Even Bloggers Get the Blues

In college, many students have a tryst -- if not a full-blown romance -- with chemicals of various kinds. Such experimentation is common for many students, though not me, not then. My college-years experimentation took vastly different forms: experiments with poetry about the nothingness of being, experiments with soul-crushing, spirit-breaking emotionally destructive relationships. Ah, good times.
Many years after college, I had my first tryst with chemicals: antidepressants. Well, first tryst if you don't count the courting of alcohol I did very briefly. After a few humiliating drunken episodes, that affair ended abruptly and we never saw one another again. Who needs alcohol, though, when you can have Effexor? It isn't as cinematic as heroin, but, then, neither is my life.
For as long as I can remember, I have been writing (which, currently, isn't all about the nothingness of being), I have enjoyed movies about haunted, poetic drug abusers and I have suffered from dark episodes of depression. I just assumed that everyone felt that way. But, it seems that sitting in a doctor's office, crying controllably is not something that everyone does. Hence, the Effexor that was prescribed at that very appointment. For a time, things were good between us, my little pink beauties and I. I felt mostly like myself, only a bit less sad. But, after a year and a half, I decided to cleanse my system and stop all medications. So I did.
Mostly, I am okay, but there are still very bad days. Yesterday was one such day. It was gradual, seeming like another bad day where people were just being annoying. You know, a typical Thursday. But it was not so. Little by little, the clouds outside my office doors swept in and by midmorning I could not control my crying jag. Nothing screams 'office professional' more than sitting at one's desk crying. I willed it to stop, tried to pull myself together, but in the end it didn't matter because I was in my office alone for a couple of hours. Long enough to cry until I was exhausted. I called Mr. Barefoot because nothing makes his day like receiving a call at work from his crying, depressed wife. Talking helped and the clouds thinned a bit, but they did not go away entirely. To his credit, Mr. Barefoot puts up with this better than I have any reason to expect. In the late afternoon, my office building was deserted and I spent the afternoon unable to concentrate on anything, staring a some inane article in Entertainment Weekly until it was time to go home. I felt physically exhausted and lay on the couch until dinner, something I rarely do. My day was saved by a munchkin who loudly declared "I go hide." He crawled up on the couch and under the blanket with me. The smile on his face parted the clouds in a way that my little pink buddies never could manage to do.
I felt better the next morning.