I felt a challenge to compose music. That's where my challenge was, for the most part.
It's enough just to speak when spoken to, to give some minimal reaction to a stimulus. But to actually be the stimulus doesn't even occur to me.
Depression is such a cruel punishment. There are no fevers, no rashes, no blood tests to send people scurrying in concern. Just the slow erosion of the self, as insidious as any cancer. And, like cancer, it is essentially a solitary experience. A room in hell with only your name on the door.
People say, "I have heart disease," not "I am heart disease. " Somehow the presumption of a person's individuality is not compromised by those diagnostic labels. All the labels tell us is that the person has a specific challenge with which he or she struggles in a highly diverse life. But call someone "a schizophrenic" or "a borderline" and the shorthand has a way of closing the chapter on the person. It reduces a multifaceted human being to a diagnosis and lulls us into a false sense that those words tell us who the person is, rather than only telling us how the person suffers.
In the psychological literature, depression is often seen as a defense against sadness. But I'll take sadness any day. There is no contest. Sadness carries identification. You know where it's been and you know where it's headed. Depression carries no papers. It enters your country unannounced and uninvited. Its origins are unknown, but its destination always dead-ends in you.
I would never kill myself intentionally. I couldn't do that to my family, my friends. . . But to have fate step in and give me a shove, that's a different matter. Then I have the exit, without the guilt. I am ashamed of myself for thinking like this. But more than anything, I am frightened that it makes me feel so much better to think about it. Sometimes it eases the terror, the sense that I am condemned eternally to this hell.
The bottom line is that my life has already almost slipped away from me. I have two choices: I can end it or I can fight like hell to save it.
Like most things that happen with Sabbath, it happened all of a sudden. I was intending on doing some recording, but out of the blue, Sharon called up and said she wanted us to do these gigs with Ozzy. I said that if everybody else was up to it then I would love to do it.
With the mega-fame came the mega-downfall - you know, with the press and everything - and at a young age, it was very stressful to me.
You draw on whatever’s relevant to the part you’re playing; it makes it more personal.
Every poker player is smarter than me.