i got my liver, got my blood
I have something to come clean about before any of the past four years makes sense. As a preface, I apologize to people who thought they knew me.
Folks, I have been depressed. And not just blue for the past four years. It's been pretty monolithic, like a letter of the alphabet. Like D-pression. And, sadly, it came to define me. Or rather, sucked out any substance I characteristically identified with myself until there was nothing but this void left, and that's all I had to act on.
I'm a lot better now. Better enough to not feel humiliated to cop to this. For whatever reason there was a physical cause, likely brought on by a tremendous amount of stress after my first year at college that ended up knocking my hormones completely out of balance. For the record, clinical depression is traditionally associated with an imbalance of neurotransmitters. If anything, I was menopausal.
The clinical term for the mindset I was under during all of this is emotional distancing, but if it was up to me to give it a name, it'd be emotional mutedness. It's difficult to explain to anyone what it's like to be that numb if they haven't experience it for themselves, but basically any sort of sensation was lost on me. For four years I didn't have emotional reactions to anything, even extreme stimulus, and it ultimately affected my ability to reason, discern, and think for myself. I cried at sad movies that I had seen before because I remembered them being sad, but they no longer made anything within me resonate. Nothing moved me. Whenever I laughed I thought less about the joke and more about all the air I was deliberately forcing out of my lungs to sound like I was enjoying myself. The worst part is, I couldn't fall in love.
There were a lot of factors that contributed to my staying so consistently down. I went to doctors about the physical symptoms that began to surface as a result of all that ennui, and pretty much everyone had the same response: You're too young for this to happen. Yes, I know, that's the problem. My muscles began cramping because my body was no longer producing whatever it is that keeps them from cramping--during my junior year of college it got so bad sometimes I couldn't walk. I had to give up jogging after I picked it up post-graduation because I was showing early signs of osteoporisis. On a less forboding note, the consistency of my spit changed and I couldn't taste food as well! Fortunately, dim-witted taste buds made it that much easier to drink.
I surrounded myself with horrible, horrible people. To clarify, these people themselves weren't horrible, but they were the absolute worst people I could have chosen to associate with. Selfish people, weak-minded people, insecure people who clung to whatever comrades in misery they could latch themselves on to. For four years I had sundry sycophants when what I needed most was a friend. On the other side of the coin, all of my actual friends were very, very far away from the suburban hell of Canadian mediocrity. I subconsciously picked the most self-absorbed and thoughtless people to be my friends, since they made it that much easier to hide what I was dealing with since they didn't care about me enough to notice something was wrong. It was horrible driving back to the town I went to high school in when I was 22. To see the looks on my old friend's faces, to tell that they knew they didn't know the person I had become, but didn't want to hurt my feelings and kept it to themselves.
I could go on about the downsides. They're probably more interesting to read about. But, in the interest of timely chronicling, here's what's going on right now.
I started taking some medication to help balance out my hormones. Jesus fucking Christ, do I love medication. Or this stuff, at least. And now that I'm getting more and more back to where I was, all these things I used to feel are bubbling up at the most unexpected intervals. It's like these emotions I didn't feel for four years were always in my system, just invisible to me, stock-piling until they day they could get out.
So now it's actually kind of funny. I have a lot of great, incredibly supportive people in my life now, and when one of them tells a joke, I laugh until it makes people around us uncomfortable. I can be sitting and start to giggle at how good it is to not be down. The other day I watched a sitcom where one of the main characters died, and I cried actual tears for the first time in roughly 1,200 days. It wasn't even that sad, I just need a good opportunity to be expressive (heh).
And I realized I'm in love. I had a really good hunch that I was, I just couldn't physically feel it. And now I can, like the door of a big cage of butterflies in my gut has just been let up. And there's so much emotion coming out of me right now, I honestly don't know what to do with it. So I'm jogging again, and singing in outdoor voices outdoors. I'm making plans and feeling restless if I stay cooped up. I'm finishing books and remembering how they end, and I'm back into talking on the phone again. And I'm buying CD's! Did you know I didn't buy a CD for close to 2 years? My god.
