Hey! It’s been too long! I’ve been horribly depressed! How about you, what’ve you been up to, how you been?

I hear it’s still in vogue, having horrible depression, if a little on the edge of being so last season as vaccines come to town.

But what can I say? it’s gotten so familiar, like that favorite sweater that eventually goes full Velveteen Rabbit, but instead of burning the fucker after it gives you a wasting disease, and it’s shabby as fuck anyway, and you look terrible in it? For sentimental reasons, you keep hanging onto it, wearing it around the house in secret.

I think I updated when I went on meds. That was high Covid times and so my scheduled appointment with my good physician was via phone.

I told him I was depressed and would like meds. He asked if I had considered talking to a therapist. I didn’t want to tell him that having a therapy phone call in my thin-walled house where I wept and bitched about the other members in said house? NO THANK YOU.

I told him I’d get back to that thought, but right now, I had situational crisis, meds please.

He, in turn, started down that dogged list of diagnosing someone with depression.

He must’ve been doing that a lot in recent times, because he went full DMV clerk.

I have been in situations where I’ve had to read off the diagnostic checklist to others, and so now let me send my full apology into the universe. I know they gotta check for everything, but when he got to ‘have you ever been on antidepressants before?’ and I went all the way back to that time in college, and he sighed like I was a broken toy who’d fooled everyone all these years? Fuuuuuuuu

I started interrupting him. “Look, I know why I’m depressed-“

He continued down the checklist.

“I’ve got a lot of situational stuff going on.”

He continued down the checklist.

I get it. He’s the doctor. He’s doctoring. It’s probably deeply depressing for him to be doing this checklist all the time now. He’s gotta cover his ass in case I do something regrettable. But for fuck’s sake, in Covid times, I’d hope when someone announced depression he’d just throw pills at them from a safe social distance because depression seems like a fucking obvious side effect.

A few questions later, he got to situational issues. “You mentioned you have situational stress.”

“Yes, that’s the one! I have that.”

I did not say, but made the gesture where he couldn’t see.

“What kind of situational stress?” he asked.

“THIS IS PROBABLY MORE THAN YOU NEED TO KNOW, BUT MY {relative} MURDERED MY {relative} AND MY [other relative} WENT IN FOR HER FIRST MAMMOGRAM SEVEN WEEKS AGO AND GOT A DOUBLE MASTECTOMY LAST WEEK.” And then I had to stop, because being pissed was quickly giving way to sobbing.

And I was a little afraid if I started sobbing I wouldn’t stop, and this doctor has some weird sliding scale calculator where I’m charged for MEDICAL ISSUE * TIME HE SPENDS WITH ME/How good my insurance is. And paying money to talk to someone about depression loops back to that thing I mentioned before about thin walls and already stressed kids.

“Oh wow,” he said. No longer DMV teller, doctor again. Then laughing nervously. “I’d be worried if you weren’t depressed.”

He promptly wrote me a script and I GTFOthephone.

(GTFOTP would’ve been a great new acronym but now that Covid’s coming to a close, who will ever use the phone again? Not me!)

It bothered me, how admitting depression to a doctor made him… What? Different. Like I was taxing his mental health by talking about it.

For all I know, he was distancing himself because he, too, was struggling with depression. I mean, being a healthcare provider during Covid, that seems like not too great a leap of logic.

I didn’t want to tell him about my personal life, because I knew what was wrong. Why couldn’t he trust me?

That’s probably arrogance on my part. Doctors are not script machines where you punch in what you want and meds fall out. But he was so friendly after I told him. Like I was a person again. Like my depression was ‘valid’ because I handily had a storyline and the luck to understand my A—> B psychological reaction.

Which was kind of terrifying because sometimes I’m low and I don’t really know why. What would he have done with me then?

Anyway, I don’t even know if the meds are working that great.

Aren’t you glad you read this? ME TOOOOOOOOO.