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August
13, 2001
The day begins.
Another day of blankly staring out
the window, working out my drugged, drunk, inhaler-bingeing, allergy
pill saturated, I’ll-take-two-Tylenol-today, thank-you-very-much
semi-waking coma, and trying to decide the answer to the following
question: should I get up, or go back to bed?
Usually around 1:00 in the afternoon
the latter wins and I roll out of bed, take a shower, and begin
having thoughts that I feel the compulsive need to slam onto a computer
screen typing with two fingers that no longer grow nails at ninety
words a minute. Thoughts like these, the sort of thoughts which
provide just enough stimulation to keep me awake but not quite enough
to keep me interested...but I am awake, so I might as well do something
with it, because a majority of Americans are not, though their income
is sufficiently greater than mine, which is at present, a big fat
zero.
Though I speak in a melancholy tone
and could certainly be described as “brooding” it’s hard to say
whether or not such emotions are genuine or something that I have
adopted as a result of writing and identifying as a writer for as
long as I can remember...that, coupled with being the perfect age
(14) when the teen-angsty sour bliss of groups like Nirvana and
Pearl Jam became big and suddenly the dark and depressing poetry
that filled notebook after notebook after notebooks morphed from
being depressing into being hip.
But if my broodingness is a result of adopting the persona
of a writer, I have to admit I have at least partially failed, because
I have no partner in alcoholism or drug addiction to fuel my spastic
rants...only a promise from a psychiatrist quick to diagnose and
write prescriptions and slow to help that I am, in fact, bi-polar
and therefore was born excused.
Which brings me to my point in ranting,
because see, I discovered in the course of being that after I escaped
teenagedom and therefore teen angst and moved about my life and
label of Generation X, at
no point did the emotion fade...even after music morphed from being
depressing, hung-over, strung out and hopeless journal entries about
being a “Creep,” or a “party star,” to catchy radio friendly skip-a-thons
punctuated with “mmm-bops” and “zig-a-zig-ahhs.” What has changed is that I’ve lost my people
to a world of SUV’s and super-sizing it, to plastic Tupperware containers
now masquerading under the name of “Rubbermaid,” to tell-all autobiographies
of so-called stars that I couldn’t give a damn about until they’re
dead and die in threes; because they have either “lightened up”
or retreated to a cocktail of zoloft, prozac, paxil, welbutrin,
depakote, or whatever tub-of-fun bored-looking doctors are dispensing
to people that describe themselves as something other than perfectly
happy these days. And me? Well, I am still a writer...the only thing
that has changed is that I now buy more expensive notebooks and
use exclusively fountain pens to write my terribly depressing (and
now utterly un-hip) brooding poetry.
But speaking of prescription drugs,
I must admit that I’ve tried such things.
Yes, I too noticed when brooding ceased to be cool, when
psychotic episodes were no longer considered socially accepted wooing
tools and were instead...well, psychotic.
And I responded as I should, and accepted by bottle of little
blue pills (oh, can I call them “dolls” in honor of Valley of the
Dolls, can I? Can I?) and proceeded to take Zoloft for three
solid years. For that period
of time, I was utterly void of emotion, save for the occasional
bout with rage I met during more eventful moments of the month when
I was riding the so-called crimson wave.
I could end relationships, fight with friends, (or not have
any at all), and it all left me at zero, where I was quite comfortable--nothing
to be gained, and nothing to lose.
I find it funny that we hear story after story about the
long term (and short term) effects of illegal drugs, but the ones
that are legal, well, they can rot our brains out for all anyone
cares, as long as someone heading a major corporation is making
a buck off of it. They made
a buck off of me, and all I got out of it was an on-going feeling
of anxiety that if I should ever choose to stop taking such things,
I would go completely fucking bonkers. Sleep well, and enjoy the roller coaster ride
of chaotic dream space which will surely accompany the medication
cocktail. Sleep well. Yeah right.
When the all-mighty Zoloft ceased to
perform properly (if it ever performed for me at all) and I was
no longer able to dupe the doctors at the student health center
into giving me everything short of heroin, just because I wanted
it, I ended up going to a shrink who apparently knew everything
about the chemical make-up of my brain after one ultra-revealing
fifteen minute session. This
woman then proceeded to prescribe for me everything short of daily
shock treatments and a full-frontal lobotomy in order to ease my
aching brain. She gave me
zyprexa (to treat the hallucinations I wasn’t having) and depakote
(to create hallucinations, and make the zyprexa more fun). All I told her was that I was crabby and moody.
