"... I'd rather have my own suffering than someone else's solution."

Yesterday, Ron Unger posted a link to an absolutely amazing article by British novelist Jeanette Winterson on his blog.

A few quotes:

"My creativity pulled me out of a hopeless childhood, and gave my life meaning and shape. But I have always had various forms of manic depression, (just can't bring myself to call it "bipolar"— whoever invented that dismal term must have been uni-polar—a condition I define as being permanently tethered to the banal)."

"...I'd rather have my own suffering than someone else's solution."

"Wounding—real or symbolic—is both mark and marker. It is an opening in the self, painful but transformative."

"We know from 100 years of psychoanalytic investigation that an early trauma, often buried or unavailable to consciousness, is the motif that plays through our lives. We meet it again and again in different disguises. We are wounded again in the same place. This doesn't turn us into victims. Rather, we are people in search of a transformation of the real."

Well, I could go on and on... Go read the whole article "In Praise of The Crack-Up" at, and this is amazing, this too, the Wall Street Journal's website.