In his autobiography, Black Boy, the writer, Richard Wright, describes what it was like to grow up black in America in the early 1900s. After multiple crises in his young life, including the chronic, and ultimately terminal illness of his mother, Wright says this, “At the age of twelve, before I had had one full year of schooling, I had a conception of life that no experience would ever erase, a predilection for what was real that no argument could ever gainsay, a sense of the world that was mine and mine alone, a notion of what life meant that no education could ever alter, a conviction that the meaning of living came only when one was struggling to wring a meaning out of meaningless suffering…”
Though this was written over seventy years ago, it reads as if it could have been written yesterday. And although I can’t imagine the kind of suffering that he or any black person has experienced growing up in America, there was something in his phrase “wring the meaning out of meaningless suffering” that spoke to me.


I have been a very lucky person. I have not faced the kind of meaningless suffering that many have. With one exception. I have experienced depression all of my adult life. And like many millions in this country, despite treatment, it remains a daily companion, sometimes exerting itself in stultifying ways; at other times being merely a dark shadow in the corner, but always there in one form or another.


While “meaningless suffering” may seem like an overwrought way of describing my experience, it nevertheless feels true, much as it does to many others. It’s not that I think, “Woe is me! Why have I been chosen to suffer in this way?” That is a way of thinking that does not make sense to me, although I know it does to others. And it’s not that I don’t understand the mechanisms in my brain or the life stressors or the characterologic contributors to my depression. I do. They, at least, give me an explanation. And explanations, to be sure, are a form of meaning. But not enough.
To say that my depression is a kind of “meaningless suffering” is to suggest that when I am depressed, access to meaning seems blocked, cut off, denied. For me the worst part of depression is not only feeling that I am meaningless, but feeling there is no meaning anywhere.


I think that is why I kept coming back to the above quote as I read Wright’s book. To “wring meaning out of meaningless suffering” seems to be the most important task facing me when I have fallen down the depression well. It is as if I need to believe there is meaning (“It is written on a clay tablet somewhere”), even though I may not have faith that it is there (“I can’t feel it”). Perhaps a sign on my desk would help: “Despite all evidence to the contrary, there is meaning somewhere in life.”
The challenge for me is to find ways to wring it out, to draw it forth, to squeeze and squeeze until the evidence is there. One of the things I like about being a writer is that it teaches me to notice. It forces me to pay attention, to not only look but to see. When I do that, I find meaning scattered everywhere around me, dotting the landscape of my life, sometimes seemingly invisible when I am at the bottom of the well, yet there if I keep my eyes open. And it is enough.