A good novel is great company, less an escape from life than a different way to engage. Then how about, do you have something good to read?”Ī good book - usually, that did help. I’d lost hope that I’d find a lasting relationship or be able to have a child. I barely wanted to live with myself how would anyone else ever want to live with me - or love me?

I’d explained that the sleeping problems and debilitating fatigue of my depression had been crippling me for nearly 20 years, making life a relentless ordeal. I had told her that the anniversary of my father’s suicide was approaching that he’d never recovered from my mother’s death when I was small that his torment, tormenting me, had always been a weight around my neck. The volunteer’s advice seemed ludicrously inadequate to my situation. Through my teeth, I snarled, “I don’t want tea.”

My silence prompted the volunteer to try again: “Could you put on the kettle for some herbal tea?” I was sweating in a stuffy old house in upstate New York, and I wanted a warm bath about as much as I wanted to walk over a bed of fiery coals. It was still nearly 80 degrees at 7 o’clock in September. The volunteer suggested that I take a warm bath.

The despair that had been haunting me for so long would, I feared, eventually kill me.

I felt so overwhelmingly alone in the world I was terrified. I told the volunteer who answered that when I looked into my future, I saw nothing good. One humid night in September, I called a mental health crisis center.

Free for mac instal Anna Karenina