I was talking with a friend the last week, and she told me that she was happy that I had written about the fertility problems I have had, because so many women have similar stories, but never talk about them.  It was nice to think that writing about it might make someone else feel less alone in their struggle.  And it made me think about something else people don’t talk about much.  Depression.

Several years ago, I suddenly found myself incredibly moody.  I would cry at the drop of a hat.  Anyone who knows me, knows that crying is kinda my default.  I cry when I’m angry, nervous, embarrassed or sad.  I even cry when I laugh (which is why I don’t bother wearing make-up).  But this had reached a whole new level.  All Nick had to do was look at me wrong, and I was in tears.  Forgot something at the store?  Tears.  Mashed potatoes came out lumpy?  Down poor.  Can’t get that stupid little fucking thing to go into that other stupid little fucking thing?  Monsoon season.

And I was exhausted.  All.  The.  Time.  It was all I could do to just to get up and go to work in the morning.  I would come home, pop on the tv, lay down on the couch with Kayla and pass out.  Every night.  And all day on the weekends, too.  I was already drinking a ton of caffeine, so I tried taking vitamin B supplements and looked up foods that would increase energy.  Nothing worked.  It’s scary to admit, but if someone had walked up to me at that time with a drug (legal or no) that would have made me less tired, I would have seriously considered taking it.  I wouldn’t have done it (at least, I tell myself I wouldn’t have), but it would have been very difficult to say no.  And for someone who hates taking medication, that’s fairly noteworthy.

While complaining to Nick one night about the exhaustion and admitting that I may have fantasized about taking drugs to keep me awake, he told me he didn’t think there was anything wrong with my thyroid or metabolism.  He thought I was depressed.  I thought he was insane.  I didn’t feel sad.  Wasn’t being sad kind of the key symptom to depression?  And my life hadn’t fallen apart.  What was there to be depressed about?  But I agreed to go to the doctor to find out what was really going on.

At the doctor’s office the following week, when explaining why I was there, I burst into tears.

She agreed with Nick, but ran a blood panel to make sure there was nothing physically wrong with me.  There wasn’t.  She put me on Prozac and suggested I find a therapist.  I did.

During my first therapy session, I told her I didn’t feel sad, and had no idea why I was depressed.  She asked me about what had been going on in my life.  Had I had any loses or stress or big changes recently?  And I said, no, nothing big.  So she asked me about the not so big.  I started crying before I got out the first sentence.  I told her about my fertility issues and about my beloved golden retriever, Buck, who had passed away the year before.  And how my best friend and I hadn’t spoken in a long time.  How Nick’s business had started to go down hill.  How one of my closest friends had moved to Europe.  How another one of my close friends, who had once hung out at our house almost every night, was now never around.  How my beloved Doberman had been diagnosed with Cushing’s disease, and how the medication cost $104 a month.  How my brother and my parents weren’t speaking.  How my mother had just been diagnosed with high cholesterol, high blood pressure and pre-diabetes.  How my father was told if he didn’t quit smoking, he probably only had about 10 years left.

She told me that was a lot of stuff to deal with all at once.  Even though none of them was huge, the sum of them all was taking it’s toll on me.  She said, if I told her all that was going on, and I wasn’t depressed, she would be wondering when it was all going to hit me.

I hated taking Prozac (aside from just not being a fan of medication, it gave me weird vivid dreams and made me twitch in my sleep, or worse, just on the verge of sleep, which would then snap me awake).  But I knew I needed it.  This was not the first depression I had gone through (not so surprisingly, the first had come in college, when I found myself virtually friendless, when all my high school friends went to different schools, and I, who commuted to UNH, lost the few friends I had managed to make during the first semester when none of them were in any of my classes anymore).  And my family has a history of depression.  My dad has struggled with it off and on his whole life (and I am nothing, if not my father’s daughter).  When he was just 6, he was put in a foster home temporarily when his mother tried to commit suicide.  And my whole life, I don’t know if I ever saw my grandmother really happy.  

So I took a pill and I went to therapy.  Therapy taught me how to cope with the things that caused my depression and the medication gave me time to heal and learn how to cope.  And eventually I got better.

When I felt I didn’t need it anymore, I weened myself off of the Prozac.  I felt my life was in a better place, and that I had more tools to help me get through the tough and stressful times.  And I felt the Prozac was doing more harm than good at that point.  The wonderful thing about antidepressants is, they make you indifferent.  The horrible thing about antidepressants is, they make you indifferent.

Everyone’s depression is different and so is everyone’s treatment.  There is no one size fits all.  This is just what worked for me.  But that’s not why I’m writing about it.  I grew up with depression, because of my dad, so there was never any stigma attached to it for me.  It’s just something that was (sometimes. And sometimes, it wasn’t).  So maybe, if we talk about it more, and we realize just how many of us sometimes need help, the stigma attached to it will whither up and die.  

When I realized I needed help, I got it.  And if a time comes again in the future where I feel I need help again, I will seek it.  If you feel anxious, or sad, or disinterested in life, or endlessly tired, and especially if you feel suicidal, please seek help.  And please don’t see it as a defect.  It’s not.  It’s your brain’s way of taking a break when life gets to be a little too much, when you don’t have time to process the first blow before the next one comes.  When a wave knocks you down, if you can’t stand up and take a breath before the next one hits you, you’ll drown.  Sometimes, you just need to float for a little while.