Jasmine's Struggle

A young lady called Jasmine Yow wrote to me the other day to tell me about her new book Behind That Shiny Resume, which tells of her struggle with depressive illness, and I invited her to write a post for this blog. I know that you are all going to want to wish her well when you read this :

Behind the writing process of That Shiny Resume

When Sharon kindly offered me a space on her blog to share about my recently published book, Behind That Shiny Resume, I realized that I didn’t really know what I wanted to write about. I hate doing the “I was a top student” background introduction, I feel uncomfortable “promoting” myself as someone who has survived cyclothymic depression, and yet I wanted to let you know that this book was written from my heart, to comfort and encourage students with similar struggles in school.

From the Facebook notes and interviews that I’ve written and done, I gathered that what people would appreciate most would be a 20 year old’s thoughts on how she pieced together a book on a deeply personal and painful experience during two difficult years of her life.

There were many things I considered while writing the book, an effort I undertook in secret for a long time before I dared to tell anyone:

Firstly, my parents (whom I used to blame for causing me so much stress). Now I really, really believe in honouring them—but I also believe in being real! So I constantly had to ask myself: do the readers need to know this? If not, it's out. I had my aunt and both my parents read it to ensure I painted a fair picture of things...although there were suggestions I didn't heed. Haha.

Secondly, my, erm, condition. Bipolar. I just wanted to write enough for people to get a glimpse. I didn't want it to be in the spotlight, and I didn’t understand it all that well either. My observation is that parents in their sometimes overbearing love, panic and conclude that there's something wrong with their child so easily. I did not want my book to contribute to that! But many people also needed to know that it's OK to have depression or mental illness, and it's perfectly OK to seek professional help. If your child is like that, the worst thing you could ever do is to be ashamed.

Thirdly, trying to fit everything into a book my publisher said "can be read in one sitting". How do you choose from all your memories that seem equally important? In the end, I realized it's an art that needs so much thought, time and practice to develop.

Fourthly, my life! I can imagine how utterly foolish I would look if one day in the near future, I collapse into burnout again: if I lose control, lose heart, lose purpose. What would my readers say! At that moment (which I am determined not to see), it would take me double, triple the courage to stand up again. But writing the book at this stage sends an important message--I don't know if people get it: it means that it's perfectly OK not to know everything, it's OK to be uncertain and a little lost because we're all on our journeys of discovery. I don't have to "make it" or have a success story before I can be secure: I can find that in God’s love. : )

Lastly, I had to consider how many real names I wanted to expose. What a headache! Which alma mater should I include? Which school, which individuals would not want me to print their names? One of my roommates gladly said yes, another preferred a pseudonym. I changed every single name to a fake, and then reverted a few to their real ones. The process went on till I decided every real name I put down was justifiable.

The book has now gone into its third printing and is available in major bookstores in Malaysia and Singapore. I have learnt so much from the publishing process, and every time a reader writes back to thank me for writing the book, I tell myself that yes, I made a good decision venturing out into the unknown world of publishing. Yes, it was worth the effort. I hope you will smile, cry, gain insight, encourage yourself, and be blessed because of my story.

That Old Depression ...

Nicholas Hughes’s mother, and mine, succumbed to the exhaustion of unrelenting depression. They self-destructed. And we grew up in the wreckage of their catastrophe. Their deaths took away from him and his sister, Frieda, and from me and my sister, Joyce, the solace of a mother’s love. And worse, all four of us, I imagine, had to live with the knowledge that our mothers had quite willfully abandoned us.

Following the suicide of poet Sylvia Plath's son, Nicholas, Linda Grey Sexton shares her own experience of living with a tortured inheritance the The New York Times. Her mother, Anne Sexton (left) killed herself in 1974.

Staying, for the moment, on the depressing topic of depression (!), novelist Margaret Drabble writes very candidly in The Guardian about how she wards off her own bouts :

I write at least in part to investigate, to ward off, to understand these recurrent dark periods. Maybe depression fulfils a useful function, maybe it has an evolutionary benefit. In the year of Darwin, this is a question that I haven't yet seen posed. How early in pre-history, how many millennia before Hamlet, did man and woman begin to suffer in the mind as well as in the body, and what good did it do the human race?... Many other writers have prophylactic motivations similar to mine, and some admit to them, though others strongly deny any connection between writing and self-therapy, just as they tend to deny links between alcoholism and workaholism.

Drabble reads from her new autobiography The Pattern in the Carpet here.

Hearts of Darkness

Two works of non-fiction I've read this week were both in a sense journeys into the heart of darkness.

I picked up a copy of William Styron's Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness at the Big Bookshop sale. It's a very slim volume, just 84 pages long, which started life as a lecture given at a symposium sponsored by the Department of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. It was later developed into a piece for Vanity Fair before being published as a book.

Styron was hit by serious depression at the age of 60, and describes most evocatively his own struggle with the life-threatening illness from first symptoms, through his treatment, his brush with suicide, hospitalisation to eventual cure. Along the way he includes the stories of friends and others so afflicted - many of them also writers.

It's the honesty of the book that makes it so compelling. It was one of the first "insider" accounts of depression, and captures extremely well just what it feels like. (You have to have been there to know.) I agree with him that the word "depression" is totally inadequate, sounding more like a mild case of the blues rather than something that fills your soul with dread and despair.

The second book involved a physical journey into the part of the world that Conrad described in his novel Heart of Darkness - the Congo. Tim Butcher, a journalist for The Daily Telegraph decides to recreate H.M. Stanley's famous expedition in the 1870's. (Stanley had been also sponsored by the same newspaper!) He was also curious to see the country that his mother had visited in the 1950's as a tourist. He was told that by just about everyone he contacted that the journey was impossible, but against the odds he manages to enlist the help of aid workers (including a pygmy human rights activist and the Malaysian commander of a vessel working for the UN) and others. Each stage of the journey is uncertain, and he's constantly in danger of his life and in great discomfort. But he does manage in the end to find the transport he needs (motorcycles, dugouts, a UN barge) and the journey continues. It's impossible not to salute his courage.

Blood River : A Journey into Africa's Broken Heart is a fascinating account, not just because it takes us into a part of the world we wouldn't normally venture into and lets us share the journey (from our comfy armchairs!), but also for the historical perspectives which are woven into the narrative.

In the space of half a century, Congo has gone completely backwards - it is not "a developing country", or an "underdeveloped country", so much as an "un-developing country", going backwards so fast that almost nothing remains of the infrastructure left under Belgian rule due to the greed and incompetence of its leaders. It's a terrifying portrait of how quickly things can unravel. You also come to realise that putting things right isn't a matter of throwing financial aid at the problems, but in establishing the rule of law.

It's impossible not to really pity the ordinary people of this failed country, but that there is such potential for economic growth (minerals, fertile land) turns this missed opportunity into a tragedy.

As you would expect, there's plenty of coverage of the book on The Telegraph website, including photos and extracts.

The book was chosen as one of the reads for the Richard and Judy bookclub and of course made the shortlist for this year's Samuel Johnson Prize.

Many thanks to Kavita of Pansing for passing me this copy.