Friday, April 27, 2012 This isn't a new post, just one I've used before and is important to me. It's my own little HEA, and I'm a romance author--there's nothing I like better. It's also my mom's birthday. She died when I was 32, and I still miss her. Happy Birthday, Mom, and thanks for everything.I hope you visit all the stops on the blog hop and win one of the great prizes, too. Have a good trip! Depression wasn’t something I gave a whole lot of thought to. It was something that happened to other people. Young mothers who’d just had babies and were overwhelmed by the endless and huge responsibility of it all; middle-aged men who’d lost their jobs and didn’t know where to find new ones; people who’d suffered emotional losses of such magnitude I couldn’t begin to imagine how they felt. Being on the self-righteous side, I also thought you only really suffered from depression if you gave into it, if you didn’t outrun it with a healthy sense of humor, or if you just wanted people to feel sorry for you. Average people, people like me, didn’t get depressed.
A little over
four years ago, I stopped smoking. Aside
from being self-righteous, I’m also an unmitigated coward, so I did it with
medication. I didn’t care; it worked,
and the side-effects of the medication were minimal. I’d always said that if I didn’t smoke, I’d
weigh 200 pounds--not a good thing if you’re short and small-boned, which I
am--and I’d suck down antidepressants like they were candy. I was joking, okay? Just kidding.
Really.
Well.
I don’t weigh
200 pounds, but I did gain 35 in the year after I stopped smoking, and it’s
still there--I’ve discovered that chocolate chip cookies are a great
replacement for nicotine. But the other
thing that happened in that year was that I found out depression really does
strike average people. To borrow a term
I’ve heard often in the past three years, I hit the wall.
Since I’m one
of those people who always have the symptoms described in articles about
diseases (it’s amazing I’ve lived this long!), it was no surprise that I had
several of the indicators of clinical depression. You know what they are. You’ve read them in the doctor’s office while
you’re waiting or at Wal-Mart or Kroger’s while you’re taking your blood pressure. You’ve read them and thought, “Hmm...”
because you had a couple of them.
Sometimes. But then they went
away, so you were okay.
But what
happens when they don’t go away? What do
you do when you were sad on Sunday afternoon and you’re still sad at bedtime on
Thursday? When you’re so tired you can
barely get through the day but you’re sleeping way too much? Or you can’t get through it because you’re
hardly sleeping at all? When nothing’s
fun anymore? When you can’t see an end
to feeling hopeless? When, even though
you’d never consider suicide yourself--oh, of course, you wouldn’t--you
understand people who do?
When I hit
that wall, I was one of the lucky ones in that I never for one moment thought
suicide was an answer. I was seldom
sleepless, never slept too much, still had fun.
Sometimes. But working an
eight-hour day wore me out to the point that I never really wanted to get off
the couch after I got home. I looked
around at my husband and kids and grandkids--even them--and was bewildered
because, Good Lord have mercy, how could I possibly be unhappy?
But I was. Oh, I was.
I didn’t
really want to start smoking again, but I knew I’d be happier if I did. What was worse--to die of lung cancer or of
depression? “I don’t know what to do,” I
told my doctor. “Maybe I need to smoke
again. Just some, you know, not a lot.”
“No,” he
said. “No. I know what to do.”
So he gave me
a prescription and talked to me a long time about clinical depression. “You’ll be fine,” he promised. “Maybe six months, maybe longer. But you’ll be fine.”
I hated taking
Zoloft. Zoloft was for weak people,
people who gave in to being sorry for themselves, people who wanted others to
feel sorry for them. I’d try it for a
little while, but it wasn’t going to work, not on me, Mrs. Average. I hated it.
But it wasn’t
really so bad. Maybe six months. That should get me over the hump, and maybe I
wouldn’t start smoking again. I could
always blame the 35 pounds on it. You
know, I couldn’t lose weight because I was “on medication.” No one had to know I was a spineless wuss who
was taking antidepressants.
Six months
became two years. Not that it took me
that long to feel better--that’s how long it was before I got the courage up to
stop taking the Zoloft. I was so afraid
to stop. What if I feel that way again?
I thought. I would surely die from
it. But stopping was painless, and the
depression is only a memory. But it’s a
memory that can make me miserable in a heartbeat, make me question myself if,
just once, I happen to be sad on Sunday afternoon.
But I am all
right, I remind myself, because by Thursday night at bedtime, I have forgotten
the sadness. I feel good. No, better than good; I feel wonderful. I haven’t smoked for four years and one
month. And I will never, ever take any
of it for granted again. It is a gift.
Till next
time.
 posted by Liz Flaherty # 2:00 AM 9 Comments
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