And no, for all you cynics out there, this isn't me being manic. This is me being back after a very long time away with the answering machine turned off.
Folks, I have been depressed. And not just blue for the past four years. It's been pretty monolithic, like a letter of the alphabet. Like D-pression. And, sadly, it came to define me. Or rather, sucked out any substance I characteristically identified with myself until there was nothing but this void left, and that's all I had to act on.
I'm a lot better now. Better enough to not feel humiliated to cop to this. For whatever reason there was a physical cause, likely brought on by a tremendous amount of stress after my first year at college that ended up knocking my hormones completely out of balance. For the record, clinical depression is traditionally associated with an imbalance of neurotransmitters. If anything, I was menopausal.
The clinical term for the mindset I was under during all of this is emotional distancing, but if it was up to me to give it a name, it'd be emotional mutedness. It's difficult to explain to anyone what it's like to be that numb if they haven't experience it for themselves, but basically any sort of sensation was lost on me. For four years I didn't have emotional reactions to anything, even extreme stimulus, and it ultimately affected my ability to reason, discern, and think for myself. I cried at sad movies that I had seen before because I remembered them being sad, but they no longer made anything within me resonate. Nothing moved me. Whenever I laughed I thought less about the joke and more about all the air I was deliberately forcing out of my lungs to sound like I was enjoying myself. The worst part is, I couldn't fall in love.
There were a lot of factors that contributed to my staying so consistently down. I went to doctors about the physical symptoms that began to surface as a result of all that ennui, and pretty much everyone had the same response: You're too young for this to happen. Yes, I know, that's the problem. My muscles began cramping because my body was no longer producing whatever it is that keeps them from cramping--during my junior year of college it got so bad sometimes I couldn't walk. I had to give up jogging after I picked it up post-graduation because I was showing early signs of osteoporisis. On a less forboding note, the consistency of my spit changed and I couldn't taste food as well! Fortunately, dim-witted taste buds made it that much easier to drink.
I surrounded myself with horrible, horrible people. To clarify, these people themselves weren't horrible, but they were the absolute worst people I could have chosen to associate with. Selfish people, weak-minded people, insecure people who clung to whatever comrades in misery they could latch themselves on to. For four years I had sundry sycophants when what I needed most was a friend. On the other side of the coin, all of my actual friends were very, very far away from the suburban hell of Canadian mediocrity. I subconsciously picked the most self-absorbed and thoughtless people to be my friends, since they made it that much easier to hide what I was dealing with since they didn't care about me enough to notice something was wrong. It was horrible driving back to the town I went to high school in when I was 22. To see the looks on my old friend's faces, to tell that they knew they didn't know the person I had become, but didn't want to hurt my feelings and kept it to themselves.
I could go on about the downsides. They're probably more interesting to read about. But, in the interest of timely chronicling, here's what's going on right now.
I started taking some medication to help balance out my hormones. Jesus fucking Christ, do I love medication. Or this stuff, at least. And now that I'm getting more and more back to where I was, all these things I used to feel are bubbling up at the most unexpected intervals. It's like these emotions I didn't feel for four years were always in my system, just invisible to me, stock-piling until they day they could get out.
So now it's actually kind of funny. I have a lot of great, incredibly supportive people in my life now, and when one of them tells a joke, I laugh until it makes people around us uncomfortable. I can be sitting and start to giggle at how good it is to not be down. The other day I watched a sitcom where one of the main characters died, and I cried actual tears for the first time in roughly 1,200 days. It wasn't even that sad, I just need a good opportunity to be expressive (heh).
And I realized I'm in love. I had a really good hunch that I was, I just couldn't physically feel it. And now I can, like the door of a big cage of butterflies in my gut has just been let up. And there's so much emotion coming out of me right now, I honestly don't know what to do with it. So I'm jogging again, and singing in outdoor voices outdoors. I'm making plans and feeling restless if I stay cooped up. I'm finishing books and remembering how they end, and I'm back into talking on the phone again. And I'm buying CD's! Did you know I didn't buy a CD for close to 2 years? My god.
And no, for all you cynics out there, this isn't me being manic. This is me being back after a very long time away with the answering machine turned off.