Just Me and My Shadow

Depression has the unfortunate side effect of making the world all about me.  Like a bad toothache, depression is impossible to ignore for very long; it narrows my focus until all I’m left with is the darkness lodged in my psyche. I’m on medication, so now I am functional. Unhappy, but functional. My concentration has improved. I can get work done. Sometimes the physical tension of this is so great that tears seep out. Depression is a burden on the soul. The following is shameless self-indulgent confession.

I remember my first encounter with depression. It was my junior year of high school. I was smitten with one of my friends, a senior.  He was an atheist, and a good debater.  I kept in my personal cupboard a few unexamined beliefs about God, Jesus, salvation, goodness, love, morality, and the way the world operated.  He took out every single one of them and smashed them.  This was a very strange experience, to look out at the world unprotected by any creed, to see, well, Nothing.  Why get up? Why have an opinion?  Why anything?  Why be?

I read the Bell Jar. Doesn’t every depressed teenage girl read the Bell Jar?  There were no pills to overdose on in my house.  I wasn’t savvy enough to know exactly what would make you overdose.  I read somewhere that if you slit your wrists you have to make the cuts vertical rather than horizontal.  Perhaps, I thought, I could do that.  It seemed a rather painful way to go, but perhaps razors were sharper than I thought and flesh not so resistant.  I found the blades for my dad’s razor in the bathroom.  I made a few cuts on my arm.

This isn’t going to work, I thought.

Fuck, I can’t even kill myself.  

I made a few more cuts, and then some more, until my arm was crosshatched.  And then I stopped.  

I felt better.

Small cuts like this release opiate-like substances into the brain.  Self-medication was never so easy!

Except I had to wear long sleeves all the time.

You might wonder if my parents ever noticed that I had turned into a dour, joyless, self-injuring freak. Nope. They were too busy tormenting each other.

IF they worried about me, they worried about sex. They were afraid I might be having sex with the atheist boy. Which I wasn’t. Unfortunately.

Unexpectedly, one day at the end of the school year, the darkness lifted a bit, and then a bit more, and I had a relatively happy senior year. And I could wear short sleeves.

And then I went to college. On the one hand, college was a liberating experience, to be free of my crazy parents and the petty crap that goes on in high school, to find like-minded people who actually had conversations about books and politics and art.  On the other hand, I was a painfully shy person. All my thoughts lodged in my throat.  I wanted to love and be loved, but that was too intimate to bear.

I had to wear long sleeves a lot.

Since there were free counseling services, I went to see a therapist. Funny me, I was so secretive about my little “self-medication problem” that I never even told my therapist, a somewhat sour fellow that I don’t even remember. Then there was the nice woman therapist who taught me relaxation breathing. Uh huh. Then there was the intake therapist who caught a glimpse of my arms and freaked out so much I thought she might commit me. She decided I was beyond the reach of a college counseling center and foisted me on a psychologist in downtown Atlanta.  I always think of him as the gay therapist, because he was.  He gave a new meaning to talk therapy.  I heard more about his life than my own.  I still have one of his books, Mae West Is Dead.  I made him very happy by deciding that I was actually a lesbian. It seemed to explain a lot of things.

And then I went to New York to be a poet.  This is the perfect vocation for depressives, and New York is the best place to be if you have any abnormal traits.  Everyone has a therapist and everyone is nuts.  I can’t remember meeting anyone who was happy or well adjusted, at least not in the poetry department of Columbia.  We were like guests at a Jerry Springer show: incest, child abuse, rape, alcoholism, drug abuse, suicide attempts, spouse abuse, homosexual but conflicted, homosexual but no longer conflicted just really pissed off.  My problems paled in comparison.  But I wasn’t really capable of looking on the bright side.

Eventually I ended up at the Mt. Sinai outpatient psychiatric clinic, where I was introduced to the miraculous properties of Prozac.  

Ah, Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors . . .  

This is IT, I thought. This is what normal feels like. Wow.

I wasn’t sure I had felt like this before EVER, even as a child. Definitely not as a child.

But

Fast-forward to here and now. Which isn’t so great. Getting better, perhaps, but not so great.

My therapist says I need to see myself as God sees me.

Well, yeah. Duh.

And I should pray for guidance. Uh, since I wasn’t so clear on how that worked before the Black Crow came and nested in my heart, I sure don’t know how it works now.

Oh, and if you’re worried that I might be “self medicating” again, I’m not.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.