Dear MAT,
I've just reread your introduction for the Nth time trying to read between the lines. You're 'nervous', shy, long time depressive and you have a diagnosis, your quality of life has diminished, you're in a little bit of denial about having depression(MDD?, you're angry because you feel blighted in your 'youth'(who says it can't happen to you when you're young?),you cry a lot (we cry for happiness and for sadness - yours is for 'sadness' but you can't 'see' what you're 'sad' about, your thoughts are scarey and you find it hard to stop them coming in (maybe you drink to shut them up?),your lover doesn't see why you're 'sad' and depressed,people are being brief and unhelpful with you telling you to, essentially, "pull your socks up" when you know that it's not about pulling socks up at all. There are no socks to pull up and there are no 'stiff upper lips' about what is a Holocaust of the mind.
You want this crappy life/sadness to go away so much that you dumped the pills and pretended that it was 'all a mistake', being 'abroad' should be fabulous enough to warrant dropping the "crutch", right? You went back to the doctor and got some more pills from his willingness to help you but you're still waiting for them to kick-in so you've been turning to booze to ease the pain of being a depressive. You want to 'get better' (not be depressed). You're stunned that this thing is, maybe, CHRONIC, and that that notion panics you and nobody around you socially "gets it" and sympathises or empathises with you to make you feel that you're not alone. Did I read you right??
Let me just ask you about what you DID in this other non-depressed life that this new depression won't let you do? Is it partying big time? Maybe the partying turned out to be repetitive and finally a bust for you? That's depressing.
I don't know if that is a real factor with you but I'd like to tell you how I felt at your age when I was a bonne viveur. That made me depressed when I was 25 yrs old. I was doing the same thing over and over again. I went out in great clothes, in a good car, with a good education, to good restaurants, with great women and then from the dining table to the dance floor in London, Bruxelles, Paris and then either back to my place or her place or to another woman's place and talked for hours about God, love and war and spent the rest of the early hours in bed making what I imagined was love. Next time on to a new restaurant, new gir, new club, new topics of 'deep' convervations, new capacity for Cognac and Burgundy and Kleftiko and salad and I was thin and had a huge capacity for food and drink and stayed slim. I worked out for an hour after work and slept for an hour before going out to party. Then I hit thirty.
I was still living like a graduate student with a huge scholarship and the essays and treatises dropped from my pen like flowing water. I began to feel the hangovers. I began to wonder why I was feeling 'blue' and uninterested in the Good Life.
I fell in love once, twice, three times. The saying goodbye got harder and harder. I was thirty, tired, not exercising, overeating, hungover at work, my performance (mostly personal relations with other colleagues) dipped and it was noticed. That was depressing.
Sorry if all the above seems trite and obvious but I didn't get it until I was a further ten year on from that point. During those ten years of denial I didn't get my depression diagnosed. I 'coasted' at work, I stopped exercising, I smoked and drank in cute bars and stopped dancing; I met women at the bar. No more quasi-deep conversations, just simple patters and lines that other depressives like to hear from each other. Have you ever seen a "player" deteriorate into a shadow of him/herself? It doesn't take m
