And I Shall Sing as I Push the Rock Back Up the Hill

One thing that I had forgotten about feeling well is that one doesn't always feel well. I feel rather rotten most of the time, being stuck, as I am, in a corner of the world for which I am not suited among friends whom I love but with whom there is so much I cannot share.

This sounds like pretentious weltschmerz from the mouth of an ingrate but it isn't meant that way.

What I do mean is that I often feel almost as bad as I do when I'm depressed but the trick of it is that now I only feel that way for an hour or five minutes and not two months. I'll feel unbearably anxious but whenever the reason for the anxiety is removed, it fades away, quickly. It's amazing.

I have worried, as I know that others do, that the medication could only ever take away from me; that I would either be artificially happy and well or still miserable and sick with side effects. I thought that it could only be a compromise between how much depression I could stand and how much medication I could stand. There was, indeed, no reason for me to think otherwise. I had learnt from experience that medication would make me not-depressed, which is not at all the same as well. As it turns out, that's not what has happened this time.

I've not turned into a smiling shell of myself. I'm not a morose lump either. I seem to have as complete a range of human emotion as I ever have had. I think that this is what it's like when the medication works.

Good job it finally did.

It only took twelve years, two hospitalizations, three depressive episodes so bad that I had to drop out of school, two so bad that I had to stop work, three pronounced periods of hypomania, years of insomnia, years of horrendous anxiety, and more than a decade of seeing various psychiatrists, psychologists and so on. It's only taken up the past seventeen years of my life.

I'm laughing though, it's absurd, but I'm laughing like Sisyphus. I'm glad something finally worked.