I need to keep tabs on whether I am becoming hypomanicor not. I shit you not: I have decided to partake of the magical blue pill. Not because I like to experiment with psychotropic drugs (although, I suppose, I do), but because I have finally come to grips with the fact that I really do have depression, or at least dysthymia.

I don’t really know if this has been going on continuously from since I was in high school, or if there were really times when the gloom would break, and I would be OK, at least for a while. Now that I think about it, for much of the past 10 years or so, it’s only really the shitty memories that stick out the most. I mean, I know that good things happened too, but they’re just harder to remember. Or somehow they’re always attached to depressing memories. I can’t seem to separate them. For the longest time, I haven’t had anything that even remotely resembles a “happy place.” The closest thing I could think of when I was asked was probably the last time I almost died.

There is the non-biological explanation for all this. I mean, yeah, I’ve had a few rough times here and there. Rejection, betrayal, abandonment. (OK, maybe that sounds more melodramatic than it really was, but, oh well, bear with me.) Extreme stress. Having no purpose in life. Failing at things that meant a lot to me. But these things lingered too long. They ate at my insides too much. It wasn’t until now that I realized that they were affecting my ability to function. And that this wasn’t normal at all.

Now, needless to say, this isn’t exactly something you bring up to people in normal conversation, no matter how close you are to them. In this span of time, I think I might have told only one person how I felt, and this is only because he brought up the topic of suicide. I mentioned how a lot of times I’ve felt hopeless, helpless, worthless, guilty for things which I didn’t do or couldn’t’ve had control over. How at some points, I’ve thought about ending it all, though I never really planned anything. I never really ever tried to do it, except for that time I got hold of a lot of hydrocodone. I was tempted to drink it all. But that’s the worst it ever got, I think.

It’s ironic that I am spewing all this bilge over the Internet. As I’ve told R, it’s like cheap psychotherapy. My health insurance doesn’t cover psychiatric visits, so I’m paying for web space instead.

I’ve been meaning to get evaluated for a good year now. Especially since one of my college friends recently started going to therapy. And my psych rotation really impressed upon me the need for professional help. This really isn’t something that can be handled alone. And yet, I stood still. Mostly, I was afraid. Which, of course, fed further into my depression.

I finally talked seriously about all this with my parents these past two weeks that I spent in L.A. Despite the fact that they’re both in health care, they aren’t big believers in psychotropic medication. They kept trying to exhort me to just be strong, keep a stiff upper lip, don’t let the bastards grind me down, mind over matter. Pray to God. Hah. They are afraid that the meds will make me crazy. Well, hell, technically, I’m already crazy. We’re talking what is most likely an Axis I diagnosis here.

See, suicidal ideation doesn’t necessarily mean you want to kill yourself. The way we thought about it on the psych ward was that if you wanted to die, you were essentially suicidal. A lot of the patients with major depression hadn’t ever planned anything, but their biggest complaint was that they simply didn’t want to be alive.

So, to be fully treated, I should probably still go see a therapist. While it’s been shown by studies that pills alone or therapy alone are generally equivalent, the two of them together are synergistic, more than double the effect. But I’m not taking these pills to be happy. I just want to stop feeling so crappy. So far, they seem to be working. God knows it might just be a placebo effect, and sure, I’m having relapses now and then. It isn’t that I can’t get sad, or that rejection doesn’t hurt. It’s just that it doesn’t eat away at me. It doesn’t keep me awake at night. Sure, I’ll dwell on dark depressing thoughts as I lie awake in bed, regret a little, but when I wake up in the morning, I’ll be ready to start my day. I won’t just lie in bed, stuck. Wondering why.

You know, nothing has really changed. I still think about my same fears and my same regrets. I still have my own personal failings and my bad habits. But, you know what, for once, I’m content with this. Life goes on. There doesn’t need to be a happily-ever-after ending. I just want to live.

Postscript: I suppose, mostly, I was inspired to write this all out by this blog. It’s really depressing, written by someone who eventually killed herself. (God only knows how the hell I stumbled upon it on Google.) Eerie, isn’t it? Despite my deep-seated sense of inevitable doom, and my belief that my life from this point on is going to be relatively static, this is not the way I want it to end.

