The Twilight Zone

When life knocks us down, at least we’re still living.  When life falls apart, we have no reason left to live.

The first few times I had real suicidal episodes was over twenty years ago.  I believe it was a residual relapse from an antidepressant I had unsuccessfully tried when I was a teenager.

Since then, or actually since I was fourteen (twenty-five years ago), I have been using everything I teach in personal development, therapies, healing arts, and spiritual practices, as a way to effectively manage my clinical depression.  I even made it a career with a best-selling book that has been translated into Mandarin.

But two years ago, I felt all the means I had used to handle my depression were no longer effective, or did not sustain my state for more than several minutes.  Desperately, I resorted back to seeing a medical doctor and got a prescription for anti-depressants.

That resulted in a rare, but severe side-effect which caused me to attempt suicide.  I had realized that it was the drugs, and stopped attempting, but the pervasive suicidal thoughts did not stop.

It is like living a torturous existence where I see everything negatively like a cynical asshole.  Every thought seems to lead back to a suicidal solution.

This is exactly the opposite of who I am.

One of my friends astutely asked me, “Is it really the opposite of who you are?”

Maybe this cynical asshole *is* exactly me?  Maybe my default setting is to be negative, and I have worked for twenty-five years at covering that up with all sorts of shit in order to suppress who I really am.

The last two years I have spent trying various anti-depressants.  Nothing seemed to work even remotely.  Instead, I just got nasty side effects.

I tried various forms of RTMS therapy, and those didn’t work either.

I took a special DNA test from camH that would tell me which antidepressants would work best for me.  Those antidepressants didn’t work, either.

How can I be such an anomaly?  What are the chances of somebody being so committed to change, trying everything for twenty years, and still getting jack shit fuck all.

My doctor says that I’ve now tried every category of anti-depressant that is available on the market!

The very last one I’m currently on, seems to be working somewhat.  But what is the luck in taking two years, and trying every other antidepressant, before finding one that just works moderately, sometimes?

I still have headaches as a side-effect.  And I also can’t perform sexually.  It’s so ironic, now that I finally have a girlfriend in my life, that my antidepressant is not allowing me to have satisfying sex.

This all feels like a Twilight Zone experience.  I can’t win.  I just continue and hope for the best.  And that fucking sucks.