But wait, I feel I haven’t truly revealed
to the reader the depths of these drugs. In order to give you some insight, I’ll refer to an HBO special
about Bellview Medical Hospital in New York that I had the pleasure
of viewing, thanks to my little sister Rachael.
One particular fellow featured spent the duration of the
film periodically stopping, looking around, and then announcing
over and over again (sometimes for hours at a time) “I hate this
place...nothing works here...I’ve been here for seven years.”
He was on depakote.
Any moron (let alone someone who spent
years in school studying such things) would know that this stuff
wasn’t for me. Periodically
having the urge to knock a middle aged business man with a Frappacino
in his hand down a flight of stairs doesn’t make me psychotic...it
makes me observant. And Zyprexa? Zyprexa is what they give you if you spend an afternoon wandering
around a Wal-Mart parking lot with no shoes on because you’re convinced
your sofa is about to eat your hand.
Depakote is what they give you if for whatever reason it
becomes necessary for you to be rendered completely immobile for
the majority of the day, save for the occasional drunken-sounding
warbling. Me? I was crabby. Constantly. Period.
I never took the zyprexa, but I took
Depakote for about two weeks. During
that time I stumbled the streets, Jim Morrison style, spouting off
what I supposed were Bibles full of truth with no concept of any
beginning or ending or logic to what I was saying-- just an awareness
of words happening that I felt were far more poetic than reality
could possibly handle. Man, I had peaked, brother, and the words I
was saying...you know, I was deep before, but man, these words were
river deep!
Little did I know...
Two weeks later, off the crack, into
life head first, dealing with it...
See, medication is dangerous because
it prevents you from properly observing your surroundings...it doesn’t
introduce you to them, it doesn’t allow you to see them more clearly,
which is what they would like you to believe.
It allows you to see them through a mask of chemicals that
creates a sort of dependence that leaves the average ingester to
wonder “can I really live without them? Can I function in society?”
It dulls everything to the point where you don’t know if
you are actually feeling better, or if you have fooled yourself
into believing that you are. And
you can’t stop, because the meds have received all the credit, you
certainly couldn’t have done any work now, could you? Not
you! Not crazy, crazy you.
And everyone in America is taking these
things. Sure, Elizabeth
Wurtzel wrote a book and called it “Prozac Nation” while failing
to mention anyone other than herself, but there is some truth to
this title.
So why are so many prescriptions being
written? It seems that when
they are dispensed to interested individuals (which is just about
everybody, which makes me laugh, since we are living in “say no
to drugs” USA) the doctors handing out prescriptions more often
than not fail to take into account individual circumstances which
might have caused depression to take place.
For example, say you go to a shrink
and tell them that your husband just left you with three kids that
pay no attention to you, you have no job and no skills to obtain
one, are collecting welfare, and your mother just died.
Pretty bad fucking day, if you ask me.
But nothing zoloft can’t cure, right?
See, from what I have offered the reader, however, there
is nothing mentally wrong with this person: she’s a perfectly functional
human being responding to circumstances.
This is normal.
Normal people are taking my pills.
They are ruining my bad name.
Fuckers.
But regardless as to whether or not
sane or insane people are popping pills, the question that no one
seems to be asking (or at the very least, answering) is why we are
all so fucking depressed. Is
it because everything that has become the basis of our lives is
something that serves to further distance us from humanity?
From working in tightly sealed off cubicles, to watching
other people live out lives that we ourselves don’t live on television,
to talking to one another with imagined selves over the internet,
none of us are real anymore--right down to our emotions, which our
manufactured, courtesy of a collection of dulling pills, promising
to make everything okay. And
we should be okay, right? After
all, this is the most prosperous country in the world, right? This is the land of the free, the home of the
brave, where there’s a VCR made in China and a computer in every
house, where there’s jobs and junk food for everyone, where the
women are thin and beautiful and tan, where the men are wealthy
and well-dressed and gainfully employed, where the movies have million
dollars budgets and the actors million dollar salaries, where everyone
has a chance to be something, right? Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Clause. So what if it doesn’t happen? Or what if it does, and you’re not happy anyway?
