depression

Clinical depression, that is. The kind that recurs and will not go away without medical intervention.

What does it feel like? For me, it isn't a "sadness," as such - people who have never experienced it don't understand this - oftentimes it is just a deadness. A lack of emotion. No pleasure, anger, anything. Other times it is an overwhelming feeling of doom or hopelessness. Before I sought treatment for it (before I knew what I had) I would be overcome by it a few times a year; once in a great while it would explode in what I called a "rage." I would smash things, throw things, break things; throw things in the trash that were perfectly good. During my last great "rage," after my wife and I split up, I guess I blacked out; for months, I didn't know what had happened to my telephone. It was gone. When spring came and the snow melted, I found some rusted metal objects in the burn pile that led me to believe that I probably burned the phone in with the trash. Weird.

What triggers it? Sometimes nothing. It just happens. Other times frustration, physical pain, psychological trauma (like when my wife left). All I know for sure is this: for the vast majority of my life, from my earliest memories until my mid-thirties, it was always there. Lurking, waiting, dominating every day of my life with thoughts of death. I wasn't diagnosed until my mid-thirties; until then I just thought I was miserable, and self-medicated with cannabis, alcohol, hallucinogens, and anything else I could get. When I decided to get sober I knew that it couldn't be done without treating the depression as well, and I couldn't get a doctor to treat my depression unless I got sober. Catch-22.

WTF?
OK, so I was on the bus today, headed downtown. Twenty-minute trip, right? Try an HOUR! The freaking Florida State University Homecoming Parade was going on right downtown, from 2 to 4 pm on Friday afternoon! Friday! When people work and drive around in massive numbers! There is no expressway around Tallahassee, everybody drives through the city. Today, they essentially parked in 4-lane columns and kept the buses locked in with them.

So who is the idiot who decided to hold the parade TODAY? There were a lot of unhappy people on the buses, let me tell you. People on their way to work at service jobs, who don't work your standard 9 to 5 hours; the bus drivers, who had to deal with irate passengers and nasty traffic; people on their way to doctor's appointments. It was ugly, man, ugly. No wonder there's a riot at the mall every year on Homecoming weekend. I was ready to pop off at somebody, I was pissed. And I wasn't even in a hurry to get anywhere.