When Did This Start

Friday August 17, 2012  How This all Started

I think I remember when these episodes of depression started.  The seed was in a decision I made and I remember thinking it might lead to chronic depression, though not in those words.  I was a toddler.  And my older siblings had discovered something about me of which they were pleasantly surprised, that I could talk.

I had been thinking in words in my head for quite some time and every now and then I would speak a word or phrase but I had not yet committed.  I was either a precocious toddler learning to speak early or a developmentally delayed kid who still couldn’t talk yet; I no longer remember the details but it turns out there’s a thin line anyway.

The decision I would make would be to enter the social world by speaking words rather than gibberish.  I previously spoke a type of gibberish that was full of energy, drama, personality, and mirth.  What I had to give up was the freedom to blab and spit out any sounds the mind and body desired to instead form my lips and thoughts to those confined terms that everyone else uses, called language.  And I was aware that the necessary self control might deplete my ego reserve and leave me chronically depressed.  But it was becoming lonely speaking gibberish.  Being the youngest, it wasn’t long before I was the only one who spoke it.  So I conformed and luckily before being labeled developmentally delayed or another of those self-fulfilling prophecies we force on youth.

The lack of freedom, energy, and vitality of this new way of communicating had the effect of making me sarcastic.  I thought everything I said should at least have a second layer of meaning.  Who could stand to be literal?  Reality already offers readily the prospects for emptiness, boredom, and depression without us making things worse by asking everyday for a drink of water meaning only to literally drink a cup of water as needed until the day we die.  Is not water the life-force.  Were not the slaves brought across it, did not the savior walk upon it?  Or is it just that floridated chlorinated draft from the tap.  How unpoetic to add fluoride and chlorine to water, outright blasphemous!