Perhaps I have just discovered the secret to the popularity
of “American Beauty.”
Americans
are like the window shoppers of life--always looking at things,
but never buying anything, but dreaming and desiring, wishing they
had just enough to have that one big thing. That
one big thing almost always being material, never spiritual or emotional,
just a big, fat, plastic thing to place on their a shelf, the thing
most missed in event of a house fire will be a blue light special
at Kmart in ten years. And the ones that want something else, something
spiritual and not material, are in even bigger trouble because they
can’t buy it at Kmart, and it will never be a blue light special,
so that means they really, really have to look, and none of us want
to do that. Hence, why things like reality TV have become
so popular, and computer games like the Sims. Such things allow people to experience living life without actually
having to live: from the comforts of their own home they’re allowed
inside the emotional turbulence, the gossip, the ups and downs,
the drama of a newly born relationship--and they never have to cry
or feel badly about themselves or anything that hurts.
They have the perks of life without the pains.
Or so one could be lead to believe.
In a little while the program will end, and now what?
But I imagine these are all things
that have been said before (and often times better) so why should
I reiterate what you already know and try to claim it as my own
personal deep thought in order to best reflect how...not well-read
I am. This may bring us closer to understanding why the kids of America
are down and dirty depressed (though their music no longer reflects
it as well), why folks have mid-life crises and leave their spouses
and buy cars and go on cruises...because there is simply nothing
significant from day to day in order to inspire that sense of wonder
that we are all utterly convinced our grandparents felt.
We may be closer to understanding why a pill is just a pill
and not an encapsulated miracle to make it all better, and why work
of any sort (emotional or otherwise) bums most of us out, but it
doesn’t tell you much of anything about bitter, boring old me.
Since I cannot speak on behalf of America, but am authorized
to speak on behalf of myself, perhaps there is something to be said
here.
Sometimes I think I came out of the
womb depressed, or that at the very least something went wrong somewhere
between cell division and the ungraceful exit, because I don’t remember
comfort. Something tells
me that I was probably bitching in the womb about how damn dark
it was, and that on the way out my only thought was, “it’s all downhill
from here.” I have found that my depression is sometimes
enhanced by different things, like birth control pills and alcohol,
and sometimes is lessened by other things, like a good life, ecstasy,
and the presence of God. A good life, well, who can argue that, is directly
dependent on whether or not I feel a strong presence of God, which
is why I choose to live in Athens.
See, here, when I wake up in the morning and look around
at the hills and the trees and see people smile and say hello, I
feel a very real connection with God.
When I go to some shitty city with gray buildings and gray
cars and gray people doing gray things and it’s all very GRAY GRAY
GRAY I can’t help but think that God is not known there, and shucks
the people seem unhappy, and therefore it becomes within my best
interest to just go somewhere else.
When I say ecstasy, I mean the drug,
but of course it manifests in a variety of forms. The peak moment of orgasm where your spirit lifts a couple of inches
from your body and your heart pounds and you feel that a moment
more of pleasure will surely lead to death and you’re not sure if
your willing to make such a sacrifice for pleasure...but you do
anyway. To fall in love, and stare at another person with such a growing
sense of awe that it seems impossible to get close enough to that
person, unless you are able to somehow curl up inside them and call
it home. A cat curled up in your lap, purring like a
motorboat, just because you are a person with a lap, and that’s
kinda nice. The feeling
of ink hitting paper from the smooth flow of a fountain pen, moving
without restraint across a greedy, empty page, swallowing each word
and holding it fast to the once blank canvas, where I have suddenly
appeared.
This, this is ecstasy, this, this is
living.
Depression, is not, it’s being awake,
but not really, it’s moving, but not a lot, it’s working towards
being but not, only floating, hovering above the ideal and watching. A genuine, long term depression is difficult
to feel comfortable in, because it seems to have it’s roots in melodrama,
and though your emotions more often than not are very real and are
things that need to be dealt with and addressed both in your sleeping
and waking selves, you quickly become annoying both to yourself
and those around you. After all, everyone has heard your endless
whining about your unfortunate circumstances or your inner demons,
has listened through your bedroom door as you play the soundtrack
of your life, which consists largely of left-over CDs from the now
long-dead, aforementioned grunge era, has watched you stay home
while others go out for no other reason other than “because.”
