Introduction to Creative Writing met at one o’clock on Wednesdays. I took a violet spiral-bound notebook to class. On a lavender post-it that I stuck to the inside of the back cover, I wrote:
“. . . Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.”—D. Foster Wallace
The only work that I have ever read by David Foster Wallace is the commencement speech in which he said those words. The line was preceded by the following:
“As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head . . .”
That’s what depression is like. A constant, hypnotic monologue damning each pleasure, every hope, any purpose and all courage. It corrodes human resolve. It bleeds out energy. It’s paralyzing.  It will confine you to the inside of your own head and the only way out is to take back control over how and what you think.Â
It scared me that the Creative Writing course was one of the things that triggered such despair. The possibility that deliberate writing, and the introspection and vulnerability that accompanies it, might always be so damaging was depressing enough. I didn’t want it to be that way. I really wanted to believe that, armed with philosophies like Wallace’s, I could cope my way past all the classic hazards of sensitivity, perception, and creativity, and get better.
To this day, I’ve never read a word by David Foster Wallace that wasn’t in his commencement speech. At first, I abstained out of fear. My depression was an imaginative and particularly superstitious monster. I believed that reading Infinite Jest or Consider the Lobster would bring me closer to the author, but I also believed that if I got too close, I would break the spell. I might threaten his control over his own thoughts. And I might shatter any hopes I had for myself.
I’ve still not become a reader of David Foster Wallace’s work, and now I only wish there were some validity to my irrational fear.
The speech is archived at Marginalia.org.
I still have the post-it.
