Sara Benincasa

[nate]

Hello Paul,
I just finished listening to this podcast. The new listener that wrote in at the end really hit home with me too. Please tell that listener thank you. His description of the universe as opposed to religion is exactly how I feel. Your reaction to his "love" of having his mom comb his hair nailed me right in the chest too. I was chocking up while walking around my neighborhood, while you were choking up talking about it.
Thank you!
Nate

[binx_83]

On the catheter discussion on this episode,
I can totally relate to it because I had one put in when I was hospitalized few yrs back with a staph infection. It was so uncomfortable and awkward. The damn nurse couldn't even find my urethra opening. She had to call in another nurse to help find it, I could not believe it and regret not telling the doctor who was checking me. I really thought it unnecessary, but the Dr ordered it because they needed to check (?) kidneys due to all of the antibiotics they put in me to fight the infection. And I can tell Sara that it seems pretty standard for how a catheter is put in, there are no new advances or pain relief with that procedure when she mentioned that doctors email her about it.

I found this particular episode to be more relateable to me in that the depression I feel is similar to Sara reacting to her agoraphobia. She takes pills though and talks to a professional, something I have yet to do due to no health ins., money, and fear/laziness. Why can't I just buy the pills I need that will make it easier for me to live?! (and i don't have access to recreational drugs)
I have been depressed since teenage yrs, but its worse now that I am getting older...

[ubi_sunt]

I thought Sara's remarks on suicide as an impulsive act of fear were spot-on, they reminded me of this great analogy.

The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames. Yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don‘t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.
-David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

[adrivahni]

I thought Sara's remarks on suicide as an impulsive act of fear were spot-on, they reminded me of this great analogy.

The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames. Yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don‘t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.
-David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

Love this quote. Thanks for posting.