For Every Season There's A Time

 Entry 1

Depression Is: When your bed is your second home.

"Bed is our solace, it's where we go to think, to hide, to cope with whatever has us down. Sometimes we go there and hope we don't wake up, or at least when we do, our depression has subsided."

The above quote from the Depression Is substack is a good reminder of why my bed is often my office, my place of contemplation, my base of operations these days. I like to tell myself I am just a bit blue, all the while evidencing the circular travels around a cul-de-sac of emotions. It's a bit like wallowing in shit without the enjoyment a pig gets out of such a roll. The best I can say about today is that I am up, out of the bedroom, bathed, brushed and working. That feels like an accomplishment. 

I didn't realize when I was growing up, how tiny our 800 square foot home was. It is small enough for one person, but as many as six or seven lived in that place. I remember when I first experienced what in retrospect was depression. I was 14, in 9th grade, with a mad crush on this sweet young woman in my grade. The feeling was not requited. I was alone in 9th grade, had no close friends at school, and had guys bullying me for the first time in my life. I felt so alone, and so inadequate in every way. I was lost. 

So, somehow, I determined this girl wasn't into me--she wasn't alone--but it felt like the end of the world. It was a straw, if not the last straw, that broke the camel's back. At some point, it

My coat was close to this color.

must have been the weekend because it was light outside that Winter, albeit gray and rainy, when I pulled myself away from sobbing in my room about my sorry lot, grabbed my portable tape recorder--back then portable tape recorders were about as small as an illuminated Bible from the 16th Century--walked past people watching television in the front room, and went out to my mom's 1976 Dodge Dart. The color of the car was what we called puce, but that was incorrect because puce is the color of a dried and faded bloodstain, apparently, while this car's paint looked closer to the color of an overripe D'Anjou pear. I didn't have keys to start the car but was wearing my puffy tan raincoat with the giant blue V on the back to keep me warm.

My coat had this pattern.

In the car, I recorded my feelings about the girl, and how much I "loved" her and hated my life. I sobbed as if someone had died. I sobbed as if I were dying. I had been carrying around this soul crushing weight of feeling I was less than, but with no one with whom to share it. The pain from the incessant bullying I was experiencing each day in math and PE from these asshole bullies, unrequited crushing and my abject feelings of isolation ran down my face as hot tears. I cried so hard I couldn't catch my breath, I couldn't keep recording. I remember pounding that hard 1970s steering wheel. I remember the windows so steamed up that I couldn't see outside. 

I must have been in that car, and inside my head, for two hours, before coming in the house. I had cried so hard that my nose, which had been stuffed by a cold, was completely clear. My eyes were bloodshot, my throat raw. Even at that young age, I knew that crying like this, which I had never done before, was beyond the norm. I didn't know about depression--except my mom had a paperback, The Bell Jar, by some writer who had a tendency toward depression, killed herself. I walked into my room , kicked off my shoes and fell asleep in the lower bunk bed. It would be 7 years before I would be diagnosed with depression, another 3 before I took any medication for it. 

Today, after living with this soul sucking leech for so long, I still am at its mercy at times all of the time currently.

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Entry 2

Love Can Make You Happy And Love Can Rob You Blind

This enforced hermitage does have one advantage, if I am honest. I am immersed in as much music as I am solitude. Fittingly, Kate Wolf's Redtail Hawk is playing as I write this. But, so have a lot of the other songs off this journal's playlist and a lot of AJ Lee if I am honest. I explored why I sink into this solitudinous state with my therapist some years ago. At the end of my high school career, I had more friends than an LSD dealer at a Dead concert. Corey died five days after I graduated, and I immediately went into protective mode. I spent the next year or so with very few people, my friendships dwindling down to fewer and fewer people. I was friendly enough, and even spent time with people, but the world was still not right for me. A piece of me that other people have was and is missing. I built a wall of enforced distance. It wasn't intentional--or thought out. I just functioned better without anyone that I could lose to disappointment or death. It got ridiculous. 

The thing that kept me from spiraling was the loving kindness of the women I dated. My deep narcissistic tendencies--which I would like to chalk up to being a 20-something male, but that is a cop-out--made me little appreciate the loving kindness and sacrifices these women made for me. The joyous memories, the clear happiness of my 20-something days that I remember today, are because of them.

But, when that ended, and after I started dating Jenny, I realized I could have a girlfriend and go back to that solitary cave-dweller. That is what I did. That is what I did. I shed any semblance of friendship with others, and lived a life of bliss alone with books and my vast collection of music. I had achieved what I wanted or what I thought I wanted. I read political tomes, I read every article I could find on a dozen subjects, I rode my bike on the Burke Gilman alone and really was alone. I was incredibly unhappy, however and abjectly so at times. I didn't know I had terrible anxiety. I didn't understand that I had depression. I just didn't get it. 

Was it an act of divine grace that caused the bicycle accident all those years ago while in my merry solitude which led to me being invited into a double blind study of people with head injuries to try Zoloft (or a placebo)? It was a turning point.

I ramble. I need some sort of intervention again, all these years later. I am tired of being alone all the time, but too anxious to do anything about it. I don't want to die alone, I don't want to be the hermit who everybody in the neighborhood called a nice guy but never knew.