From my journal for November 19, 1995
I’m afraid I’m not keeping up with my discipline around sleeping. I think I’ve dropped my discipline because I see Dr. Stoll in a couple of days, and I’m hoping for a magic bullet, a small dose of an anti-depressant that would make it easier to sleep, that would make it possible to wake up rested. At the same time I have great distrust of drugs and doctors — and actually no positive experience of medication that actually helped. And I think how last summer I let go of my discipline around food, expecting to fall into the safety of dance camp, and it wasn’t a safety net at all.
There’s a fine thin snow falling. I can hear Dana’s heavy breathing from where he’s sleeping on the couch, I can hear it over the furnace that’s running (I turned it on when I got up) I don’t like that we haven’t slept in the same bed in so long, but I realize that I couldn’t sleep at all with that sound going on. It’s not really snoring, but it’s noisy enough to be a problem. I guess I’ve been hoping that anti-depressant medication, if it helped me sleep, might lessen my sensitivity to noise.
November 20
Reading through journal entries on depression. This is being very hard. My life looks like someone struggling through a swamp full of brambles, pain and crisis and depression succeeding each other like recurring themes in music.
November 22
I saw the shrink, Dr. Andrew Stoll, a nice young yuppie with a faintly supercilious air. He didn’t tell me anything I hadn’t got from the books except to explain that Prozac et al are “serotonin uptake preventers,” that they blocked the sites where serotonin is captured for recycling. This sounded a little unhealthy to me, like closing down the drains in a house so you would have more water in the system.
He’s neither as knowledgeable, nor as flexible as I had hoped, and my sense that these guys really don’t know what they’re doing makes me not want to do something so potentially dangerous. At least not until I’ve really worked on separating helplessness and hopelessness with Karen, because it seems that that is where major depression gets triggered. I want to try reminding myself — “I am not helpless. I can ask for help, I can go away, etc.”
I don’t seem to realize the damage done by my father saying when I asked for help “If you didn’t know how to do it, why did you even try?” In fact both parents usually refused to help me. So I basically learned not to ask for help.