How Sarajevo Saved Me

The mailwoman brought me a book, and made me shut up, for a while at least.

PUTTING EVERYBODY DOWN, VERBALLY OR OTHERWISE, IS JUST ANOTHER SAD SYMPTOM OF DEPRESSION - WORSE THAN SAD. IT'S PATHETIC.

If I'd stumbled upon this book a little bit earlier, maybe things wouldn't have turned out the way they did. Then again, maybe they would.

John Falk tells a true and touching story about a battle with a beast that appears in different forms in different worlds. Depression plays havoc usually in countries with a relatively high standard of living, while war rips apart everyone in its path, especially the poor.

A single memoir, Hello to All That, manages to produce firsthand testimony from both frontiers, witnessed by the same guy.

One morning at the age of 12, Falk woke up with only one desire left in his body: to go back to sleep. And the feeling - of nothing, which enfolds him so that he very nearly becomes nothing - won't go away.

His family gets worried, of course, and does everything in its power to help. To no avail. The boy sees no point in doing anything. For a while Falk grinds his teeth and goes through the motions, pretending everything is dandy. Finally, he really is incapable of doing anything. He spends most of his hours in a supine position, reading at night, sleeping the day away.

Enter doctors, enter shrinks, enter antidepressants, which, after many attempts, seem to take effect.

But the damage is done. The boy has lost over a decade of his life. "There had been a point in my life when my biggest ambition was simply to make it to the next minute", Falk writes.

He needs to live. He needs to reconnect with the world, with people. So he packs his bags, cooks up a story about being a correspondent for NBC Radio and boards a plane to Sarajevo.

It is August 1993.

___


Somehow, today, unable to bear one more piece of news about the financial crisis, I appreciate Falk's move even more. Also, there's the story of Anthony Shadid, which I stumbled upon yesterday.



Hello to All That: A Memoir of Zoloft, War, and Peace
By John Falk
Picador, 2005



http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hello-All-That-Memoir-Zoloft/dp/0805072187/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1327005405&sr=8-1