Pick Your Poison

I’m having a mid- life epiphany. See, before today I operated under the premise that I am a basically normal person who happens to have a depression and sometimes alcohol problem. My past is riddled with skeletons rattling around and tumbling out of the proverbial closet. Said skeletons are the result of weakness of character, laziness, and sometimes alcohol intoxication, I thought before today’s revelation.

Okay, so I have been on anti- depressants since the tender age of sixteen, starting out with the dry mouth causing, sleep inducing tricyclics. Then some genius invented Prozac, and I got in line for my prescription. Prozac is the first of many of its class of antidepressants that I have been taking my entire adult life. “So what,” you say , “one can’t swing a dead cat around the United States without hitting an individual on an antidepressant.” You probably also want to tell me to get over myself and put on my big- girl panties and deal with it.

You’re wrong. I am certifiable. This individual is afflicted with Sylvia Plath, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf depression. And here’s the epiphany part; the treatment is almost as bad as the condition. The treatment is what causes the dumbing-down, the living of a mediocre, not up to my potential life. The medication used to treat my depression is numbing at the doses required to keep me functioning. The choices have always been clear: go to work or turn on the gas oven, care for my children or pick up the pistol, be a wife or wade into the water with my pockets weighed down by stones. So here I am, among the living, a little flat and slow- moving, but participating in life nonetheless.

But that numbness is devoid of spontaneity and joy. So I’m not suicidal or doing crazy things to feel alive ( hence the skeletons), but I just don’t try as hard, think as clearly, and, sadly, care as much. Maybe some of the treatment is about another choice: staggering around in zombieland or walking upright in a world lit by technicolor(ever see the film Pleasantville?)

So now that my latest medication regimen has resurrected me from the bed, where I wallow and fantasize about the sweet relief of death, I march into the midst of those vertical and ventilating. This time, though, I’m on a quest for joy. Surely it’s possible. it’s just going to take some conscious effort and calculated choices. I choose life infused with happiness. I’ve fought much harder battles. just like I chose work, motherhood,and relationships over nonexistence, I choose a joyous life over a flat, apathetic being.I’m boarding the joy train now. Won’t you come with me?