What my day was like.

A while back I asked a guy I’ve been dating casually (“D”, for our purposes here) whether he’d like to see a particular movie with me: it’s a documentary by a couple of friendly acquaintances of mine about a famous literary figure which D likes quite a bit. He enthusiastically said yes. I wrote back a quick email, saying “cool” or some such.

By this morning he had not called or emailed. I texted him to ask if he still wanted to go. Nothing. Then I called and left a voice mail, saying please let me know because someone else would like to go if you can’t (a lie, because after all, I have no friends, let alone any friends interested in seeing this film). I am still hurt and angry and wonder why is it that I keep hanging out with men who are pretty much indifferent to me.

I was so angry that I sent an email not to him, but to L, the psychiatrist. I had written several drafts of long emails spelling out my grievances and hadn’t sent any of them. But then I was like, fuckit: Guys act like dicks to me and I’m sick of it. Within some twenty minutes of sending it I received what seemed like a heartfelt, albeit brief, apology. But I still feel like shit. It doesn’t really matter if he’s sorry because what hurts is that I was treated that way in the first place.

So I went to the film unaccompanied by a date. C was there with Y. N was there with R. I just look at everyone, all paired up, and wonder why I can’t find anyone who even respects me, let alone loves me. I started sobbing on the sidewalk, where C was on lookout for the last member of our party, who was late. Said I felt like garbage. He said I didn’t have to stay. This misses the point. Of course I know I don’t have to stay. That’s not the problem. The problem is that I want to throw myself in front of the train because I’m an absolutely worthless human being, and no one gives a shit about me, appreciates me, or loves me. It’s an empty existence.

I really wish I had the balls to kill myself, but I can’t let go of the world. I’ll bet it’s the kind of thing you can work up to — deleting a blog is practice for the ultimate letting go of suicide. I’m trying to work myself up to deleting my other, non-secret blog tonight.

My life. It’s a living hell.

So now, in the morning, I take: .5 mg of Klonopin; 300 mg of Wellbutrin XL; a multi-vitamin; and a B12 supplement. In the afternoon I take another .5 mg of Klonopin. In the evening, around 8pm, I take 50 mg of Seroquel, and then, an hour or two later, 100mg.

This was going along okay. But I’m realizing that it was okay because my life circumstances weren’t that bad. Now I have less than no money; no job; a recurrence of the physical pain and numbness on the right side of my body, which I’ve complained about for years without any doctor being able to tell me what’s wrong; and no real support network to help me through trying times.

The doc gave me a scrip for a beta blocker to get me through today’s volunteer interpreting gig (the less said about that, the better), and Monday’s interview with Company X.

Things have been getting worse, yesterday and today. That switch has been flipped and my head is full of thoughts of suicide. Both the thinking of reasons why it would be a good thing to do, and the grisly mental images of my skull shattered into a million pieces.

What can I do about this? Over the course of my life, over 22 years of horrible depression, I’ve tried many things: drugs, hospitalization, talking to friends, talking to spouse, calling a suicide hotline…and they all just make things worse. There’s nothing worse than having that tiny little spark of hope extinguished when you realize that no one can do a damn thing for you, and you’re trapped in hell.

Update

Wretchedly, wretchedly depressed at the moment.

At least I’d be in good company

Edvard Munch! Kurt Vonnegut!

When I had my nervous breakdown in Vermont three weeks into the Middlebury summer language program, I was referred to a psychologist at the college’s counseling service. I also saw a doctor on campus — a really nice, understanding GP. He put me on Effexor and Buspar, and while the Buspar helped a little with the anxiety, after four weeks the Effexor had still done absolutely nothing for the depression. I was still a weepy, suicidal wreck.

The doctor suggested that I see the psychiatrist in town because even though the program was about to end and I would be going home in two weeks, a specialist could give me advice about the proper course to follow when I went back to New York.

So I saw the psychiatrist and gave him my whole history — I told him about the neglect and abuse, the hints that something wasn’t quite right with me in childhood, the full-blown depression as a teenager, the hospitalizations, the suicide attempt, the medications I’d been on. Specifically, I told him that no antidepressant had ever done anything but hit me with horrible side-effects…no antidepressant, that is, with the exception of Prozac.

I first started taking Prozac when I was 22 years old. I had had a really rough time of it that fall, and I started the drug in December. It did little for my mood at first, and I don’t remember the side effects I experienced except the crazy weight loss. I vividly remember Christmas Eve that year at the house of my friend Tom’s father: according to their bathroom scale I had lost about 10 pounds even though there had been no change in my appetite at all. If anything, my appetite had increased.

My mood began to lift in January. I was more social, outgoing, and energetic. I wrote a philosophy paper on Plato’s Statesman in one day, and I thought my angle was brilliant! — I argued that statesmanship was merely the ostensible subject of the dialogue when in fact the real subject was proper dialectical method. This “insight” might be totally banal, I don’t know, but I thought it was brilliant! and all the pieces just fell right into place. I typed it like I was channeling it from somewhere else.

I became the party girl. I drank tons of alcohol with no hangovers. I became promiscuous. I slept with two guys that winter who were attached, such was my indifference to consequences and morality.

Weirdest of all was that I became delusional. Specifically, a couple of incidents where I had correctly guessed information that another person was trying to hide convinced me that I was clairvoyant. My best friend Steve was skeptical. He also raised an eyebrow when I told him about my feelings of specialness, that I was destined for great things, that I was like Jesus. Meanwhile my weight dropped and dropped until it stabilized around 104 pounds. I’m 5′4″.

