Bruce Springsteen details his long and ongoing struggle with depression in which he reveals that the mood disorder recently left him “crushed.” PUBLISHED: MAY 23, 2022.
in his introduction to Terrence Real’s Us, excepted exclusively for Oprah Daily, Springsteen describes his own emotional isolation, how the demands of studio sessions and sold-out stadiums triggered a crisis in his 30s.
THE FOREWORD BY BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN IS RIGHT BELOW
Bruce Springsteen
I was crushed between 60 and 62, good for a year, and out again from 63 to 64. Not a good record. Patti will observe a freight train bearing down, loaded with nitroglycerin and running quickly out of track … she gets me to the doctors and says: ‘This man needs a pill.’
"You don't know the illness's parameters,"
"Can I get sick enough to where I become a lot more like my father than I thought I might?"
In his book, Springsteen says his father had relatives with prominent mental health issues, including agoraphobia and hair-pulling disorders.with
Foreword - "As a child, it was simply mysterious, embarrassing and ordinary," he wrote.
By my early thirties, I’d become aware enough to know, as things stood, I’d never have the things I wanted. A full life, a home, a wholeness of being, a companion, and a place in a community of neighbors and friends all seemed beyond my grasp. I didn’t have the judgment, the courage, or the skills to bring a real life to fruition. I was one of the most successful musicians on the planet, but work is work, life is life, and they are not the same.
Even more frustrating, the things that made me good at my job—my easy tolerance, even hunger, for the isolation of creativity, my ability to comfortably and deeply reside within myself and put all my energy into my work for days, weeks, years at a time—doomed my personal life to failure.
I lived a lonely but seemingly secure existence. Then at thirty-two I hit an emotional wall and realized I was lost in a deep dark forest, largely of my own making, without a map. So began forty years of trying to find my way through the shadowed trees, down to the river of a sustaining life.
With help I realized, in early middle age, that I was subject to a legacy that had been passed down from generations in my Italian-Irish family.
A long and stubborn stream of mental illness and dysfunction manifested itself in my life as a deep, recurring depression and an emotional paralysis. I had a fear of exposing my inner life to anyone besides twenty thousand complete strangers at your nearest arena. The eye-to-eye democracy of real adult love struck fear and insecurity deep in my heart. Meanwhile I could feel my life clock ticking on the things I wanted to do and what I wanted to become.
So how do you transform that legacy? How do you break the chain of trauma and illness whose price is compounded with each successive generation? As Terry says, “Family pathology is like a fire in the woods taking down all in front of it until someone turns to face the flames.”
Slowly I began to face those flames, mainly because I couldn’t stand the idea of failing my own children, my family, in the manner that I felt I’d been failed. And at the end of the day, the way we honor our parents and their efforts is by carrying on their blessings and doing our best to not pass forward their troubles, their faults, to our own children.
... My children will have plenty of work to do on their own, but we all have to learn and earn our own adulthood.
Be safe and journey forward, Bruce Springsteen - To read the full foreword click HERE