Writing himself back

I know of no better mirror than the record other people leave of their life stories. Some things are very familiar to us; other thing are about as far from our reality as they could be. But either way, if we pay attention, we learn something about ourselves. Consider Colin Wilson’s battles with depression, and his way of working himself out of it – and then consider what happened when despair led him to set out to kill himself.

Wilson, a born intellectual without the social advantages that would have allowed him to go to university, as a young man found himself in dead-end jobs that held no interest for him, a long way from the world of books in which he longed to live his life. Anyone who has ever slogged through a meaningless workweek without any clear hope of escaping to something better – particularly anyone who has done it at a young age – will recognize the bleak hopelessness that threatened to engulf him.

But then he made a discovery: From Dreaming to Some Purpose: An Autobiography, pp. 2-3.

“I had listened to a radio programme about Samuel Pepys, and decided to start keeping a journal – not just a diary of my daily activities, but a record of what I thought and felt. I had borrowed from the library a book called I Believe, full of statements of faith by people like Einstein, Julian Huxley, and H. G. Wells. One Saturday … I bought a fat notebook, and settled down to writing my own statement of what I believed about my place in the world.

“I wrote for page after page, with a sense of freedom and release. I was objectifying doubts and miseries, pushing them to arm’s length. When I put down my pen, after several hours, I had a feeling that I was no longer the same person who had sat down at the writing table. It was as if I had been studying my face in a mirror, and learned something new about myself.

“From then on, I used my journal as a receptacle for self-doubt, irritation and gloom, and by doing so I wrote myself back into a state of optimism.”

Of course it wasn’t as easy as all that. Recurrent swings of optimism and pessimism threatened to overwhelm him, until finally he decided on suicide.

“I felt angry with God – or fate, or whoever had cast me down into this irritating world – for subjecting me to these endless petty humiliations. I did not even believe human life was real; it had often struck me that time is some sort of illusion. But surely, I could turn my back on the illusion by killing myself?”

He knew just how to do it, too. He had only to drink hydrocyanic acid, easily available to him at his workplace, and he would be dead in half a minute. He procured the vial and stood ready to drink.

“Then an odd thing happened. I became two people. I was suddenly conscious of this teenage idiot called Colin Wilson, with his misery and frustration, and he seemed such a limited fool that I could not have cared less whether he killed himself or not. But if he killed himself, he would kill me too. For a moment I felt that I was standing beside him, and telling him that if he didn’t get rid of this habit of self-pity he would never amount to anything.

“It was also as if this ‘real me’ had said to the teenager: ‘Listen, you idiot, think how much you’d be losing,’ and in that moment I glimpsed the marvelous, immense richness of reality, extending to distant horizons.”

And that was the passing of his lowest point. From that moment on, through ups and downs, “I no longer felt trapped and vulnerable.”