The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

After seeing a counsellor and feeling rather awful the other week, I bought a copy of the Bell Jar. The association is pretty clear, right? And I'd read it before and all so I knew the content and how the story unfolded. Potentially this could have been a very very silly mistake, however it ended up on my shelf and I didn't pick it up again until I was feeling a hell of a lot better.* The last time I'd read this book was about fifteen years ago and different things stuck in my mind -I read it as a historical artefact and thought a lot about how ghastly it was for women in the 1950s (I was v. proto-feminist at the time. Another story). Over the last few days of reading I've been just blown away with her descriptions of depression: that moment of realisation that you're merely going through the motions of life; the feeling that you're absolutely the most stupid and the worst person in the world; the feelings of isolation. It's kind of blowing my mind in fact. *I had a particularly awful morning where it was hell itself tearing myself out of bed; this after a particularly awful night where I lost my mind quite spectacularly in front of a bunch of people. I was late to work and on the way I read an article in the paper about a man hanging himself on Skype in front of his ex-girlfriend and I felt a weight lift off my mind. Literally, something cleared. And I felt much much better. I'm not questioning it too closely, I'm just going with the feeling.