Ugh, Depression

Sometime around 1992, I realized my depression was upon me. I’m reminded of it tonight because of the disaster that America has become. And I read today in the New York Times that everyone is suffering much worse from anxiety, especially people of color. White people, we are so lucky. You get that, right? The story to come is so pathetically white-privileged that I cringe as I write it. Whining? Sure. Self-pity? More than enough!

Today, there are plenty of reasons for anyone to feel depressed: Trump is determined to steal the election and destroy our democracy; people are needlessly dying by the thousands; the racists, covid 19 deniers, and religious nuts, emboldened by Trump, won’t shut the fuck up; and there isn’t going to be any fix to our economic inequality, ever. If anything, Trump is entrenching it irretrievably.

And now Smith College has announced that it will teach all classes remotely. Kate will stay home this fall. What an irony: I so desperately wanted her to go to a school with a national network that she would enjoy, and she did get into one, and now she can’t go.

The president of Smith made the right call, I think. No schools are going back without horrible ramifications, and they’ll all shut down again. But now our kids are going to fall behind the Finns and the Japanese and everyone else because Trump and his minions have bungled everything.

I remember when my friend Nolan came to visit (see posts dated November 24 and 29 about Nolan) sometime around 2003. Kate was a baby. Nolan remembered that I had been “happy go-lucky”—his words, quoted—when I was an instructor at Auburn. I was astounded by that assertion. Me, happy go lucky? I had been a lawyer for 25 years by then, and any memory of feeling relaxed was gone.

I remember when the depression hit very clearly. Nancy and I had flown to a little town in Maine—I can’t remember where now—for a surprise birthday party given by one of her high school friends, Beth, for her husband Anthony. It was lovely on the coast, a quaint little town out of a postcard.

Every activity was designed to be joyful. We men were supposed to play tennis at some point. I joined three others on the court, and, oh no. They were a lot better than I am. I couldn’t keep up with them as we warmed up. I mean, I’m not terrible, I used to be pretty good, but all of these guys were on a different level. I told them my knee hurt and I couldn’t keep on. They accepted that with barely a blink, and someone’s brother was there to make a fourth anyway. I sat in the stands and wondered how I had missed out on being better. There are reasons, but no point in going into them. I just didn’t want to embarrass myself by attempting to play.

Then there was dinner; one of the guys was an actual chef and put together a restaurant-worthy meal. I can cook but not like that. He was charming and gregarious as well; introvert that I am, I sat in an easy chair.

But it was the conversation that got me. Anthony was a chief of staff to a member of Congress. Another guy was a well-considered journalist for the Washington Post. Though it was off the record, I remember Anthony being extraordinarily well-informed and passionate about the Balkans conflict: “If we’re not going to get involved, we need to give those people the weapons to take the fight to the Serbs themselves.” I can still see his uncharacteristically angry face.

But at the time, I hadn’t followed the conflict well enough and had little idea who the parties were: Bosnian Serbs, Serbs, Croatians, Albanians, Kosovars…how did they all fit together? The journalist and Anthony knew all the angles. I could only sit and think, how did I get so stupid? Why don’t I know anything?

My memory about all of this gets fuzzy. And it’s not because of drink. What I do recall is that one night, after driving around the little town a while, and moseying around shops, we all went back to our rooms.

I didn’t. I was desperate for another drink, but that was done for the night. No one needed a drink like I did. Why did I? Of course because I felt so awful. I didn’t belong there. Everyone brought more to the party than I did. I couldn’t even stay on the tennis court with them, and they were presumably not in a position to play tennis as often as I was. I couldn’t come close to what the chef was doing. I knew too little about the Balkans.

What were they all going to do all night? Watch TV? Make love to their partners? Read top-secret intelligence reports? And I was just dying for another few drinks.

I couldn’t face it. I walked down to the rocky beach, sat down, and cried.

Eventually I must have gone back to our room, and I must have fallen asleep without another drink.

The next day, we all went home, and I never saw any of those people again. Save Beth. Her husband Anthony the political operative, someone important’s chief of staff, turned out to be a pathological liar. He never graduated from Georgetown as he said. He had an affair with some other woman in his congressman’s campaign, and Beth was the last to find out about it. She changed the locks on the house. Though he was a horrible guy, I had a grudging admiration: holy shit, what a nerve the guy had!

That weekend in Maine was just the start of it. I was working at AIG by then, a job wrenched by pressure. I’d been given two outlaw groups to corral, and they hated me. The work was insurance regulation, in the main, which is dreadful. Older and more experienced than the other guys in the department, who’d never been in a courtroom, I at least got to manage litigation, which was fun. Also because they were young I was able to fashion a role for myself as a transactional lawyer—I did agreements.

But at the end, there was insurance regulation, deadly boring, and the clients didn’t want to comply. On a weekly basis, a piece of illegal advertising came my way, and I had to be the heavy. “Ed,” I’d say, calling the senior VP. “I got an ad from San Francisco that no one has seen.” “I’ll handle it,” he would assure me, and we’d hang up. I don’t know if he ever did. Ed at least gave me the courtesy of pretending to care.

But they’d say, “We’ve been doing it this way for 25 years and it’s been OK.” Finally one day I said, “I can’t believe you’ve been at this for 25 years and have no idea how your industry is regulated.” That went over well. I’d go home and run three miles around the track and curse them all and after the three miles felt no better.

I finished a novel and marketed it. No one wanted it. Finally one night as I was leaving, a young woman called from a press that had had the book forever. She gushed: “It’s so charming! I’m going to recommend that we publish it.” The editor-in-chief read it and in the end discarded it, but she took 18 mortal months to make up her mind.

In the meantime, Nancy got a job teaching law at Widener University. One night she went out for a dinner with the rest of the faculty. I had known that I would never be involved in academia again. I lay down on the sofa and cried for three hours.

Yet I wonder now if it was truly chemical. I took all the drugs, Prozac, Zoloft, Wellbutrin (which made me either very anxious or weepy), and only Zoloft helped for about six months. My shrink then was pill happy and called me “Big George”, which really annoyed me.

Years later, I wonder now if I had been truly chemically depressed. Reading the details of my life in the 90’s, I wonder if maybe I was just sad. After I nearly had a heart attack and luckily got to leave AIG, it got better. Now that I’m retired and don’t have to be a lawyer anymore, my depression results from feeling that in the end I’ve just been a loser. So many regrets. Oh yeah, and what everyone else with a brain suffers from: Trump.

I think back to that weekend in Maine when I was thrown together with really accomplished individuals and confronting my own steadily obvious mediocrity. My shrink has said that I should try not to think about the regrets but instead feel grateful for the good that has happened. He’s right. At least my neighborhood isn’t being bombed. Every day, Nancy and I look at each other and can read our faces: we are the luckiest people on earth. That has to count for something.

But being me, I’m looking ahead to when Trump loses the election, refuses to leave, and our Army has to fight through gangs of moron right-wing gun-toting Confederate-flag-waving crazies crowded around the White House. In my world view, though things are livable now, they can only get worse.