Water Balloons

[chaoticidealism]

My mom wants me to be a skinny writer with a husband and three kids. I'm a single asexual fat girl who's gonna be an engineer if I can just convince people that my three-year string of F's does not, in fact, outweigh the straight A's before and after it... (Depression's a bitch. Especially when you're in denial

Comments

Depression

[anonymous]

Your mom wants you to be a thin possibly starving writer? Stick with the engineering kid. Don't worry about the husband and kids, your mom needs a tranquilizer. "She goes running for the shelter of her Mother's Little Helper....."

Depression is a major [bummer]. It is just like the Sum of All Fears, one moment I am an like an aircraft carrier cruising along happy, 3.6 total GPA, and then an emotional crisis (welcome to girml says no to guy, and [was coerced into] withdraws friendship too). Hit the bridge, hit the hanger deck. "Captain thinks he can save the ship but flight ops are definitely out.... They practically sank an aircraft carrier!"

I should have been in dry dock back home, and/or on therapy and medication, basically things parents with transportation can arrange. I had two Fs, a D and three Cs in the fall semester. I had a B, three C's, and two D's in the spring. I think I recovered enough by summer but I was overwhelmed by a fast-paced summer class: a D, but my minor in psychology was finished. I did get an A in my other class.

Finishing out my sociology major over the next year I realized I had recovered, by tuning into another set of friends entirely. I had fewer Christian friends than I had fingers on one hand. I had nearly as many pretty good non-Christian friends as the fingers on both hands, and as far as good friends, as many as I had toes.

I did graduate, and realized that life has more and bigger things to worry about than one or two women dumping you. I went to graduate school to get a bigger degree and I did. But getting interviewed is not the same thing as getting hired. Finally, the state of Maryland reasoned that the answer to student loans and medical bills (cancer) was to study computer programming at state expense, even if I was formidably well educated already, and even if my particular brand of Asperger seems as light as air, an excuse, a pretext like the Mugden Incident in Manchuria, and extremely well correlated with stereotypical math and computer skills, a gift.

Callista, can you get antidepressant medication and psychotherapy? It works. I find a cocktail of Welbutrin-buproprin-Effexor-Topamax suppresses self-pity and anxiety about [depression seeks a weak spot specific to each person, mine right now is singleness, though I have dated since December. That sets a record.].

I felt discriminated against when the Federal government only wanted to talk to grads with a 3.5 GPA. What, 3.09 is not good enough? It got me into graduate school. I circled my GPA on my resume and submitted it as a protest. I am a person not a number. The difference between one number and another was a psychological illness that was not never treated by my parents.

I finally went for psychological treatment (feeling suicidal thinking of how my job history would be perceived, graduate students bounce around) when Dad died and he could not stop me from driving. Mom was more pragmatic about such things: someone had to shop, and working would be a good thing for me. I got my first antidepressant, Prozac. Six months later I felt emotionally and intellectually clear.

Hope you can get what you need.

Chris (Shrek)

Re: Depression

[chaoticidealism]

I did get on an antidepressant. Zoloft didn't help; Lexapro helped a little. Finding out I was autistic, and solving the stress problems involved with overload of various sorts, helped most of all. The depression has been in remission for about six months now, though I still have scattered, probably habitual, suicidal ideation. (Because I don't have the mood to match, it's not a problem; if you have a habit of thinking about suicide when things get annoying, you'll still think that way even after you're quite sure you don't want to do yourself in.)

In any event, I tapered off the Lexapro last February; it was giving me some mild but annoying side effects--sedation, a bit of a "haze" effect, mostly because it's impossible to keep the same level of the stuff in your blood if you're taking pills. I made a deal with my psychiatrist: Get into counseling, and I could get off the meds. So that's what I'm doing now. An hour every couple of weeks isn't very much time to trade for the annoyance of having to take pills that mess with your brain.

Oh, and those straight A's? Yep, got 'em after I got off the antidepressant. So I'm pretty sure it was a good decision. Anyway, the depression's not coming back unless I get another relatively long time of having stress I can't deal with. (That's when it happens. Every time I've had an episode, it was always precipitated by long-term unavoidable stress.)