I'm back (after not blogging since July), and I have a serious subject to discuss as summer wanes and the equinox looms.
Show of hands: how many out there have ever experienced depression?
Okay, those of you who were in a bad mood last weekend because you didn't get the promotion you were counting on, or because your lottery pick was one number off the big winner, or were pissed off because your college football team lost, put your hands down.
I'm not talking about being stressed. I'm not talking about being disappointed. I'm not even talking about the blues.
I'm talking about depression. The big "D." The real deal. That thing that keeps you in bed because it arranges things so you don't even want to get up. That thing that immobilizes you against your will, takes your resolve, your concentration. Your hope. Your hopes. Your belief in the future. Your belief in the present. Your belief in anything.
Sometimes takes a life.
I have a former friend who shares my tendency toward falling into the grip of Old Omnivorous, aka Mr. Sad. He calls people who have never experienced depression "civilians."
Okay, I'll go along with that. Depression sufferers are a sort of army, because we fight an enemy that's powerful, unrelenting at times, and sneaky. Oh, boy is Mr. Sad a sneaky bastard. He waits behind the next garbage can, the next tree. He can jump out at you at any moment.
Except with me. I know when to expect Old Omnivorous.
Now.
I first experienced clinical depression when I was a teenager. Of course I didn't know what it was, then. Neither did my parents. They didn't know what was wrong. I didn't know what was wrong. All I knew was that I was a few weeks short of 16 and my life was over. Ha-ha. Well, it wasn't funny then. What do you say about a kid who comes home from school, puts on his bathrobe and sits in front of the television set, sometimes crying, until it's time to go to bed?
That was me: September, 1971.
Mr. Sad has been back to visit me a number of times since, and as was the case that first time, it's always right around Labor Day that he gets off the bus and checks in. I don't know exactly why, but when depression comes to visit me, it's almost always late August-early September when the games begin.
My doctor says he knows the reason why. Some people do tend to become depressed during the fall. Or in my case, when they see it coming.
My doctor knows more than I do, but my problem with that thesis is, for most of my life fall has been my favorite season. How can something you enjoy make you sad?
Well, for some of us, it's hardwired in, and the hardwiring goes back thousands of years. Spring is a time of renewal, autumn of shutting down. Days grow short. "September...November...," as the song goes.
Yes, but when I was growing up, fall was also the time of a lot of fun stuff. My birthday was in October. Then came Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas. Always something to look forward to. School vacation. Days off. Autumn was fun, once you got past that annoying business of having to go back to school.
But I'm going to be 54 next month. Back-to-school hasn't been part of my life for a good many years. And as we all all know, the older you get, the more the "big picture" intrudes. It's true: at midlife and later, I find that autumn, love it though I may, has become no longer the pageant of fun it was when I was a kid. It's what it always has been: a pageant of glorious, flaming-out color that adds up to one thing: Here Comes Death.
Mr. Sad doesn't come to me every year. No indeed. He has given me wide berths. Sometimes his visits come 10, 12 or 13 years apart.
The thing is, though, the older I get, the more often he shows up, like some sponging relative who's heard that you might have money.
He left me alone last year. I had other things on my mind, I guess.
But the year before last, 2007, I had him hanging around the house, uninvited. I knew he was here because I started listening to Mantovani and Percy Faith. When I, as a music lover, start thinking that anything more emotionally taxing than elevator music is going to be more than I can deal with, something's wrong.
My doctor put me on Lexapro and some other antidepressant. I soldiered through. I even got my act together and dropped 25 pounds.
But between my teen years and 2007, every time Old Omnivorous came poking around my window, almost always about the time of Indian Summer, I simply endured his presence until he went away, usually right after New Year's. Some people's cycles of depression only last a few days. An old friend of mine in this army has these mini-depressions. He's knocked down for two or three days, then he's back up. My cycles tend to last three months. I'm usually coming out of it when the January snows begin to fall.
But the thing is, until two years ago I didn't know what it was like to HAVE help. Sure, I had heard that depression was treatable, but I'd never bothered. I dealt with it by putting myself on routines that bordered on the autistic: turn left, turn right. Put right foot in front of left foot. Go for long walk after work. Return home at fixed hour. Fix dinner.
Crawl under covers and cry. And hope, come morning, you'll be able to get up.
My experience in 2007 was something of a revelation. Help works. Depression does respond to medication.
Shortly after getting that help, I was sufficiently back on my feet, emotionally anyway, to go back to playing my Glenn Gould and George Szell CDs rather than Mantovani's version of Charmaine. (I'm not putting down Mantovani, and Charmaine is a lovely song, especially in his all-strings arrangement. But I'd rather hear it when on an equal emotional footing than when I'm in a state where I feel that its non-offensive soothingness is all I can bear.)
Mr. Sad is poking around this week. I think he took advantage of a very sudden change in the weather here in Washington, D.C. We went from August Steambath to September's dry-air cicada-music literally overnight. It was about a week ago. On Sunday afternoon I was out driving my cab wearing a T-shirt and shorts, my summer cabbie uniform. I came out Monday morning to drive in exactly the same attire, and damn near froze. Overnight, September had arrived. A day early, no less.
With alarm bells on. Something in my brain suddenly said "Ah-ha! Labor Day! GET SAD!" And, fool that I am, when told to jump off the roof, I got out the ladder. Or my brain did.
I wasn't scheduled to see my doctor again until next month. But I called his office on Friday and asked if I could see him this coming Tuesday. I'm going to ask him if he can put me back on the antidepressants. At least until New Year's, when the All Clear traditionally sounds, for me anyway.
And if you're a soldier in this army, whether you're fully aware of it or not, my advice to you is, don't try to do it the way I did for 30 years and tough it out as the Lone Ranger. Help is there. Medication works; take it from me. The blackness CAN be softened to gray, and gray is the color of soft mornings. Soft mornings often become bright days.
