Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey by Geraldine Brooks (best ereader for epub .TXT) 📕

grandmother gave my mother. I wear it to remind me there is love in the world amidst all the self-hatred I feel for myself. Anyway, I use the silver chain you gave me for it—thanks again.”

She was, she said, battling to retain some semblance of a normal life, having started at a local college in late January on a three-day-a-week schedule. “Because of my mental difficulties, I am having problems in concentrating and going, but basically the classes are interesting.”

She had also managed to pass her driving test—“a sign of independence and adulthood, which is important for me, since that’s part of my whole problem.” The letter broke off at the end of the page. It began again four days later. It had been snowing. Joannie had always loved the cold and the snow—it had been an ongoing joke in our letters, because to me any temperature below sixty degrees was a torment, while she complained bitterly if winter didn’t bring blizzards. Now, she said, she hated and feared the snow and the cold “because I feel it so intensely because I am so skinny and also I guess it has bad psychological representations to me to.” That tiny misspelling—“to” for “too”—jumped off the page. Joannie was a meticulous writer who rarely made a grammar or spelling mistake.

At that point in the letter her handwriting changed abruptly. “I am going to start printing—it may be easier for you to read. I am having a hard time (physically) writing because I am so tense.”

And I was having a hard time reading this outpouring of painful emotion. Until now, Joannie had written to me after she had climbed out of her depressions. As a result, I hadn’t felt the full force of her despair. I’d let myself believe that Joannie was going through a bad phase that would eventually pass. It had seemed impossible to me that her intelligence wouldn’t somehow lead her out of the emotional thicket in which she was temporarily lost.

For a few paragraphs, her letter covered familiar turf, with a critique of the state of the Union—confidence in the President at an all-time low of twenty-six per cent, the energy crisis, inflation, a truckers’ strike, problems in the Middle East. But instead of her usual wry assessment, this time the catalogue of problems seemed to weigh upon her personally and add to her affliction.

“Part of me has just stopped fighting and I’ve got to find it and get it going again—it frightens me that I can’t find it. Geraldine, I like you—that’s reason enough to want to live, isn’t it? I’ve got to find my will to live and give it a kick—I need some motivation. There are a lot of things I could hold onto but nothing seems to matter right now.”

It was another nine days before Joannie was able to finish the letter. “I have already taken two Valium (a calming pill) tonight and as a result am feeling kind of wiped out. The depression in me makes me not want to go to school, the fright in me is sure I can’t do the work, my various hang ups prevent me from doing the work, and everything is all messed up.” She had called her psychiatrist and would be going by his office at 8 A.M. the next morning “so he can give me a shot of some sort to make me hopefully feel better.”

I hoped her psychiatrist knew what he was doing. Surely this seesaw of downers and uppers risked making everything much worse. “I hope by the next letter to be able to paint a cheerier picture but I just can’t write any more now. Take care of yourself, write soon, and I will try to write you back as soon as I can.”

I read and reread the letter, trying to frame a reply. She had said that my friendship was a reason to live. I wanted to yell, “Yes! Yes! You’re my oldest friend! We’re going to do great things together one day. Don’t you dare think of checking out!” I wanted to write something that would reach her and pull her out of her dark place. I wanted my letter to be as reassuring as an enfolding hug.

And yet there was another small voice in the back of my head—a querulous, no-nonsense voice saying: “Snap out of it. Fight your fears. Everyone goes through it. Stop thinking about yourself all the time.” It was my mother’s voice. Without even noticing, I had absorbed her belief that neurosis was the self-inflicted wound of the coward who can’t face the fight. Deep down, there was a small, ungenerous part of me that didn’t empathize with Joannie, a tiny kernel of contempt for her weakness.

Earlier that month I had finally walked through the big stone gates of Sydney University. I’d arrived there brimming with confidence, proud of good exam results.

But the exhilaration didn’t last long. Drifting from one big anonymous lecture hall to the other, I soon felt lost and lonely at the university. My Bland Street school had been a safe, intimate environment full of people just like me—same gender, same socioeconomic level, same religious background. The vast arts faculty of the University of Sydney was a different story. I had thought I would love the diversity, but instead I felt overwhelmed by it. I was in awe of the students from the private schools of the North Shore and the eastern suburbs who seemed to have so much poise and polish. I wasn’t sure how to act in front of the young men in my classes. The English department was huge; the fine arts department snobbish.

The only place I felt comfortable was the government department. I’d taken the subject as an afterthought because Duff had said it had good lecturers. Many of them were Americans—disenchanted veterans of the 1960s culture wars. One, who described himself as a “Lyndon Johnson Canadian,” had left his country to dodge the draft.

But my shyness made