August 7th 2001

Finally the actual appointment to see the "real" therapist rolls around, it is stifling hot in this city, the bus ride to this office is an hour, I had to keep telling myself to go, and I told my supervisor yesterday that I did have an appointment so that I would feel like I HAD to leave work and go. I did come away from the appointment with something called Effexor. Which I have never heard of, but in my desperation I took one as soon as I left the office. He gave me a "patient starter pack" which was 2 weeks worth and then a scrip for 30 days with another 30 day refill, and a reminder that it takes 4-6 weeks before meds start to work, so I shouldn't call him in 2 weeks and tell him they're not working, nice guy huh?

The past couple weeks have been so bad, I sit up all night, I feel sad, scared, in the middle of the night I want to call someone, but at the same time realize I don't want to deal with the stuff that follows calling someone for help in the middle of the night. "Yes obviously you mean a lot to me if I call you, but in my state of my mind I simply cannot return the friendship I'm asking of you, so could you leave me alone unless I call you in desperate lonliness in the early hours before dawn?"
Does that mean that on top of being depressed I'm narcissistic? Maybe I'm just a sociopath? Okay I'm getting carried away, it's just depression, plain old ordinary, unexciting depression. Sometimes these past days I have found myself crying as I walk to work, or on the bus, or as I sit in the tub trying to soak away my sadness.

The shrink. He is interrogating in his style, asking me what precipitated this depression. I must have lost someone, had a bad relationship, had some kind of trauma. UGH! No stop it, I've been through this already with the CSW, I've been depressed forever, I've been depressed since I was a teenager, I've seem the same pattern emerge over and over in my life, and it is now finally at nearly 35 years that I can no longer move forward without help, without getting it under control. So despite the fact that I don't like him, that he literally makes a list on his fingers in front of me of all the issues he has to talk to every patient about, suicide, childhood, parents, relationships

etc... I accept the appt for 6 weeks from now, knowing it is absurd to put someone on meds and tell them call me in 6 weeks and make a note in my book on the way out to call and ask for a referral to something a bit closer to home, and not like him.

I'm on my way right? At the least maybe this stuff will work, maybe....