Gordaen's Blog

This post is one in a series about depression. It uses humor and reflection to explain and relate what depression really is. For those who regularly read my blog, you’ve probably noticed that I generally don’t post much that is personal. I debated for a long time about whether I should write about this experience, and finally decided that it can probably help a lot more people than a PHP tutorial or yet another Bush joke. Hopefully some of you out there can benefit from this.

I’m not sure at what point I finally realized it, but I was depressed. It wasn’t the “my best friend passed away” or the “OMG why did they cancel my favorite TV show?” kind of depressed. No, it was a deep, soul-quaking emptiness, an “I don’t even want to play video games” kind of feeling. As humorous as that sounds, video games had always been a great way for me to unwind and escape (much like a good book or movie). I even lost the desire to escape.

The decision to seek medical help was an extremely difficult one. Like most guys, I don’t like medicine or going to the doctor’s. I have my own unique thoughts on nutrition (steak > salad * 100) and medication, but I’m not sure why I dislike going to see doctors so much. Maybe it’s the trusting someone to know more about my body than I do even though that person has to look at a chart to remember my name. Or, it could be the subconscious understanding that C’s get degrees and being right three-fourths of the time is good enough for that. Being taken care of by someone who is utterly wrong 25% of the time feels a lot like Russian Roulette. Somehow, I don’t think the doctors who earned all A’s in school are likely to be taking care of my health for the pennies that I pay.

The doctor assured me that I had taken the most important step and that was really good. Being critical, I didn’t think making the doctor’s appointment was more important than working on a solution. If I weren’t depressed, I might have used the energy it takes to worry that maybe enthusiasm can boost medical students’ grades from D’s to C’s. For those keeping track, that puts my Russian Roulette chances at about one in three. Then the doctor prescribed Lexapro. *BANG* (or some other gunshot-like onomatopoeia keying my Russian Roulette metaphor in such a clever way).

The good: The depression was gone. The bad? After several dizzy days, everything was gone. No depression. No joy. No anger. No excitement. No desire.

I had never been the kind of person to think much of emotions, despite relying on them so heavily for the poems I wrote. But life without emotions is like an over-cooked steak, dry and disappointing. Without emotions, you can’t have desires. Lexapro made me feel like life was pointless, but it was so zombifying that I couldn’t even care enough to want to be dead, let alone contemplate suicide. If I were on train tracks with a train coming from a mile away while on that medication, I don’t know if I could have cared enough to move. Life felt like a chain of inconsequential events.

I took the medication because I was told to. I went to the equivalent of a counselor because I was told to. I listened to his pro-military answers. His thought: “Maybe if you reenlist and cross-train into another career field, you’ll feel better.” My thought: “Maybe if I hit you I’ll feel better.” The mandatory question: “Are you now having or have you ever had thoughts of harming yourself or others?” The mandatory answer: “Of course not!”

Somehow I made it to the end of my enlistment. Unfortunately two of my outprocessing appointments overlapped and my appointment with the VA rep. was cancelled. I called but never received a reply, so that appointment was not rescheduled and I left the military with a small supply of my anti-depressant (more like anti-life) medication.

I drove from the South to the Pacific Northwest. My medicine soon ran out, but the depression’s return was delayed because I kept so busy. A few weeks into college, it returned. Having a psychotic roommate probably didn’t help. He wasn’t the good kind of crazy. He was the “wake up in the middle of the night with him standing above me” kind. Unfortunately, that was actually one of the more tolerable things he did. If I had had any Lexapro left, I would have found a way to get it into his system, one way or another.

More to come in the next post…