I had a point down there. I was gonna mention it… what was it again…?
Oh yeah: Some stuff has been happening to me. It’s vaguely interesting, so I thought I’d mention it here.
First off, I got diagnosed with Clinical Depression. What’s Clinical Depression, you say? Well, think of Hepatitis B. Okay, it’s nothing like that.
Here’s the thing about Depression. It’s the most innacurately named “condition” you can think of. Depression makes it sound like you’re always moping around, feeling sorry for yourself. But that’s not it. Clinical Depression is when you, uh, well, lemmie start a list and just avoid one huge run-on sentence.
- You sometimes find yourself crying with no fathomable cause. This, in turn, scares the shit out of you which makes you cry harder. This is actually a lot of fun when it happens to you in public; I highly recommend it.
- Another characteristic: You don’t get anything done. Seriously you do nothing. You don’t even do whatever it is you do when you’ve nothing to do. When it’s really bad, I don’t play games, or watch television, or anything really. I tend to sleep a lot, because it’s better than being awake.
- You’re often unreasonably afraid of things. I don’t mean things that you should be afraid of. Like spiders, or a robot holocaust, or the Bush family. For example, I was frequently afraid to leave the house. Also I had a terrible fear that my wife would be murdered or die in a horrible airplane accident and I wouldn’t find out about it until days later because I was so depressed that I couldn’t watch the news. Real rational stuff.
- One last aspect of Clinical Depression is that, when you discover you have it, it’s so fucking obvious that you wonder why you never thought of it before.
So let’s say you read something (other than this page) online that convinces you that you need to look into this depression thing. You go see a psychiatrist and, 99% of the time, prescribes something called “Wellbutrin,” which is Latin for “The Medication That Doesn’t Seem To Work Until You Suddenly Realise That You’re In A Good Mood For The First Time In Like Fucking Years.”
I remember when I first started taking Stratera for my ADD, and it was the same thing. I was thinking, “fuck this, shit be weak.” until I suddenly realized that I could remember numbers and other equally dull and unimportant things at work. Like customer names. So there you go.
Contrast this with Ritalin, Dexadrine, or any other amphetamine delivery system. Take some of that and you’re all “Hello! I’m fucking UP! How the hell can I help you?” Sneaky stuff.
Now I’m really in a good mood a lot of the time. But thankfully it’s not the artificial kind of good mood that Dexadrine gave me, where people would look at me and wonder what kind of drugs I was taking. Now I just seem to be having a good day because, in all honesty, I can actually see things in perspective now. In a way, I used to either over- or under-react to everything that happened around and to me.
Also my focus and memory have improved noticeably, otherwise I never could’ve sat down and wrote all this down without going back to play World of Warcraft, and doing nothing there except trolling the Auction House.
Also my house in New Orleans got wrecked, my parents moved into the same apartment complex as me, two of my cats died and my best friend was forced to fire me from my job. But thankfully those things don’t seem like the end of the world anymore, but more like lessons well learned. Unpleasant events best experienced and then forgotten.