For years, Bill had been bothering me to watch Harvey, and I steadfastly maintained that black-and-white movies were universally terrible, on account of how the special effects quality is poor and nothing ever happens except people talking.

I was back in Orlando, where I’d grown up. It felt like such a failure to be there, living with my parents, unable to do much of anything. I felt like I was nothing but a burden. My thoughts whorled and swirled. I couldn’t ever think straight. I couldn’t concentrate enough to read or write. I was in daily therapy, and taking a new medication, but I felt certain it wouldn’t work, because I didn’t think the problem was chemical. I thought the problem was me, at my core. I was worthless, useless, helpless, hopeless. I was less and less each day.

One night, my parents and I rented Harvey. Because it was adapted from a play, Harvey is, as I feared, a talky movie. Most of it takes place in only a few locations—the house Elwood P. Dowd shares with his older sister and his niece, the sanitarium where many believe Elwood belongs because his best friend is an invisible rabbit, and the bar where Elwood likes to hang out and drink.

Mary Chase’s dialogue is magnificent throughout, but I especially love Elwood’s soliloquies. Here is Elwood talking about chatting with strangers at the bar: “They tell me about the big, terrible things they’ve done and the wonderful things they’ll do. Their hopes, and their regrets, and their loves, and their hates. All very large, because nobody ever brings anything small into a bar.”

In another scene, Elwood tells his psychiatrist, “I’ve wrestled with reality for thirty-five years, Doctor, and I’m happy to state I finally won out over it.”

Elwood is mentally ill. He’s not much of a contributor to society. It’d be easy to characterize him as worthless, or hopeless. But he is also extraordinarily kind, even in difficult situations. At one point, his psychiatrist says, “This sister of yours is at the bottom of a conspiracy against you. She’s trying to persuade me to lock you up. Today, she had commitment papers drawn up. She has the power of attorney over you.” Elwood replies, “My sister did all that in one afternoon. That Veta certainly is a whirlwind, isn’t she?”

Despite not being a traditional hero of any kind, Elwood is profoundly heroic. In my favorite line of the movie, he says, “Years ago my mother used to say to me, she’d say . . . ‘In this world, you must be oh so smart, or oh so pleasant.’ Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant.”

In December of 2001, there was perhaps no human alive on Earth who needed to hear those words more than I did.

I don’t believe in epiphanies. My blinding-light awakenings always prove fleeting. But I’ll tell you this: I have never felt quite as hopeless since watching Harvey as I did just before I watched it.