The Hilarious World of Depression

by John Moe

Finding a therapist is a bit like dating. You might have to have some very boring or weird or tense meetings before you find someone you connect with.

As if I could simply do that. As if I chose this. As if I looked at the options available to me and they were clearly labeled “Perseverance” and “Freaking the Fuck Out All the Time” and calmly said, “Mmm, yes, I select option B.”

Trauma occurs when something happens that’s too horrible for your brain to deal with, so you just store it away. Over time, the horrible thing, which is still there, starts coming out in a variety of ugly ways, causing mental problems that you don’t even associate with the trauma because it happened so long ago.

Depression does its damage and then it hides, covering its tracks, making you think that it is not an illness, that you’re just bad and weird.

Depression is an illness. And it tends to follow a similar pathology in all its patients. Certain characteristics, events, and responses occur over and over again among humans because we’re really not all that different from one another. I’m sorry if you thought you were a special, unique, one-of-a-kind shining star, but you’re not. Hard as it may seem to believe, nothing you’re going through hasn’t happened to other people. And that’s good news because tested treatment, or at the very least fellowship, is readily available. Hi. Welcome.

Only by being useful or talented, and receiving external recognition, would I achieve personhood. I couldn’t imagine a world where I was a worthwhile person by dint of mere existence; I felt like I needed to earn it and prove it every day. Don’t worry, this feeling went away after only several decades.

When you’re raised in a situation where you need it, denial goes beyond coping mechanism status, surpasses instinct, and becomes reality itself.

Only decades later would it dawn on me that normal people who never deal with depression have a sense of self-worth automatically. Just by being a person on the earth, they feel themselves worthy of respect and love and all that other cool stuff. When you’re up against Clinny D, you don’t have that core sense of self. So you frantically search the world for someone else to provide that sense of self for you.

“Well, you’re depressed,” he said. “Major depressive disorder is the medical name. You’re depressed. You have depression.” “Come on,” I replied incredulously, “how can you tell I’m depressed just by asking me a few questions?”

“Oh, no, I knew it the second I saw you. The questions and stuff were to make sure. And to be polite.” Good one, Kovar. He said I could try a bunch of things to address it and he’d work with me on that. There isn’t any one single thing that works for everyone, he said, but there are a lot of things we can try. Right off the top, it’s a good idea to get out and exercise on a regular basis. You don’t need to train for a marathon, but set a schedule for running and biking. Eating healthy is always a good idea, too. “And,” he said, “I’d like to start you on some medication. We’ll try the lowest dose of Zoloft just to see how it goes.” “Is there any way we could do this without pills?” I asked. “I don’t want to be all altered. I want to still be myself.” “This kind of medication doesn’t make you into anyone else. If it works the way it does for a lot of people, you’ll feel more like yourself. Kind of cleans the windshield. As for not being altered, how’s the status quo working out for you?” This Kovar character had a good answer for everything. Almost as if he had been in a thousand conversations like this one and had years and years of medical training. He said looking into talk therapy would also be a good idea, that it helped a lot of people in my situation. But in the meantime, he wanted me to feel better much sooner, and thus the Zoloft.

Depression looks for the most horrible option on the menu and selects that every time.