I have been busy getting better this past week. I read two Danish auto-biographical books written by a local author, Jesper Stein, who is a contemporary of mine. The first was about his upbringing in Risskov, where I live, the second about his final and successful attempt at becoming permanently sober after he had achieved some (international) success as a crime writer.
Jesper Stein was afraid that he would never write again if he became a teetotaller. Wrong he was. During the "reprogramming" process to never ever drink again, he realized that he had subscribed to the self-destructive and long-standing myth that inspiration and alcohol (etc) go hand in hand. Instead he found that he could only write when sober or when just a little intoxicated. When his alcohol dependency took over, nothing came. Alcohol ate up his soul to such an extent that he could not write a word and his private and social worlds fell apart.
Somehow his reflections about his life and struggle with alcohol struck home. I know that having a depression is not the same as being an alcoholic, but the fact that I have carried depression with me as long as I remember back in time, makes me wonder what effect it has had on the people who know and knew me. What effect it has had on my adult life, my work as a teacher and as a poet. Somewhere along the way I stopped writing poetry. In the period from 1988 to 2005, I really wrote a lot every day, I simply could not help it. Then the output lessened to a trickle before it almost stopped from around 2013. My mind gradually seems to have become buried in sand after that.
Today I am slowly freeing my mind from that vast mountain of sand gathered throughout the last 10 to 20 years. I am getting myself back again.