I have been stuck deep inside the bell jar for weeks now. Or is it months? Years? Decades, it seems. I have had an ongoing affair with depression for as long as I can remember. It’s not my constant companion, and I know that it sees other people, so I don’t take it too seriously. It visits me on a regular basis, always taking me to the same miserable places, but insisting on spending the bulk of its time with me in bed. It’s a bore, really, and I don’t know why I can’t just say no and close the door in its face. Our relationship isn’t going anywhere. I’m certainly not ready to make a commitment. I mean, I’m not about to run away with it, say off the top of a cliff, or stick my head in the oven. (It’s electric, anyway.) I may be down, but I’m not ready to throw in the towel quite yet. I’m just plain blue.

I have what a good doctor once diagnosed as “disthymia”. Disthymia, for all you non-devotees of the DSM IV* out there, is a low level depression that usually has no specific crisis associated with it. In other words, it's not acute; it doesn’t start because your favorite aunt died on the day you ran over your dog while escaping your flame-engorged house. It’s just a feeling of general malaise that settles down upon you, so gently at first, you don’t even notice. It’s like gaining weight: you may not realize you’ve put on a few pounds, and then one day your favorite pants look like shit on you. With disthymia, you don’t realize you stopped turning the lights on, but one day, you notice you can’t see anything. Then you sit in the dark for a few weeks, figuring out where the switch is. That’s the key, you can always manipulate yourself out of it. There’s none of that boa constrictor death grip that comes with major depression. But sometimes it does get uncomfortably close.

There are prescription drugs for it, like everything else these days. But Prozac and Lithium are far too expensive for me, and I’d rather have my emotions dictated to me by my own personal personality disorder that Pfizer Pharmaceuticals. Besides, self-medicating is a lot more fun, and what do you need more than fun when you’re depressed? With the right ratio of Sapphire to pot to nicotine to videos, I can pull myself up by my own chemically-aided bootstraps. And if that formula doesn’t work, I can bring in the big guns, like a couple of one-night stands and a bag of mushrooms. I’ve found that a good dose of psillocybin can act like a mental Extra-Strength Liquid Plumr, flushing the greasy hairballs of emotional excrement from my system. It’s probably why you don’t see too many depressed hippies. Who cares if it strips the pipes on its way down? In my book, it’s the wonder drug that works wonders. And there’s something to being the girl with far away eyes. At least in Portland, where a mild case of depression seems to be the aphrodisiac of choice. I may find it depressing that when I feel good, I don’t get laid, but when I’m actually depressed, I have any number of solicitous takers wanting to, in the biblical sense, share their pain with me.

While salvation may be only a few well-placed calls away, the herculean challenge is just getting to the point where I can actually leave the house to pick up my now not-so-secret ingredients. There are times when I must forcibly rouse myself to a constitutional within the confines of my studio apartment, just to stave off the onset of bedsores. I know I’m really depressed when I start to miss the daily routine of a regular job, and a boss who won’t accept “a general feeling of blah” as a valid excuse for skipping work. Deadlines always seem to fall when I’m in the depths of despair, when I can focus only on the most mordant of topics, not the light patter I’m paid to disseminate. (Case in point, see this article.) If there is anything more pathetic than a writer several days behind deadline writing about the fact that they have nothing to write about, I’d like to be it. Ironically, I’m usually quite verbose at these times, but only on the most navel-gazing of subjects. If someone would like to pay me to recount every nuance of every awful thing that’s ever happened to me, then my disthymia might become a profitable cottage industry in and of itself.

What is truly the most maddening aspect of my down syndrome, is that I can’t point to a specific event, a just or unjust cause, or even a problematic boyfriend as its antecedent. Although the view through the glass walls of the bell jar may be distorted, I can still see that I have little to complain about. My life is good. I generally manage to function as a productive citizen, I pay most of my bills, and keep myself and my cats fat and healthy. I feel like the princess who couldn’t get a wink because of one tiny pea buried twenty mattresses below her. To bolster my flagging self-esteem, I consciously make an effort to recount some of the nice things that are said to me every day, but of course, I can only recall a hit parade of some of the nastier commentary that has grazed my psyche, much of it from high school and before. Who cares if I have free drinks for life at my favorite bar, just because the manager thinks I’m the shit? Bruce Kent told me I was fat when I was fourteen. So what if my friends keep my phone ringing with lunch dates and party invitations? No one picked me for softball when I was twelve. Maybe it’s not so much depression as regression that I’m afflicted with. Or maybe I just need to cash in on a few of those free drinks.

* Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the Am. Psy. Ass.