Fear itself

I'm way beyond appreciating the life of getting to read this book recently. My life had changed drastically after grad school, and I was drifting far away from the summer when I was 15; when I started to learn about depression and PTSD, and so much more later on in my academic life. Although I kept taking classes in mental illness and suicide and emergency training sessions, I felt myself leaving this realm forever, until recently, until I read this book. William Styron's words have a magical power to take me back in time, gazing myself in my 15, knowing that how close I once stood by the problem and confronted it with a stout heart that doesn't match the age of my age by then but of the one I loved. Then I started to see how 10 years later I've transformed, wandering behind the shield of reason and logic, simplicity and blind pureness, completely forget what fear means but keep running away from my most enormous dread, then failed to discover that the soul I hope kept untainted had been eroded by guilt and reminiscence. In 80 pages, he leads me to go through the past 12 years to get to this conclusion: There are only two ways for us to deal with a lethal problem, confront it or go a completely different direction away from it, which leads to our most humane emotional acceptance or rational understanding of the problem. I truly hope that those who seek help could find it, who need hope could attain it, and who want peace could settle from within, through Styron's sensitive and genuine words. And in the end, we all could come to an understanding of the last sentence of this book: And so we came forth, and once again beheld the stars.