At some point, this is no longer interesting, so what do
you do when you don’t feel better, after you’re already boring and
it’s no longer something your sarcastic sense of humor can save?
Perhaps this is a good time to, at the very least, pretend
to be happy for the sake of being alive, if not in spirit, then
at least in appearance, and hope that the more favorable one rubs
off on the other.
I wish I could say this worked, but
it really doesn’t, though there have been times when (poof) I’ve
snapped out of it, just like that (poof).
This, of course, is known as mania, and hell yeah it’s all
better. Fuck yeah I’m the life of the party, yes I
will have another beer, hey, I’ve got a joke too, and mine is better,
hell yeah I wanna dance, as a matter of fact, I wanna dance on the
bar, so clear your glasses off fellas cause I’m on my way up!
And I certainly have something to say and something to write
and a new gospel to preach and a new idea to meditate on (if I could
sit still long enough to do such things) and a marathon to train
for and a performance to rehearse.
I...am...on, and damn it, during this time I suffer little
more than occasional bouts with embarrassment. Mania is a hell of a place to be...unfortunately,
it barely makes it through to the third round. Depression is the heavy weight champ.
I suppose there is a middle ground,
one that I know at this very moment, when I write this, when I revise
this. A sort of solid center
space that is rarely visited. There
is no stress or pressure or need to be....there is just being, in
the present, there is just the verb to be.
When I am there my only distraction is wondering how long
it will last, before another something extreme kicks in, before
another something happens, before it is winter and lack of sun and
lack of warmth leads to lack of me.
Depression...sometimes there’s is no
snap of mania to insure a pendulum swing.
Sometimes it just comes out of nowhere: no reason, no cause
to the effect, it’s just there, wrapping your head in a wet towel
and sticking you out in the snow storm.
Sometimes there’s a number of causes, but whether there’s
a cause or not, you’re going to look for one...and look and look
and look and look. You’ll
make up stuff if you have to. You’ll
tell your friends that you were thinking about how your dog got
hit by a car when you were twelve, and then you packed Fluffy into
the back of the station wagon and raced to the vet, and Fluffy almost
made it, and then he didn’t. And
that, that just brought you down, just brought you down a little
low, so you should probably be by yourself for awhile, they probably
shouldn’t expect much communication, they probably shouldn’t be
surprised if you let the phone ring and ring and ring...
But when I am off and not on, what
wakes me up at night is not a feeling of gloom and doom but one
of acute paranoia. Oh, how
quickly your best friend becomes your worst enemy as they stand
outside your door, knocking, knocking, knocking.
How suspicious it becomes to hear laughter from others, to
see the mischievous smile, to see such looks that could quickly
lead to feelings weighed down with accusations. I was at a party once, and I remember a dull,
sad feeling creeping into me because the person taking pictures
chose to take none of me. In
my mind, this was not an accident, it was a decision, a decision
to exclude me not just from their photographic catalogue, but from
their memory. It took root in my head and grew branches of sadness, fueled by
the chemicals swirling through my brain, and it lead to a very restless
night.
And even now, I can’t help but wonder
if to talk about this, does it give it power, does it allow it to
take root, or am I expelling my demons?
Is that what I am doing?
Is that the source of that lump in my throat?
This, this is a long term project,
because there’s no way to complete any discussion of depression,
of manic depression (or the more politically correct bi-polar disorder)
in a couple of lazily crafted pages composed during some sort of
happily dull in-between phase.
What this is, is a desire to communicate the goings-on of
my brain, to bring it to other people in order to give them a glimpse
of what it’s like to turn off and on and only occasionally feel
conscious of being. The
trick I am trying to play is to incorporate it into
my being in such a way that I truly accept it as not a visiting
stranger, but rather a part of my psyche that I can entertain or
reign back at will...that is what many hope to do with medication,
with therapy sessions featuring a mildly interested individual making
more money in an hour than I do in a day, things I can’t afford
and don’t want. This is
my stubborn self expression, the emperor’s new clothes, this is
seeing is believing, or so I think.
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