I stumbled across an article some time ago written by a man named Kevin Powers, a veteran of the Iraq war. In his article, Books Saved My Life, Powers writes about himself at a time in 2005 after he had left the military and taken out a small apartment in Richmond, Virginia. It was a time when Powers was “utterly adrift and more or less uninterested in either sailing or even getting back to shore.” In other words, Powers was a lost soul. I imagine he was suffering from some combination of PTSD and depression. Powers said, “The side effects of prescribing yourself a case of Milwaukee’s Best everyday are unpleasant, but if the goal is not to feel at all, the efficacy of the dose is unparalleled.” Powers says he spent six months in 2005 drunk and confessed that, “—just below the surface of my semi-consciousness was the constant thought: Maybe I won’t wake up this time.”
Even so, Powers says, in the midst of this depression, that, “The ultimate problem I encountered was that my mind and heart resisted my attempts to drown them.” Powers was a fighter in more ways than one.
What does this have to do with writing? Powers says, “I wrote that books saved my life, and while I believe this to be true, I’m not exactly sure how they did that. As I drifted further and further into my quarantined stupor, my attempts to read anything became ridiculous, often resulting in a book held diagonally with a trembling hand, examining with one eye squinted and the other eye shut, until I eventually added the reading of books to the many other higher order activities that had once separated me from the rest of the nonhuman animal kingdom and that I could no longer reliably perform. But one day, for some reason, I picked up “The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas” and found that the following oft-quoted lines of Thomas’s provided me with a moment of, for lack of a better word, grace: “These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I’ll be a damn fool if they weren’t.”
Power says, “You may think that by using the word ‘grace’ and including a quotation about praising God, I’m claiming that something miraculous happened or trying to smuggle in a religious answer to the universal difficulty of being a person. No. What spoke to me were the references to ‘crudities, doubts, and confusions,’ for nothing came as close to characterizing what my life had become as those three words. I was, I though, crudity, doubt, and confusion personified.
“For the first time in a long while I recognized myself in another, and somehow that tether allowed me to pull myself away from one of the most terrifying beliefs common to the kind of ailment I’m describing: that one is utterly alone, uniquely so, and that this condition is permanent.
“I wish I could say that at that moment I took up my bed and walked, but I didn’t. I needed the help of real-life human beings over a significant period before I got better, and staying better requires diligence and attention even now.”
I’m thankful to Powers for writing about this. As a person, I find it relatable and inspiring. It’s remarkable and maybe a little scary how a person’s life can change, for better or worse, on just a single interaction with another person at a single point in time, the lyric of a song, or a passage in a poem. I’ll do well to remember that as an author. It’s also a reminder that the world and the people in it are complex and unpredictable and my writing should reflect that as well.
Powers’s author site is at www.kevincpowers.com. His first book, The Yellow Birds: A Novel, was made into a movie.