Is it Seasonal Affective Disorder?

Or are depression and anxiety coming ‘round again?

I saw my first therapist when I was fourteen.

My mother literally dragged me up a flight of stairs to the office of a social welfare therapist—this was shortly after my father died and we were scrimping.

Said therapist was a caricature from Central Casting. Goatee, wire-rim glasses, Eastern European accent. He terrified me and I refused to say anything to him until my mother apologized (because yes, she was in the room with us) and led me home.

In the past forty-three years, I have worked with a total of fifteen different therapists. A few of them were awful. One was so bad that I left the session after about ten minutes when the practitioner interrupted a deeply closeted me, struggling to find words to describe my loneliness during my freshman college year. He offered a summation: I was happy at college and didn’t know how to admit that.

Wrong.

Eighteen years-old in 1984. All the Farrah Fawcett feathering in my hair should have let my therapist know I was heterosexually-challenged.

The first time my symptoms of depression? anxiety? (I’ve heard all kinds of diagnoses) surfaced after moving to the Seattle area from Japan was in the early 2000s. The company that had headhunted me away from Tōkyō had died during the dot com bust, and I took a position at Microsoft.

For many reasons that I won’t go into, Microsoft was a rough place to be. I had a good health plan, however, and started seeing a psychiatrist for the first time. The search was on for a medical cure, side effects be damned.

Nothing worked, however.

When Hiro and I moved to British Columbia in 2006, it didn’t take long for me to seek out professional care once more, and for many years I was on a cocktail of anti-depression and anti-schizophrenia meds that worked, I suppose. What the drugs did was make me an emotional zombie, and my highs and lows—I was tested for bipolar disorder and for ADHD, although results indicated neither—blurred into a gray blandness. The prescribing psychiatrist gave me a new diagnosis: morbid anxiety.

To go with my morbid obesity?

My sense of humor remained intact, if at a lower volume.

When, with a new job, Hiro’s green card, and the opportunity for a new home all available, the two of us returned to Washington State in 2015. Once enrolled in a new health plan, I was able to stop taking the cocktail of four meds I had been on. The medical consensus had been upgraded: I suffered from situational anxiety.

That diagnosis clicked. My bouts of bad depression/anxiety until then had occurred during moments of intense situational stress. The closet. Job insecurity. Homophobia at work. Relationship insecurity. And life in BC was the pinnacle of stress. No permanent residency. No permanent home. No permanent job or income. And, until the 2013 Supreme Court ruling that invalidated section 2 of the Defense of Marriage Act, no permanent standing for my relationship with Hiro.

But that all changed in 2015. Not only were Hiro and I married, he had a green card that let us return as spouses to the US. My part-time job coalesced into full-time. We got a new home (and mortgage).

The situational anxiety faded.

But depression still stalked me.

After a couple of swings and misses (a sports metaphor? who am I?) I started working with a great therapist. It was she who prompted my return to writing. It was she who helped me let go of minor worries.

But this past year has brought a lot of situational stress. All of it financial. Unexpected repairs. Unexpected increases to our mortgage, our insurance, our grocery bills.

And as we plummet toward to darkness of the winter solstice, I can’t shake the sense that more sunlight hours would make the (temporary?) money concerns more bearable.

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And yet, I have kept my ashes and my sackcloth at bay. And I have refrained from gnashing my teeth.

The past week brought a return to creativity. I have turned back to my memoir’s revisions. I have been working on more t-shirt, sticker, and gift designs.

And Thursday was a double bonus. Thanksgiving in the company of friends AND reaching the thirtieth anniversary of the first date Hiro and I shared.

And I have a plan for the next week. My writing group meets on Monday. I speak to a mentor at work on Tuesday. Hiro and I have an appointment with a financial advisor on Wednesday. And I see my therapist on Friday.

The only way out (for me) is through.