Junior Year

Figured I should post more than just my job-ranting here and there…

Junior year was kind of– the loss of my innocence. Or maybe the final chapter of the losing of my innocence starting with that summer my family fell apart and then melded itself back together again. I spent the summer immediately before falling in love with CoolFamily (couldn’t think of a better pseudonym), for whom I was a live-in babysitter. It was supposed to be for 3 months and it ended up being just short of 3 years. I kept a dorm on campus which was a good way to have a place to crash after working late hours at the campus arts center, but for the most part I was living on the 3rd floor of a house and eating my meals with a kindergartener and an almost-2 year old. BestCollegeFriend didn’t much approve of the arrangement, and neither honestly did my family I think– but I was happy. My course-load that first semester consisted of all high-level classes in my major and for the first time ever I determined that earning “honors” would be something to care about. If I was going to be taking all classes I wanted to be taking, I was ready to do it right. I wrote drafts and made Teaching Assistants read them. I was excited for the academic rigor and inspired to create, create, create. I fully embraced directing and signed on to direct a friend’s play that fall.

The school had a fall break in October– and I drove out to my FavoriteHighSchoolTeacher’s house in Upstate New York and spent a few days with her. It was a lot of fun hanging out with her again, with her kids and her dogs– but what i mostly remember about that trip is how I spontaneously burst into tears two or three times. She always had that effect on me. I didn’t know how to explain my sputtering– somehow just being around her tore through the layers of whatever in me was latent and unresolved. It’s odd remembering that trip now because it was so incongruous with my sense of that period in my life– all my other memories are of it being simply a joyous time during which my worst problem was having to deal with customers while working at Victoria’s Secret (little known fact about me that I myself have tried to block out– that will have to be for another post…). But I realize in retrospect that in my joy at being so focused and busy at school, it took only a few walks in the woods or a long drive with a long-ago mentor to break me down and realize how much I, even then, felt was lacking.

Junior year was the year I was diagnosed with clinical depression. Looking back I don’t think it was the first instance– in fact, I’m pretty sure now that my sixth grade year and part of my tenth grade year included depressive episodes in them– but it was the first time I was aware, and surrounded by lots of other people who were also aware— that I was slipping down a long path of sadness that I ultimately had to get help for. My mostly wonderful months of challenging classes were rudely interrupted by a lot of Reality all at once. Sister threatened her boyfriend that she was going to commit suicide. Twice. I got a call one morning coming back from class from Urbanblight, and the sound of his voice on the message made me know something was wrong. A Friend had died. I had never before had someone my age who had died. The circumstances of his funeral, the day after Thanksgiving, during which Friend was condemned more than he was mourned, were a final straw of sorts in my psyche.

There is a lot I remember about that depression. I left that funeral so angry it almost felt like being happy. I wasn’t sad anymore I just wanted to throw things. And then shortly after I had this sense that I took a hiatus from my own life– as though I wasn’t living it myself at all, and was just observing myself from the outside as I wandered around in a mostly aimless fashion. I was a mess. I stopped doing homework altogether and slept as much as I possibly could get away with. I didn’t brush my teeth for about three months. I had a strong sense of people around me, making these quiet inquiries, trying to reach me– but they all were so very distant-seeming. I had fallen too far inside myself, and I simply didn’t have the energy to reach back. In all the bad news I had received I had gotten it by phone call, and I went through a period where I was literally terrified to pick up a phone. The lowest point I can recall was of sitting on my dorm room floor one night, holding my ears while the phone rang, trying to will it to shut up.

The best description I’ve ever heard of depression is this. If someone had a broken leg, or cancer, or was living with constant intolerable pain– and you put a Magical Cure on a stick and dangled it three inches from their nose– they would sum up every ounce of energy they had to grab it and be cured. With serious depression it’s different. You can be in constant intolerable pain but if somooeone put the Magical Cure three inches from your nose– you’d just be too tired.

I did find my way out of that hole, but it took a long time. I told some friends I could barely get out of bed and they resolved to invite me to breakfast before class each morning. I saw an Academic Dean and was able to take an incomplete in one class. Luckily my grades had been so high in the other classes thus far that even the class I completely phoned in the rest of the semester still managed to amount to a low but passing grade. I got permission from the school to take on a reduced course load the next semester. CoolFamily had a psychiatrist neighbor who was able to recommend Doctor to me. I went on Zoloft that February.

Hmm. It’s hard to talk about depression without being… depressing. Maybe I should just go back to the job-ranting:)