The other day, I got a call from the ketamine infusion clinic where I was treated for ‘treatment-resistant depression’ (isn’t it always?) shortly before I got married two years ago. (If you’re prepping for a wedding, skip the facials and go with a dissociative anesthetic instead). I sent the call straight to voicemail. They were simply checking in to see if I’d become depressed again. Always nice to hear from an old friend.
If I had room in my budget, I’d probably go get an infusion as if it were a facial. I sort of hate ‘self-care’ as a category — it’s turned into more of an industry than a practice, Jessica DeFino writes about this better than I ever could — and I certainly wouldn’t place necessary mental healthcare within it, but lately, I find myself bargaining about what I need or want in my head. Why shouldn’t a new scalp oil or probiotic be the thing that changes my life? I don’t need help, I think, I just need to walk outside more. I don’t need to have that conversation, I think, I just need to write a letter and throw it away. I don’t need. I don’t want. I simply don’t — I generally do not, and that’s the end of the sentence. Do? I don’t know her.
I used to be really annoying about therapy. I wanted everyone to go to therapy and I would tweet about it all the time and bring it up in the club, in the back of the uber, at work — one might say that I lacked boundaries and one would be correct. I thought therapy could prevent personal and worldwide devastation. I was haunted by all of the losses I’d experienced and my guilt motivated a lot of my so-called compassion or advocacy or whatever you want to call it. Maybe my thinking was magical. Deluded. If I talk about affordable therapy as much as possible, not only will everyone get it and be okay, but also the world will recognize my goodness and spare me any continued suffering.
Now, I’m annoying in a different way: I’m haunted by how annoying I was. I’m disturbed by my impulse to shield myself and others from suffering, as if life isn’t about suffering. I don’t want to over-prescribe. I don’t want to talk about my experiences. I don’t want to talk about depression or ketamine or how talking about this is so important. Again, no matter what the thing to be done or said is, I simply Do Not.
And yet, here I am, type-type-typing away.
Lately, I’ve had that immovable lump in my throat. The burn in your wrists and your stomach right before you’re about to cry, the surge of something hot and fearful that’s like adrenaline but never subsides. I’m eating all my meals and going to the gym and working and doing everything that I’m supposed to do, and I don’t feel bad in a way that feels like it needs my attention. I feel dread, I think. And who cares what I’m dreading? The climate crisis, the culture wars, those weird little alien guys I saw on The Daily Mail, the bacteria in my gut and whether or not they’re good gut bacteria, Lydia on Love is Blind, aging, reproducing, creating a capsule wardrobe, how none of my pants fit, the right ergonomic desk chair, death, etc. It’s all the same.
The comic and the tragic. The sacred and the propane. The bullshit and the less-than-bullshit.
Whaaaaaattteeevvvvvvverrrrrr.
I wanted to sit down and write something cohesive that like, really had a point and said something succinct and interesting, but this is all I have to say and now I feel like I need to publish it because otherwise I wasted my time or something.
I’m going to go watch the Mike White season of Survivor.
By following you on twitter however long ago, you helped me to see the value in therapy (even though it wasn't working for me at the time) and helped me take the plunge in getting medicated. I've tried every medication under the sun these last six years and now my doctors are coming around to diagnosing me with ~treatment resistant depression~ and suggesting ketamine more. Seeing you mention this now is a real full-circle moment for me. You're, like, my mental illness oracle.
Lydiaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa