Well, I'm fighting the good fight. And it's going... okay, some of the time. It’s just the damn seasonal depression has got me so down. The thing is: I really wanted it to not get me this time, not here, not here in our exciting new town, not here in our new life. But here I am and here It is, and it's the same as all the other years- insidious and gripping- and it reminds me of all the other years, which makes me feel even more shitty because I have this insane idea that I should have gotten over it by now, that it's something I should naturally grow out of. I thought this tendency in me must be diminishing a little each year, going the way of my collagen, but boy did I have another think coming. Now I’m left with just as much angst, but significantly less of the plump-faced youth that helped me pull off angst so poetically in the past. At my age the cancerous, obese, hypertensive reality of depression starts to set in, and it’s not a very pleasant aspect.
Not that it was ever so rad, before, the depression. Looking back now it is woefully apparent how major a role the seasonal blues played in my dropping out of school all those times. At the time I was just taking it day by day, not recognizing my own patterns, but now it seems so clear- if I had only been on a quarter system and skipped the middle quarters, or if I only I had gone to college in southern California instead of in Utah- I might have earned a degree after all. I might have slept around more while I was still in my early twenties, too. That would have been fun.
Last year I didn’t get the depression so bad. I got it, but I was so busy with work and family and social engagements and so distracted by all the righteous fury I was building up toward my insane, abusive boss that I didn’t have time to sink into the usual ennui. Instead I just developed general anxiety and routine bouts of irritable bowels. Also I was out in the daylight birding or on the farm almost every weekend and I have to consider that that helped a whole giant lot at the time.
This year I’m mad because the shit sneaked up on me in a mean, sudden way. I was doing fine, we were all fine, it was a fun year, I liked our town and we had a lot of visitors and everything was moving along and then I had this desultory Christmas and I just couldn’t get feeling festive. By the time we went to New York for New Year’s weekend I had completely lost all inclination to socialize and spent the weekend not talking to people and getting angry at Stan for no reason and crying all over Brooklyn. Even then I still didn’t get that This was It and it wasn’t until last weekend, the better part of which I spent in the apartment just sitting, staring, doing nothing (me not typically being a do-nothing kind of gal, when I am well anyway), without even the least inkling of a desire or idea swimming around in the fog that I began to consider that I may be depressed.
On Monday It began to affect my work, and that was the final straw. I cannot be low-functioning at this job. I cannot be slow or cloudy or God forbid cry- ever- at this job. Not at this firm. Not in this atmosphere of hyper-educated, highly ambitious, workaholic overachievers; I just can’t. Not only will it not fly; it’s not even conceivable. So if there’s not room for me to be foggy on the job, there is certainly not room for me to be abjectly miserable and weeping, or to think seriously every day about calling in sick, or to find I am speaking aloud without realizing it, saying things like, “I have no joy in me now,” because not only is that unacceptable at work but it’s also just really fucking embarrassing.
To be continued...
