THE SOURCE OF DEPRESSION

THE SOURCE OF DEPRESSION

BY

DALE W TICE 

 Dill sat on the edge of his bed, staring at the bottle of antidepressants in his hand. The morning light filtered through the curtains, casting a pale glow on the label that promised relief from the darkness that had gripped him for so long. I envy the kids that can sit on a stand in a court and point at a doll that tells everyone where they were touched and hurt at. I myself, can't say. The words echoed in my mind as I sat there, the weight of unspoken wounds pressing down on me. I was fifty years old, handsome for my age, but my hair was thinning, and my waistline had expanded beyond what it should be. Dressed only in a T-shirt and underwear, I felt exposed, vulnerable.

From somewhere down the hall, my mother's voice called out.

"Dill, you want something to eat before you go?"

I looked up at my reflection in the mirror across the room. There I was: an unhappy white man in the middle of his life, staring back at me with hollow eyes.

"You fat fuck, you don’t need to eat anything," I muttered under my breath.

"Whatcha you say?" my mother called back.

My mind snapped out of the zombie-like trance my thoughts had held me in. "Sure!" I replied, forcing a normal tone.

I got up and walked across the room toward the bathroom. In my path, I accidentally bumped into a stack of books, and one tumbled to the floor. It was my old elementary school annual. I paused, picking it up, and for a moment, it triggered a flood of memories.

Suddenly, I was back there—young Dill, in elementary school during recess, walking alone on the playground. I looked over and saw two girls staring at me. I knew them: Tonya and Renee, pretty, rich, and popular. I was none of those things.

"Hey, Dill," Tonya said.

I stopped, unsure why they were paying attention to me.

"You know, we think you are the most handsome boy in school," she continued.

The sad expression on my face melted away, replaced by a smile. The girls smiled back.

"April’s fool," Tonya added, and they both ran off laughing, leaving me standing there in the middle of the playground, hurt and confused.

The memory faded, and I was back in front of the mirror, now fully dressed in a suit and tie, looking neat and ready for work. I picked up a glass of water and the bottle of antidepressants, shook out two pills, and washed them down.

A Persian poet named Rumi once wrote, “The wound is where the light enters you.” If that were true, I should be shining like a disco ball now.

But instead of light, there’s only darkness in me—a dull, murky, dark, colorless darkness that swirls around me constantly, clinging to my every living minute. I can’t shake it; I can’t break from it. Where and when this unhappiness began, I can’t seem to find that one moment that triggered it. I’m not even sure if there is a triggering moment, but rather a layering of bad memories that has made me this way.

As these thoughts swirled, flashes of scenes from my life played out in my mind: me trying to pitch a baseball while people screamed insults; someone telling me they needed my jersey to put on one of the boys who didn’t play football but had been elected to homecoming court; calling my girlfriend only for a man to pick up; voices calling me a fool, telling me to use my head for something besides a hat rack. And so on.

I found myself sitting in a doctor’s office, briefcase at my side. I glanced up at the pretty receptionist, and our eyes met briefly before I looked away, too shy to hold the gaze.

I’ve always been a shy man and have found it difficult to strike up a conversation with women to ask them out. This shyness has followed me throughout my life, and now I find myself in my fifties and lonely.

Another memory surfaced: me standing in a hall as a pretty girl stared at me. She walked over.

"Hey, I’m Nina," she said.

I tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t come. I just walked away, leaving her confused as she watched me go.

You would think that growing up in the South, sexual development would be more straightforward.

But it wasn’t. Back in first grade, I watched some boys playing a game where they threw a football in the air, and the one who caught it ran until everyone tackled him.

One boy turned to me. "You want to play?"

"What is the game?" I asked.

"Smear the Queer."

"How do you play?"

"If you get the football, you’re the queer, and you run with it until you lose the football."

"Okay!"

I joined them. They threw the ball, and I caught it. I paused, looking at it, then realized I needed to run. The boys chased me, caught up, and piled on top.

"I can’t breathe," I gasped.

Later, sitting with some football players, a boy walked by in a pink shirt.

"Only faggots wear pink," one player said.

A year later, those same guys were sitting on the same bench, all wearing pink shirts.

I have good days like everyone else, but even when I’m happy, I’m aware that it’s only a temporary state, and soon the happiness will fade to melancholy, and melancholy into sadness.

I remembered riding in a pickup truck with my father and mother. Nobody seemed happy.

I want to blame it all on my parents, but I’m not sure that’s where the blame lies.

There I was as a young boy, lying on the floor crying while my father laughed and ripped down my posters.

Me and my father never got along, and we never resolved that conflict. Now he’s dead, and there can be no resolution.

