“Can you remember what you felt like when you walked through that door?” “No,” I blubber back. “You said you were feeling okay. It was just twenty minutes ago.” “I’m not okay,” I insist, through tears. “I’m not going to be okay.” It hadn’t been an easy day. I had a total meltdown over the… Continue reading Out of Sense, Out of Mind
8:00 a.m. – Breakfast 8:45 a.m. – Community Meeting 10:30 a.m. – Snack 11:00 a.m. – Group Therapy 11:45 a.m. – Lunch 1:00 p.m. – Visiting 2:00 p.m. – Activity Group 3:00 p.m. – Snack 4:30 p.m. – Walk (if approved by insurance and doctor) 5:45 p.m. – Dinner 7:00 p.m. – Visiting 8:30 p.m.… Continue reading Impatient Inpatient
The months tick upwards. I tried to write this as four months, rewrite it at five, post it at six. I wish I could say it was because I wanted to say everything perfectly, but it’s not. Life overtakes us, and promises we make glibly to ourselves—“I’ll think of her everyday”—are forgotten fast. She always… Continue reading You Are Here
Perhaps because the novelty—by which I mean an alcohol-accentuated tincture of horror and awe—has worn off, I’m not coming away from my fifth reunion with the same crazed list of stories as I had after, say, my Freshman year. There were no drunken alumni saving me from arrest at the hands of Mohawk-profiling P-safe officers;… Continue reading Going back was the best of times, going back was the worst of times
A few weeks ago, I spilled my coffee at the breakfast table three days in a row. Someone suggested that maybe I was guzzling too much caffeine, and I replied that, no, I’ve been on an unhealthy-grad-student level of coffee consumption for some time. Curious, though, I went off for a few days, but it… Continue reading The Normal One
Dates like these are always kind of arbitrary, but it’s been three months. Three months since I was last crumpled up on my parents’ couch, since I cried for no reason at all, since I could speak of “being depressed” in both a present and seemingly eternal tense. Three months, and it already seems so… Continue reading Happy, At Any Cost
Recently I’ve been spending my days working frantically on my book, voraciously reading texts for my qualifying exams and—this is the best, and most exciting, part—talking animatedly about potential dissertation ideas with my colleagues. You could say that, after a two-year hiatus, I love sociology again. The only problem is that it took me getting… Continue reading Anomie Soup
I still haven’t gotten around to meditating. In some ways, I feel that the rapidity of my recovery has slightly blunted the urge to try out new health and well-ness practices, beyond the simple fix of adding more medication to my daily regimen. In the meantime, I’ve rediscovered the wisdom to be gained from a… Continue reading Motorway Meditations
Apparently if you want to get a big response to something on social media, write about depression. I’m not entirely sure why I decided to “go public” about my condition and the cascading failures it has led to, but the response I’ve received has been incredibly touching. In addition to the public support I’ve received—for… Continue reading Empathy
I am not entirely sure how I first got on anti-depressants. It was the summer after 10th grade, and I had a summer internship with the Defense Department (yes, really) in Albuquerque. I was also, for the first time, plumbing the depths of sadness to a degree that surpassed normal adolescent angst. One day, a… Continue reading Little Helpers
Alex V. Barnard - Sociology 