Complex Numbers

One pill makes you larger

I've never really come out and said this, but it should be obvious from some of my entries that I'm prone to depression.

Some time ago, before I joined WDC, I tried a prescription for antidepressants that my doctor recommended. That didn't last long. It lasted, more to the point, for about a week, until one night I found myself floating above my bed and looking down at myself lying there. Sure, it was a dream or hallucination - I don't levitate - but that's just one of those things that we're not supposed to experience or, if we do, we should be under the influence of something more recreational than Paxil.

Not that I do recreational drugs, mind you (well, I drink, but nothing illegal. That would be the LAST thing I need, getting a dependency on something like that.)

I lived with it - the depression, not the medication - for a while, rationalizing it by thinking that some of the best writers have suffered from depression, and I might as well get what creativity I could out of it.

The problem is, I don't get very creative when depressed; instead, I find myself starting to write angsty poems which I immediately delete (teens, take note: write them all you want, but freaking DELETE them before inflicting them upon the rest of us. You're not Poe. You're not even Morrissey.)

More recently, I've found that a combination of two things clears the depression right up: exercise, and vitamin D. Either one alone helps, but together they make me positively cheery, at which point none of my friends want to be around me because they're used to me being cynical and apathetic. That bums me out, which makes me depressed even when I'm not. Maybe I need new friends.

Well, I haven't been exercising very much over the past month - no excuse for that, just haven't worked it into my schedule, but I've been taking the vitamins.

Last night I forgot to take it, so today I found myself driving down the back roads of rural Virginia listening to Leonard Cohen and Brandi Carlile - not something I recommend in megadoses for one's mental health.

What really bugs me about all this is that it's all chemical - either directly as in the vitamin D, or indirectly through production of endorphins via exercise. In other words, no event can "cheer me up" for any length of time.

I don't know WHY it bugs me that this is the case; it just does.

So tonight I'll remember to take the vitamin D, and tomorrow I'll go to the gym. And maybe I can save a bit on gas in the process.