Currently, I’m working on a grant application for funding for my writing. For this grant, I’ve decided that I must read Virginia Woolf’s classic work, A Room of One’s Own. The book is much like other classics—written in fine, early 20th –century language and involving heady and complex ideas that makes for boring reading for a person in the present 21st century.
In her book, Woolf talks about women writers, their poverty, their lack of publication, the sexism that they faced at this time. What strikes me as astounding is that things have changed so drastically and also have not changed at all.
Women have the right to vote; women occupy some of the highest office’s on the globe; women have become influential in all aspects of life; publishing houses possess many titles by women; And yet, women still face sexism, still face the glass ceiling, still receive a lesser wage than men for the same work; great women writers still go unpublished.
Even more disturbing for me personally is that I am a woman writer who is mostly penniless, dependent upon another for my income and financial well-being. I am virtually unpublished, and work is hard to come by.
One might assume that my own situation has something to do with my talent or my drive or my work ethic; yet, it has little to do with these matters and more to do with my mental health.
Turns out, Virginia Woolf was Bipolar as well. One of the greatest English writers of the 20th century, she struggled with manic depression. In her case, it was a fatal condition. One day, she filled her pockets with rocks to weight her down and walked into the deep and rushing waters of a river near her country home. She was in her forties at the time and obviously had had enough of the illness and its terrible cures, which forced her to be immobile in bed, covered in darkness. Talk about a bad idea for curing depression.
As for myself, I have all the benefits of modern technology and medicine. And if I drown, it won’t be in a river. Rather, I’m just as likely to suffocate beneath self-loathing and the terrible cures of medications.
I’m not suicidal, only alert to how mental illness continues to have no cure. Instead, we continue to resort to hocus pocus—pharmaceuticals, talk therapy, hypnotherapy, acupuncture, meditations, exercise, a healthy diet, herbs, alcohol, recreational drugs, and such.
On some level we might as well be 17th-century town idiots, wearing a placard that announces our insanity, babbling nonsense at passer-bys. Instead, we sit in our darkened rooms, tapping away at keyboards, hoping to connect through wires and electronic signals with anyone who might listen.
Here’s to Virginia Woolf, a casualty of our disease. Here’s to change and recognizing that maybe we are not so different from her.