Then, sitting on the couch with my mother, who was hugged up to her dogs and her phone.

Me and my mother get along, but there’s a strangeness about her that bothers me more than I bother her, I think. It’s always like she never showed love to me until we got older, and now she wants to have the loving mother relationship, yet I know she loves her dogs more than she will ever love me.

In the Army, walking with a black girl—my girlfriend at the time—when some guys came up and said we were going drinking. I let go of her hand and went off with them.

Then there are my own foolish decisions that have cost me relationships and possible lifelong love affairs that could have changed the course of my life.

Back in the waiting room, I pondered: Maybe I even chose this path for myself because I wanted to be the depressed fifty-year-old complaining about his life? Who knows.

"The doctor will see you now," the receptionist said.

I sat in the psychiatrist’s office.

"I have a tough time making friends and meeting women," I told him.

"I’m not sure you are depressed," he replied.

"Why?"

"You don’t have the characteristics. Do you ever think about harming yourself or others?"

That’s a tricky question, you know. If you say yes, they’ll throw you in a facility. So you know in your heart that “yes, I think about killing myself,” but I don’t want to be put in a nut house, and “no, I know I’m not really serious about it.”

It was always hard for me to visit a psychiatrist because I always felt like they were judging me, and the verdict was mental weakness, not depression.

Later, I was presenting a new drug to a doctor.

"We have a new pill on the market for anxiety," I said.

After a stint in the Army, I returned to college and got my degree in business, then took a job as a pharmaceutical salesman. I have always been curious about drugs, even when I was a teenager. I probably knew more about drugs than the average teenager. I guess I was always curious about them because I loved to use them occasionally to escape the world. Drugs, music, poetry, and writing stories were the things I loved when I was young. That was the career path I wanted to follow, but I chose to go into pharmaceutical sales because my father insisted I go into the Army, and then he insisted I get a real job and stop chasing after dreams. I think about all the guys that made it as writers, actors, musicians who didn’t follow their fathers’ wishes, but I wasn’t one of them.

I do have friends, but they are really friends with each other, and I’m the last one they call. I hang out with them, but I spent years in the Army and lost contact with people from high school. When I returned home, they were all married and moving on with their lives. I was still trapped in that just-out-of-high-school, about-to-go-to-college point in life, even though I was four years older now—not married, young but jaded by my experiences in the military and war.

"Will things get better for me, Doc?" I asked.

"They will, maybe. But just in case, let’s put you on a pill."

I found myself sitting in a grocery cart in the watermelon section, with nobody around.

If I could write a letter to my younger self, I would tell him things aren’t going to get better. Nothing is going to work out for you like you think it is. You will be a failure in life. You will not find love in the future; you will be living with your mother at fifty; and all your dreams of being something more will not work out. Your shitty life is just going to get even shittier. Kill yourself now and save yourself from all the hurt the future will bring.

There I was as a young man, lying on the floor crying as a man’s boot kicked me in the belly, yells and laughter echoing around.

My name is Dill. Yes, Dill. Having a name like Dill is bad enough, but to have a name like Dill in the South is brutal. I was called “Dildo,” “Dill Pickle,” “John Dillinger,” and on and on. I wish I could tell you things got better after school, but they didn’t. I didn’t go straight to college but instead chose to go into the Army, and there the name just got worse. After the Army, I went to college, studied business, and became a pharmaceutical salesman. I knew a lot about drugs, which is how I got the job; I just didn’t tell them how I knew so much about drugs was because of my past drug habit. They never asked, and I never told them.

My father died a couple of years ago, and I moved back in with my mother to help her and make sure she didn’t live alone. It saved me money but destroyed any kind of pride I had.

I’ve been dealing with depression for all of my life. I have always been curious what the source of it is, and when I talk about it with my psychiatrist, we can’t seem to pinpoint the cause of the depression. But the memories that I have kept of my oldest memories are not very happy.

I was losing the battle with depression and started self-medicating with my own pills.

Things spiraled; I started to lose control.

In my darkest moments, I saw visions: a young man with a gun to his head, an old man with a gun to his head, a soldier with a gun to his head, a broken heart with a gun to its head.

The source of my depression eluded any clear answer.

The best thing that ever happened in this country is that the marijuana advocates won the war on information, and people began to accept that marijuana was a healing cream rather than just a drug to get high. I know there will never be people out there who will ever understand this, but it is true. I sell drugs, but the drug that I have found that helps me more than anything is a joint.

I finished rolling a joint, then lit it and began to smoke.

The more I think about it now, I don’t think I will ever find the source of my depression—that one event that caused it. It may just be a predisposition of mine from birth, and I was meant to live the way I do.

At home, smoking that joint, a smile finally crept onto my face.