None of this seemed disturbing to me at the time, of course. I was thrilled not to be depressed, and no doubt the people around me were thrilled as well, but eventually I stopped taking the drug. I don’t remember why, exactly: either it just sort of pooped out on me, or else I thought I was cured and didn’t need it any more.

It was only later — how much later, I’m not sure — that I came to recognize that behavior as manic behavior. No one at the time was alarmed: when the doctor asked me how I was, I said I was doing great, and he’d hand me another prescription. My friends thought I was a regular laugh riot.

Anyway, the doctor in Middlebury listened to all of this, then said, “Hm. SSRIs aren’t supposed to make you manic. The fact that you became manic suggests that you have an underlying bipolar disorder.”

This to me was just further evidence of the stupidity of psychiatrists: how the fuck could I be manic-depressive if I’m never manic? That one manic episode was Prozac-induced. Without Prozac, that kind of behavior was entirely alien to me.

But I didn’t understand until recently that there was such a thing as hypomania, which is much harder to identify. And I didn’t know that some people have bipolar disorder without ever experiencing any mania at all. What distinguishes bipolar depression from regular depression is that it is very intense, particularly the suicidal ideation; moreover, it always, always, comes back and antidepressants on their own don’t do jack shit for it, except sometimes make it worse.

It will be a long while before I can know for sure if I am bipolar, because it seems that there is a lot of tinkering that goes on (roughly two years’ worth, on average, I’ve read) before someone gets the pharmaceutical cocktail just right. So it’s back on the fun fun fun psychoactive merry-go-round once again, but this time with anti-psychotics instead of antidepressants.

Fun fun fun.

A list of five…

…dysfunctional coping mechanisms. When everything else has failed.

1. Run away. The novelty of a new place will jolt you out of it — for a while, anyway. Better if it’s a very foreign country, with a different language and currency, so that the business of getting basic things done requires all your concentration. Another benefit of running away is that the daily embarrassments, awkward moments, and humiliations of life don’t sting as much when you’re abroad: everyone knows you’re a foreigner and they expect you to do stupid stuff because you don’t know any better. And if something really embarrassing or bad happens, you can always just leave the next morning and never go back and there’ll never be anyone to remind you of it.

2. Think about suicide. Many of Nietzsche’s aphorisms make me go, “What the fuck?” but this one is pretty insightful: “’tis always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night.” When the pain is unbearable, it helps to think that you won’t have to put up with it forever. When evening comes and you don’t have the means or the guts, you can just say, “well, we’ll see how I feel when I wake up in the morning.” If the pain is still there, set another appointment and when that time comes, say, “I can stand this for just another 24 hours.” Continue in this manner until the feeling lifts.

3. Trawl for sex on line. Fun fact: when people want sex from you, they’ll be really nice to you. They may, if you’re lucky, compliment you for things you can actually take credit for! And even if what they say is mostly insincere, it’s better than being utterly ignored by the world.

4. Knock yourself out. I was given a few pills ages ago that were supposed to help me kick jet lag (though it probably wasn’t really jet lag, because jet lag does not usually last for three weeks). They’re not actually sedatives, but rather, antidepressants with sedative properties. I don’t know how anyone takes this stuff on a daily basis and remains functional, because the ones I have are the lowest possible dosage and when I crush one and ingest a crumb that’s about one-quarter of the tablet it knocks me flat within ten minutes, and I’m out for twelve to fourteen hours. When I wake up I’m so groggy I can’t think straight about anything. Usually after several days of over-sleeping the feeling lifts enough for me to rejoin society.

5. Television. You’ve watched all six seasons of Show X? Start watching them all over again, from the beginning.

Tsunami

I thought for a long time that will-power alone could conquer the depression. It was purely an environmentally-induced affliction — I mean, who could doubt it was “nurture” rather than “nature”, given the shitty family I was born into? Anyone would be depressed in those circumstances.

Yup, it was all about maintaining an even keel. After a horrible few months of yo-yo moods in 1997 I started 1998 on a totally different foot. Started swimming and more or less gave up alcohol, cigarettes, and men; tried to give up caffeine but the stubborn headaches were too much. This new regimen seemed to work okay for a while, but then I got married. Yo-yo moods once again, though after a while they eventually settled down.

After the roller coaster ride had abated for a couple of years, I felt a sense of pride and satisfaction. I had kicked it! I was well! And I did it without antidepressants or therapy — just force of will.

What I didn’t realize was that throughout all those years I was depressed; I didn’t recognize it as depression because it wasn’t part of a horrible roller coaster of moderate highs (or normal moods) and utter crash. I didn’t find very many activities enjoyable, but this anhedonia, I thought, was just part of my personality and no big deal.

But then I got back on the roller coaster and I’m still on it now. What I’ve realized in the past year is that what other people call “depression” is not what I call “depression”; it’s what I call a normal mood. My depressions are so black and terrifying that people who see them up close usually disappear from my life, including the people who say to me, “if you need someone to talk to, call me. I was depressed myself, after I lost my job/my mother died/I quit the PhD program….”

So now I know better. I can’t control the mood, but I can control my behavior: when it’s really bad I can disappear so that no one else has to see it; at other times, I’ve become quite good at acting like a normal person in the situations where it matters.

But the mood just washes over me and carries me away like a tsunami regardless. Early this year I made some changes to avoid the highs that precipitate the crushing lows: I quit caffeine, reduced the amount of alcohol I drank, and avoided social situations involving more than two or three people, but I’m still stuck in a living hell. I have no control over it. It controls me.