Thursday 6 Oct 2011 (posted Fall 2013 and still editing)

The Fall

Tuesday I had fallen to pieces like I hadn't in a couple of years. Maybe it was that bad last year. This was the sixth year in a row that Fall was weighing heavily upon me. Was it like that before that? I don't think so. Maybe it was a vestige of the dread of starting another school year, the bus rides, the recesses, but I can't remember any pattern before this to support that. While I had my moments occasionally there was nothing so distinctive. Whatever the case it has come to be the feeling of another year ending alone.

A day or two later I wanted to get out and maybe speak a word or two at the bar, the Lynnhaven Pub to be exact, a dive with probably the best beer at the beach and a decent, diverse, and not too divey crowd who are more than welcoming. I wrote an outline of the night when I got home, and will leave it at that:

Sometimes I see a facebook post about Depression asking others to pass it on, but I never have. Now I'm passing it on.

That first notable Fall there were only a couple of close friends that knew I was starting to get professional help on the question of why I wasn't living life anywhere near it's fullest (or rather, semi-professional — weekly sessions with EVMS interns, though I cancelled regularly…I think going every single week would have driven me crazy.) After several months they were gone and never asked about it, and I was on my own. I certainly wasn't easy. Maybe it's just like that damn Cimbalta commercial. "Who does depression hurt? Everyone." It definitely hurt me.

One of those residents let slip, or was good enough to let me know that I should have received help as a young teen. There was nothing in my childhood to really talk about or to get over. But what it didthough I didn't realize it for a long timewas make me very bad at and closed off to relationships of any kind. There was plenty of that falling apart all around me to talk about.

Back then I hardly said more than hello to my good friends in the morning and hardly spoke to anyone else. I was very lucky to have two Crazy, Silly friends who kept me going even when I was no fun to be around, though I didn't tell them about this stuff. Then in spring more than three years later I started coming out of it. I took myself off antidepressants. That was bad timing. A good friend in the cycling community killed himself. No one expected it. I couldn't even pay him the proper sorrow. All I could do was walk behind that church after his service and think that it should have been me.

But I did recover enough so that after three and a half years I stopped the weekly sessions and the anti-depressants. I can't say anything great about the sessions or the drugs, just that as long as I was going I wasn't giving up. One of my "homeworks" was to strike up conversations in the grocery store. That just wasn't going to happen. My own version of that was going out to a bar. I hadn't done that by myself before this, and I wasn't really prepared for it.

Fall of 2012 was different. It came and went without incident. I had a girlfriend. The one thing I know how she feels about this site is that she would hate to be made one of my stories. Let me just write, It was far better with you than without you. (PS. Only a few people a year read this website anyway.)

Am I really depressed? "Real depression isn't being sad when something in your life goes wrong. Real depression is being sad when everything in your life is going right." Ha, I may never know! It's not some French ennui or some vague housewifey thing missing in my life (for a good lecture on too often stereotyped, clinical depression listen to Kevin Breel). I know what I'm missing. I'm just having a hard time believing it's out there any more and I'm tired of looking, or maybe I just can't feel enough any more. I'm trying not to become the stereotype of the introvert.

Tuesday 17 Dec 2013 : Rides like this have kept me going at times this fall. Solstice just a few days away...