often they did not live much, often they were engaged in a slow rowing toward death, absorbed by blackness as if it were not a color but an atmosphere as thick and suffocating as the inside of a steam room. And yet, with what little brightness seeped through the slats and bled through the shades, they did so much. Slyvia Plath, who has by now been dead longer than she was alive, wrote The Bell Jar, composed her Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry, put together a collection of short stories, had a Fulbright Scholarship at Cambridge, graduated summa cum laude from Smith, taught a couple of semesters at her alma mater, had a couple of stays in a mental hospital, managed to have many love affairs that ended badly and one marriage that was on its way to ending badly, gave brith to two babies- and still she was able to die at age thirty, a suicide on schedule preceded by a life that ran at a breakneck pace. I point out this prodigious output because I think depression ought to be understood as much more than a monolithic force- in fact, it ought to be understood as something so mighty and complicated that it drives its sufferers in a mulititude of directions, and occasionally gives the impression that if behind every great man there is a woman, then behind every great woman there is a madness. If the male driving force is the need to make a living, the female ambition is fueled by suffering."--- Elizabeth wurtzel in "Bitch"

i love this woman, period.