The Iceberg

I’m going to assume you know about the Titanic, the colossal boat that sank in the North Atlantic, not the 1997 film about the two lovers on the colossal boat that… well, I won’t spoil it for you.  You may not know that the Night Captain who spotted the iceberg was inexperienced and thought putting the engines in reverse would help; instead, the swirling water created a vacuum, pulling frozen doom even closer.  Still, the luxury liner was engineered to withstand a head-on collision with an iceberg. There would have been damage of course, but the ship, 1,503 people and that enormous diamond would not have been lost. However, the newby Night Captain thought it wise to turn the ship, trying to avoid a collision.  In so doing, the iceberg caught the side of the hull, where the ship was weakest, fastened together with cheap rivets to save money. As a result, water flooded areas no engineer imagined it could reach and, after a harrowing struggle, the ship was swallowed by the icy, black sea.

Ernest Hemingway loved the iceberg as a metaphor for his writing, probably because it conjured images of the Titanic and thus depressed people.  Making people feel sad was a huge aspect of Hemingway’s work. (See: Anything he ever wrote). But Hemingway also liked the iceberg metaphor because it described the style of his minimalist, athletic prose.  He believed if a writer were writing truly enough, the writer could leave out huge parts of the story and the reader would still understand them; these omissions, in fact, strengthened the story, in Hemingway’s mind.  There is some speculation and evidence to suggest Ernest Hemingway may have lived his life the same way, showing the world a rough, masculine facade while enormous personal issues of self-doubt, depression, and closeted homosexuality remained hidden, just under the surface.  He blew his brains out shortly before his 62nd birthday.

To live with mental illness is to live life on a collision course with an iceberg.  For the first 31 years of my life, I didn’t know how to handle living with my iceberg; in fact, I probably would've told you I didn't have an iceberg.  I threw my engines in reverse, tried to run from it with distractions like shopping or drinks, drugs, food or gambling.  But I only brought the iceberg closer. I tried to avoid it and pretend it wasn’t there, and it ripped me apart at my weak points and sank me in ways I didn’t expect: I shirked my responsibilities, took risky actions, lashed out at people and alienated those who were just trying to help. I’ve come to understand the only way to live with an iceberg is to ram it head on with talk therapy, rigorous self-assessment, meditation and reflection. Ernest Hemingway preferred hunting lions and summiting mountains to confronting his own inner coldness, and in the end his iceberg sunk him. Kurt Cobain, Robin Williams, Kate Spade, Anthony Bourdain, my aunt, my uncle - icebergs got 'em all. And I get it!  It’s a challenging course to stay, steering into my iceberg. Plowing headlong through the frigid darkness, I sustain damages in the form of relationships, narcissistic delusions and egomaniacal aspirations which drift away into the cold black night. But there’s no other way through to warmer seas.