Clinical depression - out of the shadows

Coming of age is the term usually reserved for our sexual awakening and loss of virginity. For me, I came of age, I think, at too young an age, after that certain summer which, in hindsight, was the last of my childhood. By the time the next summer rolled around and although I was still a child in terms of age, "something" had happened since the previous summer. I was still in puberty and my thoughts and activities, instead of being filled with what kids my age then were preoccupied with - landing a girlfriend or boyfriend, school sports and other school functions like dances, I was afraid to even try anything kids my age were doing. Afraid because, in hindsight, I knew I was not "good enough," not "popular" enough, not good-looking enough, too insecure to try for something good because, I knew, the disappointment of certain failure would make me even more of a failure - and there was no need to exert the emotional and physical energy to "prove" what I already knew - I wasn't good at anything, and I wasn't good for anyone.

Since my late elementary school years earlier, my father first started calling me a "goddamn faggot" only when he was drunk; later, my father called me the name when he wasn't drinking. I had no idea then what a "faggot" was and, years later when I found out what a "faggot " is, I wondered why my dad called me the name since I hadn't had any sexual experience with man or woman; I was just 8 years old when I first remember him calling me that. And although I had no idea what a faggot was, I was too afraid to ask either my parents or even a friend what it meant because the "goddamn" gave me the clue that a faggot is something that was shameful, something to be rejected and avoided.

I was first diagnosed with clinical depression some six years after what I think was the last summer of my childhood. By then, I was on my own and had been tossed out onto the streets with a stab wound from the knife my father put in my leg after he came home drunk. If my father's decision that I was a "goddamn faggot" didn't convince me that he simply wanted me gone, being stabbed by him did the trick. From that night on, I never "went home" in any sense of the phrase. I wasn't a part of any of those "family" gatherings like Thanksgiving or Christmas but once, when I was required to go to my mother's house (although she had divorced my father, he continued to all but live there), someone who turned out to be my youngest sister walked up and asked, "Remember me?" That I answered honestly, "No," then being told she was one of my eight sisters reinforced for me that I was, indeed, no longer part of a family.

At some point, as a young adult, after I saw in myself a massive weight loss and then not eating anything because I was never hungry, I went to a medical doctor. He ran a battery of medical tests, sat me down and told me it was "time to see a psychiatrist" because, he concluded, I was "a pressure cooker read to explode." Seeing a psychiatrist even then carried a shameful stigma, but I went ahead with the appointment because I had nothing more to be ashamed about: after all, I was worthless. After a couple of talking sessions with the shrink, he put me on the popular anti-depressants of the day, and I dutifully took them with the thought that I was "crazy" even though I still didn't understand why.

At some point, I decided to use alcohol to get that added "boost" after taking my medications and, all too soon, I entered that dark twilight zone called alcoholism. After almost a decade of alcoholic drinking - at its zenith, my intake was a fifth of whiskey a day - and a botched suicide attempt because dying was the only way I knew to stop drinking, I finally grabbed onto a lifeline called AA and started to work, seriously work, toward "recovery." I decided very early in that recovery stage that my "recovery" had to be more than not drinking, that I had to "fix" my broken spirit and soul. And that meant not drinking was only a part of my recovery.

Somewhere in those drinking years at more than a couple of sessions with my psychiatrist, he warned that I would likely have experiences with depression the rest of my life but that I could deal with it if not totally recover - and he reinforced the fact that a relapse back into alcohol would make depression worse because, after all, alcohol and any other mood-altering substance are depressants . And so it has been for the doctor's prediction that I would probably have occasional bouts of depression requiring clinical treatment. It's been more than a decade since my last bout of what I thought was depression after I shot one of two would-be assailants with his own gun in a home invasion. In the weeks after, fearing I'd gone off the deep end because I bolted at every sound, a psychiatrist explained that the symptoms I had were more post-traumatic than depression.

My mother who, I think in hindsight, wanted but was never able to come to my defense as a child against my father, died three years after my last drink. I hadn't seen here in about a year when her mother, my grandmother, called to tell me my mother was dying of cancer and asked that I come to the hospital to say good-bye. I was with my mother when she drew her last breath shortly before 4 a.m. that Sunday morning in February. Soon after my mother's death, my brothers and sisters began to die one by one and the last of my 10 surviving siblings, my older sister, passed on in January 2008 after her three-year struggle with breast cancer. By then, by the Grace of God, she and I, as the two oldest of our parents' 11 kids, had reconciled, and she had let me back into her life along with her two daughters. Until that "reunion," I did not know that I was not the only one of my father's children to be hurt in ways that no parent should hurt a child.

After years of sporadic treatment for clinical depression and, thank God, what I hope is growth by staying sober, I think I now have the tools and strength to fight off a bout of depression when I sense it looming. Instead of running from what some would say was a horrid childhood and continuing to empower my dad that I'm not "good enough," instead of making life's disappointments and setbacks about me instead as a natural part of life, I invoke a "different" thought process: whatever I've gone through, maybe unfairly, helped bring me to where I am now - and I'm pretty good with myself where I am now. And the losses of my mother and all 10 brothers and sisters? Certainly I mourn their loss, but I choose not to be drowned by the mourning by being grateful
that I had them in my life in the first place.

And my father? He died nearly 12 years ago, and I hadn't seen or communicated with him in about 15 years before he died. He died with only a younger sister at his bedside; she was the only one of his surviving children at the time he wanted because she, like my father, had also rejected her entire family. She followed him in death 2 1/2 years later.

When I think of my father, I don't remember him as the man who called me a "goddamn faggot" nor as, some have suggested, "programmed" me to be ashamed of myself or who is to "blame" for pushing me into alcoholism. I long ago forgave him for what he did or did not do and understood that he, too, had his own demons. My prayer for him, sincerely, is that he died after conquering his demons or at least coming to terms with them, and that he went to a peace that he fought so hard in life to reject.

And, today, I'm not depressed.