This post is both very in my feelings* and a bit TMI. Only two gross moments (and I feel they are earned) but this is the trigger warning. This essay is a variation of a kind off good personal essay I wrote in college that I sort of rediscovered. Meaning I found the 3.5" floppy I kept a bunch of essays junior year. I brought the floppy for 75 cents at the bookstore. I cant find anything to open it but it says "Personal Essay" on it. So this is entirely from memory and also changed for the 14 years in between. So, it's an original piece, really, but still it's in my feelings and a bit tmi.
At some point in my teenage years my mother decided I was depressed. Note that my mother also for a brief spell decided I was gay and also decided that I should not apply to college but to universities. My mother was always right and frequented a line that went "if I say the sky is red then it is red"
So she took me to a psychiatrist and these were awkward sessions not just because of the inherent dynamic (A lot of. "So…") but because I didn't know why we were there. Well the doctor was there because it's his office, but me I'm not sure.
Was I unhappy? Sure, but in the way I think all teens are. I didn't like being overweight or terrified of talking to people. I wanted to kiss a girl and was sure I never would. School was fine save for math where I was always a C student.
I maybe an unreliable narrator. A savvy reader would ask for my mother's point of view. And, that's fair. But my mother does not speak English and unless you speak Spanish her view point is hidden. Maybe it was her maternal intuition. Or her own struggles being widowed and finding a way to pay for the private school I went through. These were the moments I thought of when I would see her on the steps to our front door smoking a cigarette and nursing wine. The metal antennae of the cordless phone still deployed because she was always on or expecting a call.
But the psychiatrist put me on anti depressants. Mellaril, which I had no clue what it was for except my mother said I couldn't sleep. I later read the word in The Exorcist novel and it was referenced ina X-Files episode and I felt badass. Then Paxil in varying dosages each in pastel Easter egg colors. 10 mg sunny yellows. Rosy 20 mg doses. 30 mg hospital room mint green pills.
And I took this for a year in high school. I don't recall any mental effects but maybe the bravery to join the public speaking/forensics team was related to it. This was towards the end of high school where the reality known was that this would all end. This spoke to privilege and geographic position. I would leave Puerto Rico and truly never see these folks again, unless I wanted to. Once I got married I teased my wife at how many people in her hometown still lived there. Does anyone leave Bay Village?! She was an outlier because we lived three suburbs over in Lakewood.
The only physical effect was that the Paxil made it impossible to masturbate. Wow, did that suck. That once happened when Marilyn Markman, who was also in the forensics club and 1)Really good and 2) Really good looking, read a speech where she was a Holocaust survivor and narrates her children dying of starvation. Yeah, really hard to break that mental image even with out the pills.
But this did not follow me into adulthood where I enjoyed enough success to 1) Not die 2) Get a job and 3) Keep these jobs for enough time to enjoy a bit of life. I'm still awkward and a scientific study degree of anxious and terrified to talk to people but I control them enough to get by. My life is incredibly boring yet frightfully successful when I remember the people I helped in the humanitarian aid job or my peers with more schooling, better looks, better personalities, who likely don't make as much.
However, recently I've felt myself sapped and anxiously bluesy. Its a Sunday afternoon at 6pm feeling but all the time. I think I am depressed in all the ways they tell you to watch for and speak out for before it gets too bad. Its the combination of age having just turned 35, an age my mother assumed I would never make it to. Its persistent impostor syndrome at work where I feel regardless of any success I am close to being run out of the the office. A co-worker told me the other day "I think you would be so much happier if you could just, you know, turn off your brain sometimes. Like at home." Its how my son seems to spiral at school unable to focus and contain whatever anger and depression came across genetically. Its the geometrical degrees of awkward when I work at my sons' schools and see him melting down in an office kicking at co-workers who, before all this, i was already zonky wonky around but now its angry zonky wonky. And yes that sounds like Sesame Street bit but I can't put it into words well. Or succinctly. Its spending years trying not to come across as a raging weirdo to these people and then a ticking time bomb where it can all pour out. I often joke about favorite teachers as a not so sly way to say people who I think are particularly funny, creative, helpful, and/or attractive. And all these coalesce around my mercurial son who is damaged because of likely something I did to him. And, its the damage I am doing to my daughter who plays peacefully with piles of stuffed animals humming YouTube songs out of key. "We need to remember NOT to forget her," my wife says as I pass out on the couch.
I said I wasn't depressed before but this feeling is emotional dejavu and I reflect on something I dismissed so long ago.
*I'll buy some champagne but all ya went is Henny. Had to make the Drake reference with a title like this.
