Op-Ed: How I beat depression by pursuing my dreams
Because I feared I would kill myself, I checked into the behavioral health wing of a hospital in Paducah, Ky., in May 2018. Six months prior, I’d moved across the country to accept a newspaper reporter position, but it was so anxiety-producing that I thought about breaking my 19 years of sobriety. My loneliness manifested in ailments that doctors couldn’t cure. As detrimental as these conditions were, my failure to become the novelist I’d promised myself at 19 to become had eroded my confidence in myself and the world. The day ahead seemed unendurable, and nothingness sounded perfect.
I’d suffered from depression since I was 18, and that day in May, I was 53, a suicidal man without a love interest, a job (I didn’t return to the newspaper office), or a published novel. Over the years, I’d taken one or more of a dozen anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medications, and I’d had extensive therapy. Yet I was as close as I could get to losing to depression, other than attempting suicide.
According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, suicide was the 10th leading cause of death in the United States in 2019, with 47,511 suicides and 1.38 million attempts. Although women are nearly twice as likely as men to suffer from depression and more than twice as likely to attempt suicide, men died by suicide 3.63 times as often as women did in 2019.
I didn’t want to die: I wanted my pain to disappear; I wanted to love and be loved; and I wanted to stop calling myself a failure because I’d had the same half-completed novel on various computers for 27 years.
In other words, despite losing all faith in myself, I believed life could still be full of promise, hope, love and accomplishments. So, after I left the hospital, I sat down to write a different novel, titled “Quilt City Murders.”
Paducah, Ky., known as Quilt City, is the quilting capital of the world and home to the National Quilt Museum. During my stint as the Paducah Sun arts-and-entertainment reporter, I’d written about many quilters and the museum, so when I needed a subject for the new novel I absolutely had to complete, I combined Paducah’s most-celebrated obsession with the knowledge I’d gained from reading 500 mysteries, and the inspiration for “Quilt City Murders” was born.
When I discovered the voice of narrator Hadley Carroll, an irrepressible, wounded, 40-year-old female journalist, the novel started to gel. She’s an enthusiastic quilter whose fiancé left her without explanation the week before the novel opens, and then she finds him dead, pinned under a dock on the Ohio River. With every page I wrote, Hadley inhabited me, told me what should happen next, and how to resolve the plot. I worked through the childhood traumas I’d suffered and the grief I felt caused by the death of my father by including elements of abuse and loss in the narrative.
A year after I finished the novel, I married the perfect woman for me. “Quilt City Murders” raced to the top of the Amazon sales charts upon its release by TouchPoint Press, which will also publish my hard-boiled detective novel, “Hard Exit,” narrated by a depressed private investigator in Los Angeles. I’m nearly finished with the sequel to “Quilt City Murders” — titled “Panic in Paducah.”
Because I received medical care, joined an online dating site, learned to believe in myself by taking small steps daily and continued to pursue my dream of becoming a novelist, life gave me everything I wanted.
The expression “Never give up” is a cliché, but it’s also true. Help is available, and your circumstances can improve. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline number is 800-273-8255.
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Bruce Leonard has been a travel writer, a magazine and newspaper editor, a bakery owner, and a guinea pig for the U.S. Government. “Quilt City Murders” is available on Amazon and from other booksellers. His website is bruceleonardwriter.com.