Prozac Nation

I am planning to go out on the boat today for four days. The forecast is for 35 mph winds and a gale warning is in effect. I won't be going to my usual anchorage, but will hunker down in a protected area of the harbor and wait until the wind subsides tomorrow before going to the "secret" island.

My little dilemma is nothing compared to the 200 mph winds that raked the Philippines this week. I cannot imagine anything being left with those kinds of winds. It would be like a nuclear explosion happened. I keep hearing that aide is on the way, but the response seems slow.  I would like to make a donation but want to make sure that it is a reputable one where the actual donations get to the people who need it.  If you have any ideas on this, let me know.

My wife has started on a new medication for depression, and it seems to be helping.  We have had a rough time of it since her parents died.  Some days both of us felt as if the air had been sucked out of us.  Then things would improve, but I could tell that she was having a hard time in general.  I suggested to her that she might want to see her doctor.  Among many of her attributes is the ability to take action when she feels depressed.  So she talked to her doctor, described what was going on, and was prescribed a different medication.  It's good to see her smiling and actually making jokes with me.  She has a wicked sense of humor when she is feeling good.

I read the book Prozac Nation after watching the movie few nights ago.  It brought home the unmanageability of depression and how it must feel to be so terribly alone in your head:
Some catastrophic moments invite clarity, explode in split moments: You smash your hand through a windowpane and then there is blood and shattered glass stained with red all over the place; you fall out a window and break some bones and scrape some skin. Stitches and casts and bandages and antiseptic solve and salve the wounds. But depression is not a sudden disaster. It is more like a cancer: At first its tumorous mass is not even noticeable to the careful eye, and then one day -- wham! -- there is a huge, deadly seven-pound lump lodged in your brain or your stomach or your shoulder blade, and this thing that your own body has produced is actually trying to kill you. Depression is a lot like that: Slowly, over the years, the data will accumulate in your heart and mind, a computer program for total negativity will build into your system, making life feel more and more unbearable. But you won't even notice it coming on, thinking that it is somehow normal, something about getting older, about turning eight or turning twelve or turning fifteen, and then one day you realize that your entire life is just awful, not worth living, a horror and a black blot on the white terrain of human existence. One morning you wake up afraid you are going to live.

In my case, I was not frightened in the least bit at the thought that I might live because I was certain, quite certain, that I was already dead. The actual dying part, the withering away of my physical body, was a mere formality. My spirit, my emotional being, whatever you want to call all that inner turmoil that has nothing to do with physical existence, were long gone, dead and gone, and only a mass of the most fucking god-awful excruciating pain like a pair of boiling hot tongs clamped tight around my spine and pressing on all my nerves was left in its wake.

That's the thing I want to make clear about depression: It's got nothing at all to do with life. In the course of life, there is sadness and pain and sorrow, all of which, in their right time and season, are normal -- unpleasant, but normal. Depression is an altogether different zone because it involves a complete absence: absence of affect, absence of feeling, absence of response, absence of interest. The pain you feel in the course of a major clinical depression is an attempt on nature's part (nature, after all, abhors a vacuum) to fill up the empty space. But for all intents and purposes, the deeply depressed are just the walking, waking dead.

And the scariest part is that if you ask anyone in the throes of depression how he got there, to pin down the turning point, he'll never know. There is a classic moment in The Sun Also Rises when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt, and all he can say in response is, 'Gradually and then suddenly.' When someone asks how I love my mind, that is all I can say too. ― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

I watched my mother suffer with her terrible depressive episodes. I really am hoping that my wife will be feeling better now that her parent's estate has been finalized, the house sold, and the work on most of the first floor here has been done.  I am wanting her to be happy.  I tell her I love her and support her and have her back....always.  I hope that is enough.