I've been telling myself that I have a disease, this thing called Depression, like my brother, on Zoloft, or my dad, on Wellbutrin, or my mom, whatever it is that she's on. It runs in the family, I guess, and it's my turn. Thinking about it this way helps me keep from getting angry at myself out of disappointment that I don't have my life together - that I'm not the blissed-out guru of good living my ego would like to see in the mirror.
But I don't really want to believe this, and as a result, I don't. Not really. It would be the final nail in the coffin of my sense of free will - the idea that some of the perceptions I have are not derived from reflections of the external world, that they come only from the soul, from the spirit, from that which is essentially and eternally me - not interpretations of sensations felt by the animal I'm trapped inside. The belief that the painful spasms of my ego serve some god I love is important to me.
But this powerful illusion I think of as Me is shrinking away and becoming a totem representative of a philosophy I learned as a child, not a soul at all but a symbol in a theory distracting my mind while my body tries to reproduce itself. Who am I? It all depends on how much serotonin is available at the synapses in my brain and for how long.
Speaking of serotonin reuptake inhibition, I've been on a psychedelic-free diet for several months now - since the breakup that set off this fit of mood. I broke the diet only a couple of weeks back, at the Rainbow Gathering in New Mexico, where I was sure that the general atmosphere, and the presence of understanding friends, would get me through any psychic despair intact.
The despair arrived right on schedule, after a nice bemushroomed afternoon watching clouds and movies played on the inside of my eyelids with scenes William Burroughs would be horrified and ashamed by - deformed babies, stillborn, being pushed out through diseased anuses ringed by phallic hemmorhoids, the flesh of the baby's face winking in and out of sight as the anus flexes, decaying, being eaten by worms, or on closer scrutiny composed of autonomous and carnivorous sexual organs devouring each other in mixed lust and pain.
Woah! Time to look at the clouds again. This is getting a little intense. Maybe I should get a job pronto so I can afford some therapy. Chatted it up the day before at a psychedelics seminar with someone familiar with the theories of Stan Grof. Grof has a concept called the "perinatal matrix" that he uses to map life phases, psychedelic trips, psychoses and such into one of four stages of birth - contentment in the womb, crowded difficulty in the womb, painful ejection from the womb, and wondrous and baffling birth. I saw myself in need of a birth, and envisioned it being accompanied by blood and screams, like births often are.
I was familiar with the despair; it had always been there. I'd never been away from it. My life had been a long project to destroy or discard it, always nearing, never reaching completion. I saw my life as a succession of paths, leading from the valley of the shadow of death, starting with billboards promising the end of all suffering at the end of the path and ending in a fiery pit of anguish and the laughter of the one yelling "fooled you again!"
I'm not going to get fooled again. There's one more path I haven't tried. But even as I pull out the one last reserve in my bag, Hamlet's soliloquy cracks my mind - to sleep, perchance to dream. How do I know that I won't just come back again, born baffled and bleeding to a screaming mother, ignorant and eager, cursed with the ability to endure pain?
An entropy of flesh trapping me in a spiral of decay and mortality, and here I am at the peak of animal adulthood and my soul still cannot find a home - what will I do when my teeth fall out and my hair recedes and my joints creak and my penis refuses to rise? If I'm not home now, when can I come home? It only gets harder from here.
I come down from the mushrooms and instead of feeling like I've been through a horrible nightmare, I feel as though I've been forcibly confronted with a long-suppressed truth - like the madman has been screaming eerie prophecy beneath my window and it's all true. There is no hope, and when there was it was the worst curse. What can I do now but pretend, like everyone else pretends, in the hopes that I can fool myself the way they fool me and I can hallucinate the contentment I thought I could earn.
This is where I was when I came home from the Rainbow Gathering and my lover gave me the heave-ho, abruptly, as if the email she had sent me several weeks earlier telling me that she couldn't live without me and that no other man had been so gentle and that she wanted me closer and closer had been a ruse and I heard the laughter of the one yelling "fooled you again!"
I had seen it coming but couldn't be sure if it was doom prophesied by mood or a true intuition. I pled my case, I bargained my soul, I told her, "this is very bad timing," I asked for a mercy fuck just so I could be held (she refused), she took me home and I cracked open a beer and sat on the floor and cried.
Then I went insane.
