For a long time I wondered about the weird warnings on antidepressants, the ones that said “may increase risk of suicide” and I thought, what? And then I discovered I’d been depressed and (all that stuff I haven’t revealed in the rewound story) and then worked hard on treating the symptoms only to discover the very obvious reasons for this.

If I may attempt to explain, using the damaged logic of the deeply depressed, it goes a little like this:

Some shit happens, and you find yourself in a phase in your life with good days and bad days. On some days, you wake up, cry ’till you puke, get up, and get on with the day. On the bad days, you skip the getting up part. During this time, you make vague, unfocused plans to go ahead and check out, but very, very subtly. You create a drunk reddit account, subscribe to r/cripplingalcoholism, and proceed to get on with it. It’s the long slow burn, the inexorable slide to ruin, and you plan to make it in as splashy a fashion as possible, insofar as the writing on the subject is concerned. Sounds like a great ride, right? And what else are we here for anyway?

So, you have a plan. You proceed. You get on with it, as it were. And then. FUCK. Complications. You undergo a series of tragi-comedies in your existence & in a series of unlikely outcomes, you prevail. How you gonna go all “I’m gonna die” and then die NOW, bitch? Well, again, FUCK. Because the first step out of the depression is the lifting of the weight on the psyche, that heavy lethargy, the absolutely IDGAF apathy that left you practically paralytic in every possible way and therein lies the rub…

You see, that apathy, that lethargy, those things are safe ways to spend a day, incapable of working up the resolve to do any meaningful damage. When you relieve the superficial symptoms of depression, the inability to DO any thing, you are left with the same sick thoughts, but none of the inability to act on them. What you have is energetic, focused depression, depression that has a plan and the wherewithal to carry it out.

At this point you either need tens of thousands of dollars worth of serious therapy, or a set of amazing friends that make that type of shit completely immaterial.

Me? I have friends. And at the moment my depression gained the ability to get up off the fucking couch and do something, my friends were there to make sure I survived getting better. It’s being a bumpy ride but I must confess to being absolutely amazed at how badly it hasn’t gone. Yet. Forgive me, still a bit nervous.

Someday I’ll share with you some of the thoughts that up-off-the-couch but still-depressed me came up with, as far as doing away with me/her/ourselves is concerned. It was/is fairly terrifying.

Because it was really quite good, I assure you.

I tossed around a few ideas as to how to approach the whole talking about the depression thing, including starting at the beginning but to be honest I have no clue when that even was.  So I considered some arbitrary start points, various cataclysmic events along the way that triggered things like episodes or whatever those were. I even put together a few introductory paragraphs for some of them, but no matter where I started, it seemed like such a long, wandering way to write and all of it uphill, so decided against that approach.

That’s my excuse, and I’m sticking with it.

So let’s start with the now: Cautious optimism. I’ve almost completed a proof-of-concept that I can be fixed. I haven’t done much of the actual fixing yet, but all signs point to yes as to the answer to whether or not it’s possible. It is definitely maybe possible. Maybe even probably possible. As we know, all possible histories and therefore all possibilities exist, so … waiting is.

And tonight, I feel very, very good. It’s actually a bit overmuch, but no complaints.

Also, a long bath after a 9 hour workday with 2 10-mile bike rides is a thing of wonder. And in a weird way, none of these tonight things would have been possible without the wonders of medical cannabis, which is one of the staples in the diet of saving me.