My Journey with Depression — Part 2/2
In Part 1, I talked about some of my experience with depression, and eventually seeking therapy. Today, I want to tell you about what help actually looked like for me.
CW: Some of the unhealthy thoughts that often go with depression.
To reiterate, this article will definitely peter out awkwardly. As I’ve noted previously, coming out has a clear narrative with punctuation events. Depression does not. Climbing out of depression is like the fact that child mortality has been reliably decreasing for several decades, as has world hunger. But you won’t hear about it on the news, because it’s just slow, steady progress. There’s no clear event at which I get to say “Depression! Done!” It was just a long, hard slog.
Getting a Diagnosis
One I decided to go to therapy, I found an amazing therapist, and I am so endlessly thankful for him, after searching my provider’s directory for someone specializing in LGBTQ+ issues. Again, I am so thankful I found him, because I would be spending a lot of time crying in his office. Even if it did come with moments like…
[Alexis describes a club she goes to sometimes, a goth/queer/burner/spinner/kink night]
Him: “Hm, this is interesting. It reminds me of a club that was in Cambridge, it was called Manray. Have you heard of it?”
Me: “Oh gods, now even my therapist is going to tell me about the old days at Manray? Yes. Yes, I have heard of it plenty from my crew of friends.”
But back to the main story.
If you haven’t been to therapy before, they typically give you a test at/near intake. Lots and lots of questions to rate on a scale of 1–5 or 1–7. Some of the questions that I answered raised some red flags. Such as…
“You said you think about your own death sometimes. What does that look like?”
“I mean, I’m not thinking about how to do it. I just think about how much easier it would be if I were dead. Like… that would fine.”
“How often would you say that is?”
“I mean… the normal amount.”
“What’s the normal amount, according to you?”
“I mean, I don’t know… three, four times a week?”
[gently] “So, that is not the normal amount.”
“But… it’s the amount I’ve thought about it for as long as I can remember.”
“That is not indicative of health.”
I should note, one of the nice things about having a healthier internal life now means that I almost cried while writing my paraphrased pseudo-transcription, rather than being comfortably numb and perfunctory about it. I’m happier that I’m sad writing that. It’s been a while, a long while, since I’ve felt that way so keenly.
We started doing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which was pretty good for me. But early on, about four weeks into therapy, my therapist looked at me and said, “Look. I am generally medication-averse. I don’t recommend it often. And when I do, I wait about 6 months into the process to say that someone should think about medication. I want you to know that when I tell you, four weeks into our relationship, you should look into medication.”
So I was diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder, with a seasonal aspect. Dealing with it finally cleared the way for me to also deal with the gender stuff too, which was totally not a thing I was here to discuss, SIR.
The it-turns-out-is-a-lady, she doth protest a bit much. Fun fact: there’s a high rate of depression among queer people in this country because [commence sing-song voice] we treat queer people like shit in this countryyyyyyy.
Getting a Prescription
When I was getting my meds, I saw a psychiatrist who, in stark contrast to my therapist, would turn out to be possibly the biggest asshole ever. Like… I was talking with a friend one time, and she mentioned her asshole psychiatrist, and I said, “hah, that sounds just like my psychiatrist, Dr. *******.” Then there was a pause as we looked at each other. “Holy shit, we have the same asshole psychiatrist.”
Pause for advice: If you have a psychiatrist who’s an asshole, you should know: once you have the Rx on lockdown for a year or two, usually you can just tell your PCP “hey, can you start writing this scrip for me? I’ve already been on it without concern for two years.” And then you no longer have to see the asshole psychiatrist.
Anyway, asshole psychiatrist did give me one amazing piece of perspective, for better or worse. In one of the weird-ass diatribes I would endure once every three months to get my meds, he said something along the lines of…
“You have to remember. You have depression right now. And soon, with any luck, you won’t, for a while at least. But we have no fucking idea…” [he dropped a lot of f-bombs] “…how any of this fucking works. No fucking idea. If we find a medication that works for you, then great. We’ll run with it. But it’s also possible that it’s just going to give out on you randomly in five years.
“So be prepared: you will never be rid of depression, not entirely. You will relapse. You will have moments, again. But know, when it happens, that it is not your fault. And, with your therapist, you will have built a toolkit so that when you fall in again, you won’t fall as far, and you’ll be able to get out quicker. That’s our goal.”
When I first started taking meds, I bought into the lie that’s sometimes fed to us, that when you’re using a mood-altering substance, you’re not really you. So I started meds thinking, “I will take bupropion for two years until I dig myself out, then I will stop. This will be temporary.”
Honestly though? To hell with that. Am I different with meds? You bet I am. I’m a way happier version of myself, who gets to do so much more stuff, and effect so much more good in the world. If that means being on a non-toxic drug for the rest of my life, sign me up. I have no problem with that.
Getting Motivated
One of the things about depression that people assume is that it’s the same thing as being sad.
It is not the same thing as being sad.
I once heard that “the opposite of depression isn’t happiness, it’s motivation.” For me, my experience of depression was that it was a numbing, demotivating fog. It was swimming underwater, trying desperately to slice through a dense substance while having everything you hear and see get blunted.
I am so thankful that I got help. I’m so thankful for the people who helped me. I’m so thankful that I helped myself. Because I honestly don’t know where I would be without it.
I dropped out of grad school at the tail-end of 2006. This was for a few reasons, including that I didn’t have an advisor (word of advice: if you’re in grad school, you should have an advisor), and that I didn’t want to pay a year’s tuition to do an unpaid internship for a year. But it was also, honestly, partly because of depression — my awareness of anything at the time was pretty low, including the fact that it never crossed my mind to get an advisor. But even now, it’s hard to not frame that in a self-deprecating way, “and my head was completely up my ass.” No, you literally often couldn’t remember anything about the previous month, week, or day, and your short-term memory was fairly shot to shit, let alone having awareness of what grad school should look like. Even now, I notice that I’m writing about it by depersonalizing it to “you” instead of “I.”
Fun fact: depression (and trauma) is hell on formation of long-term memory and executive function.
Fast forward to actually having motivation. In 2008, I’d begun attending a fire-spinning retreat in Connecticut. Oftentimes, people would approach me, and say “hey, have you thought about taking on a leadership position?” And I would always answer no.
I wanted to — I wanted, desperately, to be able to answer yes. But the answer was always no. Recall that earlier, I said that one of the constant thought spirals was “I should never try anything difficult because the only possibility is that I will never measure up to what is required.” So I said no. “Why bother? I won’t do the job right, and I’ll probably just lose motivation a quarter of the way in, not finish, and disappoint everybody who had the poor judgement to place trust in me. Stay on the sidelines.”
It’s not a coincidence that I finally said yes just one and a half years after starting therapy, and said yes not just to being a volunteer leader, but to being the Executive Director of the retreat.
Anyway, the neat little bow is not a neat little bow, however. Many people don’t suppose that I would deal with depression, but it’s not because I’ve conquered it. It doesn’t work that way. It’s just an “illness[es] to be lived with as best as one can.” I do, in fact, still have relapses into depression from time to time, though they are much shorter and shallower now, and I have my toolbox. It doesn’t show up in the day-to-day. Motivation is high. Feelings are full, not blunted. But it’s still there. I still take bupropion, an antidepressant, to help keep it in check.
There’s no Pride for having depression, to be the antivenom to Shame. It’s not something I can celebrate having — and it’s not something I can celebrate being “past.” It just is. That makes it a lot harder to talk about than being trans.
I’m still not sure how to parse that, a lot of the time. How are you?