(An interlude: I wrote an entry earlier today. I wonder if I should keep it posted? There’s something freaky about leaving such a stark naked confession out for the whole world to see, but, hey, I suppose I’ve bought in to our culture. No piece of dirty laundry is too inane, too idiotic for our brave new world of blogs and reality shows.)

Now back to our regularly scheduled program. I promise, promise, promise to stop being so deadly serious all the time.

See, the problem here is that I was exposed to way too much Disney when I was a kid. Some of the earliest songs I know are “It’s A Small World After All” and the opening credit song for “Robin Hood”. Up until I was 23 years old, I think I pretty much went to Disneyland every year. I had mouse ears, two stuffed Mickey Mouses, a Mickey Mouse telephone, a (cheapo) Mickey Mouse watch, a huge Winnie the Pooh, Figment the Dragon from Epcot Center, Little Mermaid sheets (OK I exaggerate, they’re my sister’s. I swear!) just all sorts of ridiculous Disney crap. I watched “The Little Mermaid” in the movie theater. I was obsessed with “Beauty and the Beast”. I think I watched Disney animated movies up until “Hercules”. (And I’ve just recently watched “Lilo and Stitch” which I’m also completely obsessed with.)

I finally broke out of my obsession after writing a paper about how Disneyland recapitulates the imperial history of the United States. It’s all fun and games until you realize how very much like soma it all is. And, like everything else, the corporate culture has sucked whatever little creativity was in it anyways.

But this is all besides the point. What I feel happened here is that, despite my discovery as a sophomore in high school of American Romanticism and the twisted, utterly warped, dark, morbid, perverse endings to stories written by Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville, I still somehow manage to turn my own stories into saccharine-sweet, Disney-styled slash fan-fic. (OK, I exaggerate about the slash part. I don’t think I could write a homoerotic scene that rang true to life.) In the sense that somehow things work out, and while it may not have a happy ending in a conventional sense, still, all the odds and ends get tied up. So much for my aspirations of writing avant-garde prose.

Which is probably the reason that I have never really ever finished a short story.

Which brings me, however deliriously, to this episode today:

(So, yeah, I know, I know. They are women, not girls. But there is something about this kind of thing that make me think of people as boys and girls, and not as men and women. Maybe it’s because I went to a Catholic all-boys high school, and so evolution of the way I interact with the opposite sex has arrested at the junior high stage. So, in any case, I will use the diminuitive “girl.”)

Anyway.

So I am sitting by myself eating my lunch when this cute girl walks over and sits next to this guy two tables away from me. From the patches on their white coats, I assume they are classmates, and they are chatting away, but somehow, the girl’s glance intersects with my absent gaze, and it’s like a physical sensation.

Ffft! Ffft! Aaah! (Like poison darts whirling through the air.)

Leave it to me to make these things melodramatic.

Of course my gaze is completely locked, and I’m wondering if she’s flirting with that guy, and of course every so often, her eyes veer towards me, and it just gets me right there, in the chest, and I start getting paranoid, wondering if she knows that I’m watching her. (I am convinced that they always know. And no, I really am not normally the stalker-type. Not normally.)

And then some big fat guy sits in the table between us, obscuring my view, breaking the lock (and I am somewhat relieved), but still, I catch her eyes every so often, and I flush. I try to not look obvious that I am trying not to look, which of course instantly becomes obvious, and eventually I finish my drink and get up to leave, and coincidentally at the same time she gets up too and walks away, and I can’t help but get the crazy thought that maybe I should’ve walked in her direction, and said something vacuous and stupid like “Uh, hi.”

Fun fact about delirium. It is derived from a Latin word roughly meaning “off-track” or “out of line.” In other words, non-linear.

Addendum

2003 Jul 15

“Fftt! Fftt! Aaah!” My A.P. U.S. History teacher would always do this whenever someone went off on a rather eccentric tangent during discussion. His admonition would be “It’s a jungle out there. Stay with the main party.”

OK, so the first part of this post doesn’t really make any sense of thte second part of the post, but what I was merely trying to say is that, no matter what I do, everything that I write ends up being really cheesy and syrupy, a la Disney. (I thought I’d makes this clear, as I’m pretty sure it will cease to be clear to me in time.)

mahiwaga

I'm not really all that mysterious

The Art of Self-Medication - Reprise

Walt Disney Can Kiss My Ass

Addendum