Depression (part one)
Depression and the desperation that goes with it have had a huge impact on my life. The problems I’ve experienced are less glaring than the ones directly related to my substance abuse. On the other hand, it’s entirely possible that my substance abuse has almost always been a direct result of my depression. It’s a chicken or the egg thing, and doesn’t matter much. One of both of them are apt to kill me unless some serious and sustained changes occur in both my behavior and mood.
The first time I remember being depressed, and actually calling it “depression” was in 1981 when I was drinking and drugging on a daily basis. (Valium, Quaalude, pot, etc., were the drugs I had access to back then.) I’m not a pharmacist or shrink, but it stands to reason that those drugs, at the very least, made my depression worse. Whether they caused it is back to the chicken and egg thing. That was a long time ago and my memory of that cloudy time isn’t only affected by the chemicals I was ingesting, but the ones I’ve ingested since, and the accumulation of all the years in the meantime.
Nevertheless I remember being depressed to one degree or another, depending on what the circumstances were at any given time, whenever I wasn’t impaired. My main mission in life at that time was to get as intoxicated as was possible. Without question I was caught up in a vicious cycle. Additionally, my drug and alcohol problems were so noticeable, and ongoing, that no one had a chance to notice that I was depressed. Even if they had, they’d have been so disgusted with my behavior that they probably wouldn’t have cared much. At that time almost no one who gave decency a second thought wanted me around. I was a mess.
In the mid-80s I landed back at my mother’s with no car, no license, no job, and next nothing else. Over the course of the year it took for my driving privileges to be reinstated, I experienced for the first time in my adult life a sort of exile from alcohol and drugs. It wasn’t a total or voluntary exile, but rather one brought on by my lack of resources and my mother’s family’s hatred of alcohol abuse, and sin period. Typically I’d escape to friends a day or two on the weekends, but not every weekend. I might even escape for a few hours during the week on rare occasions. Still, for almost a year, I was in touch with some version of reality much more than not, and that had never happened to me before.
I didn’t like it. Initially I was mostly bored and angry that I was missing out on life, namely frequent sex and constant intoxication. But as time rolled on I began to get depressed. That was a long time ago and I don’t recall much about exactly how I felt, or what I did. Mostly I watched television and slept as much as possible, always looking forward to the next time I could get out of the house and get drunk, and ultimately to getting my life back. I’m not sure I’d experience the constant desperation I was to come to know, but I was definitely getting acquainted with depression. It’s also relatively easy to see why. My life, the one I’d created, was pretty crumby. Almost anyone would have been depressed to some degree in similar circumstance, or at least I think they would.
When I got my license back and managed to get a car I was off and running again in no time. It would be a year and a half before I again had a run in with reality. While I was probably depressed, I don’t recall being so, because I was loaded almost all the time.
