While I’ve alluded to my depressive history on this site, I’ve never outlined it in specific detail.  I think this is partly because I’ve been maintaining this site since early 2000, and while August 2001 can now be considered part of such a history, it wasn’t history when I wrote about it then.

Duh, you say. Fair enough.

It’s also partly because I can’t outline it in detail without recalling certain painful time periods, painful occurrences, and painful people I’d rather not think about.  Additionally, said people probably don’t want to be mentioned on this site any more than I want to write about them, and I think everyone should get to choose how their own story is told.  So I’ll never mention them by name or include any identifying details.

And (with the exception of Effexor) I don’t like to talk about what medications I’ve taken. I’ve never wanted to have a comments discussion about which drugs worked for whom and when, and I’d hate for someone to take what works for me only to discover it doesn’t help them at all.  The way anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medications work on different people is so very personal that a free-for-all discussion isn’t likely to be useful to anyone.

So those are the rules. I won’t talk specifics about the people in my life, and I won’t talk about what medications I’ve taken. Also I’m not your doctor or your lawyer or your psychic or your life coach or whatever.

Also, I hope you’ll forgive me for not plumbing the depths of my extensive archives to find old posts that correspond to these events. I don’t like doing that. If you’re so inclined, you’re welcome to find them yourself.

As best I can recall, I suffered from depression even as a child.  My parents sent me to therapy a few times in junior high, which is probably an indicator, but more than that I just plain felt sad all the time.  In junior high especially, I would pretend to be sick when I was too depressed to face going to school.  I remember thinking that my life couldn’t possibly turn out to be any good, because I wasn’t any good.

I didn’t do anything about it. I didn’t really know you could.  A close family member had been in a mental hospital for awhile, I knew, but that sort of thing was for adults, and my family member was much worse off than I was. Right? It was probably just teen angst. Right?

Things got a bit better in high school. I didn’t have the junior-high bullies to worry about, and I joined some groups (school ones and church ones) that sometimes made me feel like I might fit in.  I had several close friends.  My senior year, when I fell in with the theatre crowd, spent lots of time in jazz choir (yes, really), and had an after-school job as a grocery cashier was the best school year I’d ever had.  Except maybe for kindergarten, but that didn’t really count.

I was, however, woefully unprepared for college.  I arrived at the University of Texas as an undeclared liberal arts major and found that the school was intimidatingly large, I’d never learned how to study properly, I wasn’t too good at making friends, and my roommate didn’t speak any English.  She was nice enough, but we couldn’t communicate, and sitting in our room watching her watch her Spanish soap operas was lonely and boring.  I didn’t study much, either.  I wasn’t any good, so what was the point?  Outside of taking in the occasional class, I hardly ever left the dorm.

This is already a little hard to write about.

Long UT story short, by the end of my freshman year I’d been put on academic probation.  Over the summer my parents took me to a doctor.  She was this sort of cross between a psychiatrist and a career counselor and a person who diagnoses learning disabilities, whatever you call that.  She diagnosed me with depression, a mild learning disability, and gave me some ideas for solutions for both.

I started taking anti-depressants and going to therapy during my sophomore year of college.  Things began to get a tiny bit better, but my grades weren’t improving much, and I was losing a lot of weight. A series of mid-sized interpersonal setbacks (see what I did there?) later that school year led me to drag my sad ass back home to Houston.

After that I felt much better. I got a job waiting tables (which I loved) and took some classes at community college (which I liked for the most part).  I weaned myself off of the anti-depressants in late 1998. Then I got a job as a web designer and decided that since I was fine now, the bout of depression had been due to college, moving to Austin, or some combination of both.

But August 2001 brought with it job dissatisfaction and a particularly painful breakup, and the bottom fell out.  I went to the doctor, who diagnosed me with the same old depression and some new anxiety and prescribed me anti-depressants and sedatives.  She told me that with my two depressive episodes to date, it was likely I’d be on medication for the rest of my life.  I went to my parents’ house and didn’t leave their couch for three days.

When I sat up from the couch, I formulated a plan. I would quit my job and go back to college.  So I enrolled as an English major at the University of Houston, and to my surprise I loved it. One of my friends recommended a therapist I ended up liking quite a bit.  I switched medications once, and took a sedative here and there for bad anxiety attacks, but I was all right until after the summer of 2005, when I began my Unemployed Year.

I’m going to stop for now.  I can only write about this sort of thing for so long, you know.  Hopefully my future posts about depression will be all uplifting and shit!