I got up and walked out onto the balcony, putting down my mostly-full beer somewhere along the way. I walked away from the doorway so that I couldn't be seen inside the room, and then I knelt down and grabbed the top of the wooden railing with both hands and banged my head against the planks of the railing. A few more bangs and one of the planks came loose and broke off. I shifted over slightly and started on the next plank, making animal-like sounds and gritting my teeth. I think I knocked out four planks before one of my friends came out and wrestled me to the ground. It took two men to hold me down, and another to keep objects out of my reach and to force a pillow under my head where I had been banging my forehead against the concrete.
Even thus restrained, I must have been frightening. I was not communicative, screaming and crying, and occasionally muttering "bastards." They called 911.
Quickly, the police showed up and handcuffed me. I calmed down deliberately, but when I rose, on request, I made a mad jump over the balcony, but was held down. They took me inside and asked me some questions, which I either didn't answer at all or answered evasively. They stood me up and I was close enough to a wall to bang into it headfirst with force. The cops then threatened to pepper spray me, after which I became somewhat more cooperative.
I was taken to County Mental Health and admitted "on a 5150." The officer wrote on the admission form that "when I arrived I found Gradsdovic on the ground with 2 friends holding him down. They said that he'd tried to jump. After I'd handcuffed Gradsdovic he tried to break away & dive head first off the 2nd story balcony. Based on the above information it appears that there is probable cause to believe that said person is, as a result of mental disorder a danger to himself."
This gave the folks at County Mental Health carte blanche. They placed me in isolation, a small room containing a mattress, a blanket, and a plastic bedpan. I believe they kept me here for about a day and a half, but I'm not too clear on it, because they at one point shot me up with three different medications (haloperidol is the only one I remember the name of) and my memories got fuzzy after that.
It was absolutely antitherapeutic. If you happened to be feeling paranoid, being locked up by agents of the state in a room in which a camera watched your every move wouldn't help much. If, like me, you were feeling isolated from people and quite alone, having your contact with humanity reduced to 15-minute interval encounters with people with notepads who only talked to you in order to get a closer view of the dilation of your eyes for their charts would not help your mood. But the goal was not to make me feel better, but to keep me from killing myself.
I wasn't to be discouraged so easily. I found that I could bite off hunks of skin from my wrist above that artery they use to take your pulse, discreetly, without attracting attention from those people monitoring the camera. I'd almost gotten through to the artery itself, was caught up in some gristle under the skin, when they took me out of isolation briefly to visit with my parents. After banging my head against the wall a few times in the visitation room, they hauled me back and shot me up with sleepy juice and that put an end to my wrist-biting.
"Hx from pt is sketch, as he is paranoid & guarded. Mother reports that he has had prior depressions & is a drug abuser. In recent days he has used MJ, mushrooms, ETOH." This led to their diagnosis that I was suffering from a bad trip or from withdrawal - "substance-induced psychosis." They were wrong - I was completely sober - but I think their mistake led to my being released a few hours ahead of schedule. They figured I must have come down from whatever I was on by then, so they could let me go.
"Appearance: Dark hair, slender, angry."
"Thought content: Is paranoid & guarded. Thinks we are agents of the police. Continues to say he just returned from Alaska when in fact it was New Mexico." I sat in isolation doing meditation exercises I had learned at the San Francisco Zen Center (which the staff at County interpreted as further signs of my broken mental state) and occasionally trying to come up with a game plan. I decided that as long as I was here and crazy, I'd might as well really be here and really be crazy. I thought I'd tell them the Alaska story and explain that my problem was that I was anguished over all the orphan children I'd killed.
I've been out of County a little more than a week. I've got a job now,
making real good money. I've been on Effexor one week at the time of this
writing, it's ruining my appetite, my sex drive is absent without leave, I
occasionally have to take very deep afternoon naps, and my yawns never seem
to break and satisfy the yawn reflex. My mood, however, remains fragile.
After I left County, I had several days of mania, which was good, because I
had a lot to take care of. Then I crashed hard and was afraid that I might
wig out again (I didn't). Now I'm starting to rise again. Don't know how
much more of this I have to go through. I've been reading "Listening to
Prozac," thinking it would help me confront the philosophical issues
surrounding the medical manipulation of the identity, but instead so far
it's a celebration, a series of success stories. I'm waiting to join the
choir.
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