It was my birthday on Tuesday.  I'm 40 now, which frankly doesn't feel a lot different from 27.  But then, up until a couple of years ago I would have told you that I was still 17 inside my head, so I guess I am making slow progress towards adulthood, after years of fighting it.

I'm poking around the internet in a coffee shop this morning, because I am one of the 15 people remaining in North America who still has dial-up internet and my phone at the house has been dead since the big rainstorm we had on Thursday.  I think this may in fact be the last straw that gets me to call up and have the fiber-optic high-speed internet which is now available in my neighborhood hooked up to my house.  But I've been saying I'm going to call them since it first became available months ago, and I haven't done it yet.

I have not addressed my Halloween cards yet. If I normally send you one, you can expect it to be late this year.

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. 

It seems to be a good week for Xangans to come out of the woodwork after a hiatus.  Even Gaz blogged this week, can I do less?

Trouble is, I got nothin'.

I go to work.  I come home.  I feed the cats.  I pet the cats.  One of them enjoys this, and will let me do it until I get tired of it; the other allows me to stroke his fur from arm's length for about five minutes in the morning (up from three minutes, since I got adopted by another cat) and then turns on me.  I read my RSS feeds and look at Facebook (but I hardly ever update my status) and Twitter (but I almost never tweet).  I still log into Xanga to read my subscriptions, but rarely comment any more.  I have pretty much abandoned the sporadic book blog I was keeping at MySpace.

I read sometimes.  Just finished Even Money, by Dick Francis and his son Felix; enjoyed it, as I almost always enjoy Dick Francis novels, though a lot of the intricacies of British bookmaking went over my head.  I've joined NetFlix.  This weekend I watched Quo Vadis (Robert Taylor and Deborah Kerr, 1951, with a very young Peter Ustinov chewing up the scenery as the Emperor Nero), and it made me cry at the death of Petronius the Arbiter.

A friend and I have started walking in the evenings; we do about four miles three or four times during the week, and aim for five or six miles on weekends.

I don't think I'm more depressed than usual.  When I talked to my doctor a year or so ago about getting off my medication, she remarked that I would never again fail to recognize clinical depression if it started to affect me again, and I think I'm still pretty stable.  What I'm feeling now is, oddly, what I was afraid that being on antidepressants would feel like: I'm not feeling much of anything one way or the other.  No particular highs or lows, just sort of bland and indifferent all the time.

I was thinking about this last night, and some lines of poetry crossed my mind:

My memory surprises me sometimes.  That's from "The Death of the Hired Man," by Robert Frost.  I read it in my junior year of high school, 24 years ago, and it's stuck with me all this time.  Waiting for me to know what that's like.