About those SSRI's
Antidepressants did not have an immediate effect on my depression. Rather, they took away my constant anxiety. I felt calm, which was a new emotion to me. I did not know I had anxiety, did not have a word for it. Imagine growing up with an annoying loud alarm constantly going off in your head which then fades away quite quickly at the age of twenty-six.
For a while it felt like I had a superpower, that most exotic and powerful superpower known to man: I felt normal.
This was a new start, but rather than starting at the beginning, I started farther back, from the position of someone who had made a complete mess of his life. There was a lot of work to do, and I only had the vaguest idea of how to set about it.
Learning to drive a new brain is not easy. Mistakes were made. Learning how to live as a newborn surrounded by loving people who wish you all the best and help you along the way is not an easy task, and having to do so in your mid-twenties without any support is downright embarrassing.
I have many regrets, which I will pass over in silence, except one: I wish I had sought out better company earlier.
"What would you tell your younger self if you had the chance?" is a question that some people manage to ask casually. I'm not above speculating about what my life might have been like if someone had told me at the right time to invest in Google stock, or to hit the gym, or to buy a house, or to prepare in other ways for the future, or just that one day there would be a future.
The problem with that scenario is that the recipient of the message has to be willing to listen, and I doubt you could have told me anything much at that age. I was not used to people telling me things for my benefit.
You know that scene in a high school comedy where some girl goes over to one of the nerdy kids in the cafeteria and talks to him? The nerd gets all flustered, and the girl goes back to her friends to report on the interaction so they can all laugh at him.
That happened to me.
I was not particularly embarrassed or humiliated. It was just how things went.
There were some people in school who I thought were my friends at the time. In reality they were just willing to tolerate me for various reasons -- some thought I was funny, some had no friends of their own. Some just needed someone to look down on.
I did not seek out the company of decent people because I did not think they would want me. As soon as I found some -- in a public speaking class, of all places -- things rapidly started to change.