I just slept straight through the rest of the weekend and went back to school the next Monday. I kept doing the same shit I’d always been doing and figured that if I wanted to try again, I needed to wait until I was old enough to get a car and drive it off one of suburban Chicagoland’s many cliffs. I think my mom started watching me a little more closely? But what was she really going to do? She was severely disabled. My being hopeless all the time was trumped by “You know I can’t walk, right?” and I get that. I was a kid, and it was my job to go to school, so I did my job. I would deal with it when I was off Medicare and making enough money to pay for cognitive therapy myself. BAHAHAHAHAHA choke sob AHAHAHAHAHA!
Even when my fucking parents died in 1998 and I had an actual thing I could point to as a source of my unrelenting depression, a cause to substantiate the effect of my simmering hatred, I played it off. I don’t know if it feels like this for anyone else, but I definitely come from the kind of people whose response to “Hey, man, I’m pretty bummed out” is “Shut up, there’s nothing wrong with you.” Or how about “You just sleep all the time because you’re lazy.” Like, if it isn’t broken or hemorrhaging, you need to bury it under these dollar-store snack foods and work it out by your fucking self. OH, OKAY, COOL. So then I developed very glamorous coping mechanisms like covering myself with grisly death tattoos and eating food out of the trash. And then, because I wasn’t actively trying to kill myself and could keep a job and make friends and pay my rent and not do heroin, I made peace with it. This is just how I am. I’M FINE. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had this undercurrent of sadness that, if I’m being honest, I don’t totally mind. It was easy to ignore because it doesn’t bother me that much. And I don’t want to be some shiny, happy idiot. This is gritty; this is real.
One of my most favorite extracurricular activities these days is taking a Klonopin. But not just taking it—also making a big production of getting up to get the water, then swallowing it and looking up potential side effects that I really don’t give a shit about yet am mildly terrified might actually occur. I would like to meet the person who gets a medication to fix a for-real fucking problem and is like, “Hold up, appetite changes?! Unacceptable, doctor dude.” And then, like, dramatically flushes all the pills down the toilet before collapsing into an anxiety-ridden stress puddle. I will take anything, at any time, if a doctor tells me it will repair whatever is wrong with me in that instant. Maybe I’ll read about it if I have to spend a little extra time on the toilet, but that definitely happens after I’ve already swallowed the pills dry and set a timer to see how quickly they start working. I will also take any combination of NyQuil, antihistamines, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories, vitamins, and assorted syrups at the first sign of a weepy eye or scratchy throat. To hell with my liver: FIX THIS.
I am just an old garbage bag full of blood patiently waiting for death to rescue me, but sometimes when I tell people that, their immediate response is HOW CAN YOU BE SAD, YOU’RE HILARIOUS!!!!! and then for five seconds I’m like, “This person who has never met me before is correct. I’m so funny I should stop thinking life is a trash can.” But five seconds after that, some human roadkill yells at the grocery store bagger or pulls his scrotum out on the train, and I get the insatiable urge to peel my skin off like the layers of an onion and jam my thumbs into my eye sockets, just hoping that I’ll disappear down the garbage disposal of human existence straight into hell. Then it’s easy to just write the depression off as an irritation at the dummies I have the misfortune of sharing the planet with. “I’m not depressed, dudes who ride unicycles in rush-hour traffic are fucking idiots,” or “Nothing is wrong with me, the real problem is all these people mindlessly texting while their dogs shit in the middle of the goddamn sidewalk.”
Two things happened that forced me to finally have the “sometimes I have a disproportionately rage-filled response to otherwise harmless shit” talk with my doctor. (1) I was at work and the worst person in the world came in to buy dog food. This is the kind of person who asks an unending stream of questions that I, as an unfamiliar customer-service representative, couldn’t possibly answer as she empties the entire contents of her handbag onto the counter in front of me. I hate that, the “Please don’t write a negative Yelp review of this business” trap that requires my standing there trying to look engaged while this woman uses me as a sounding board for questions like, “Is [redacted] going to eat three cans, or should I just get one?” She’s not asking me, but she’s not not asking me. I mean, we’re making eye contact and everything but how could I know?! And I had to wait there held hostage because one of these questions pouring like vomit from her toothless maw might be one I can actually answer. I felt the familiar rageheat claw its way slowly up my neck and into my jaw before finally scratching at the backs of my eyeballs. And as she kept rambling nonsensically to herself while pretending she needed my help for five minutes in real time, I calmly raised my hands to my ears and used my forefingers to hold them closed and said, “You have to get the fuck out of here or I will destroy you.” So much for that stellar Yelp review.