Red Red Whine

I enrolled a little while ago in -R-’s Blog Share.  What’s a blog share?  Well, it’s a delightful idea that only a person ridiculously more patient than I would actually follow through, wherein a bunch of signed up and -R- then assigned everyone a blog and we all write a post about something we’d never put on our own blogs, and the person to whom we were randomly assigned will post it for us, maintaining our identities all the while.  So, tomorrow I will post the list of participants and you can read everyone’s confessions or not-normally-safe-for-blogging topics.  Hell, you’ll probably guess which one is mine, although perhaps not.  I’m still debating what to write about! Should it be a diarrhea-of-the-mouth sort of post all about my in-laws?  Or some deeper confession?  Or about work or simply something I’d prefer y’all not know about me?  Hmmmm.  This is going to take some thinking, I declare.

But – back to the Encyclopedia of Me.  We have moved on to the lovely letter D.  Unfortunately for me, D is for Depression.

 

I can’t remember what year it was when I was diagnosed with major depression, but I think it was around 2002?  Whenever it was, it was not a happy time.  I could go into what all I think contributed to my depression, but frankly I think I’d even bore myself and would most definitely bore you. 

I can definitely tell you I think my depression was worse because, in addition to being depressed, I then berated myself for feeling that way when there are a lot of people in the world in worse circumstances than I was. 

And I can tell you it basically sucked. 

And I can tell you that there are friends to whom I will be eternally grateful for understanding when I declined offers to go out and do something fun because I simply could not fathom the idea of getting out of my pajamas and pretending to socialize because every ounce of energy that I had was already used up pretending to be normal and okay during the work day, and so instead of dragging me out or getting mad at me, those friends brought wine and Trivial Pursuit over to my house or listened to me cry or just simply told me they were there if I needed them. 

Luckily, a friend convinced me to try therapy; even more luckily, I really connected with that therapist.  For months – literally, MONTHS, I went to therapy, cried almost the whole time, and when my therapist told me I was depressed and that I should consider medication, I would ask, “Really?  Are you sure?” and i would be serious.  I don’t know why I had such an issue with it, but I simply couldn’t accept the idea that I would be a person who was depressed.  And when I finally decided to try taking medication (Lexapro, incidentally), it helped.  If I miss a few days of it, I get weepy and irrational, so I know it continues to help.

I don’t talk about my issues with depression a lot, but I try to be as open as possible about my experience with it.  I think I do this partly as my own personal crusade to erase the stigma associated with it and partly…well, I’m not sure why. 

More recently, after two years of phone therapy sessions with my Atlanta therapist, I finally cut that cord and tried a new one – and I really like her.  I’m in a much better place than I was several years ago, but I tend to do better and feel better if I use a combination of therapy AND the medication.  So, one Monday morning when I was heading out of my (very small, 5-person) office to go to my appointment, my co-worker (who I’ve written about before as “UberHipster”) said, “Hey, where are you going?”  I replied, “To an appointment, NosyPants.”  Did it stop there?  No.  Instead, he said, “What kind of appointment?”  Now, at this point, most people would say, “Dude, none of your beeswax.”  (Well, most people would say “business”, not “beeswax”, but you get my point.)  As we all know, I am not “most people”, which means that I was flustered and caught off-guard and therefore thought to myself, “Remember your crusade?” and responded instead with, “It’s an appointment with my therapist.”  From here, the conversation got even more ridiculous.  “What kind of therapy?”  “Talk therapy, like with a psychologist.”  “Really?  What do you talk about?”  Once again, most people would nip this in the bud, but instead, ever-the-crusader, I said, “Well, I’m not going to go into specifics, but I have issues with depression, and even though I’m much better now, I find therapy helpful.”  In response to this, I was met with dead silence.  And discomfort.

Great.

I felt like an asshole most of the day, for making my co-worker feel uncomfortable.  And then it hit me: HE should be feeling like an asshole for asking!  Ask a personal question and you just may receive a personal answer!

The point in all of this is that, more recently, I learned from a friend that my openness about my own experience helped her to seek help for her own issues, and that having me as an example has encouraged her.  And suddenly, instead of feeling uncomfortable or regretful of the fact that, sometimes, my candor makes other people feel uncomfortable, I’m proud of myself for being so open. 

So, if you have any questions, feel free to ask.  If you think you’d like to try therapy but don’t know how to begin finding the right person to go to, I’m happy to make some suggestions or tell you how I found my therapist.  And if you’re going through a rough time yourself, know that there’s at least one other person out there who can sympathize and who can tell you that things CAN get better. 

 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at 2:59 pm and is filed under Miscellany, Pondering. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.