Wednesday, 07 October 2009

• good doggie

  I doubt it'll come as much of a surprise that I've been more depressed than usual lately.  May as well admit it.
  
  I was officially diagnosed with clinical depression in December 2004, about two months after my mother died.  The process consisted mainly of me going to my family doctor and telling her my mother had died, even before that I'd been crying a lot for no immediate reason, and I thought I was probably depressed.  She concurred and put me on an SSRI called Lexapro, which if it did nothing else at least stopped me crying all the time.
  
  I'd probably been pretty badly depressed for a year and a half at that point, and mildly depressed for maybe as long as ten years, starting when I was unemployed for a long stretch after grad school. I've probably told this story already.  For nearly two years in the mid-1990s I hid in my apartment and hardly spoke to another human; even when I did go out, my interactions with grocery store cashiers and library circ clerks were pretty much limited to How are you? Pretty good.
  
  (Not coincidentally, I think, when I moved back to my old home town years later I would grumble that when I asked my elderly and increasingly frail dad how he was, he would continue to say Oh, pretty good until he fell off his barstool.  I come by my reticence naturally, but that doesn't mean it's a good thing.)
  
  I came out of my shell a little when I got a job in a bookstore, but looking back I think I was probably still depressed; I'm just a high-functioning depressive.  I never had a problem continuing to get up and go to work. I had friends that I would occasionally hang out with, though I rarely visited their homes and never invited them to mine.  My apartment was buried in clutter most of the time, and not fit for human company.
  
  Years later, a fabulous astrologer discerned from my blog that I was depressed, and advised me to talk to a doctor about it after hearing me describe what a wreck my apartment was.  When I was a kid I never ever had to be told to clean my room; I just sort of naturally put stuff back where it was supposed to go.  Now my house is not exactly buried in clutter, but there's a lot of stuff lying around that doesn't seem to have a place to go, and I don't spend a lot of time sorting it all out.
  
  I was on the anti-depressants for about four years.  I also eventually got a therapist, who seemed to help a lot.  I went off my meds, with my doctor's approval.  My therapist pronounced me adequately stable, and cut me loose.  Less than a year later I find myself wondering if the rest of my life is going to be as dreary as this. For those who know about astrology, I'm at the start of a 3-year Saturn transit of my five-planet stellium in Libra.  For those who think that astrology is bunk, I'm turning 40 this month, so you can call it a midlife crisis if you like.
  
  I've never really identified with the metaphor that describes depression as a black dog, possibly because I grew up in south Louisiana instead of England.  Down here we don't have the same traditions of spectral black dogs stalking people across haunted moors, though there may be a loup-garou or two out in the swamp.  What depression feels like to me is ten tons of "I suck" being loaded on my head.  When I stole that phrase from Elsa the astrologer, she told me to push back, and at the end of it I'll be able to lift ten tons.  On the whole I'd rather go play with the dog. 

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