It really happened in 1999, though its roots went a few years further back than that, or maybe all the way to the beginning. Nevertheless, 1999 was the first year I started shrieking and smashing things and doing harm to myself. 1999 was the year I should have died, or at least, most wanted to; if wishes were horses we'd all be eating steak and I would have ended my life that summer on any number of occasions. By then it had already been going on for months, or maybe a year; vast periods of utter normalcy which were nevertheless repeatedly shattered by hyper-lucid fragments of time - five minutes here, twenty minutes there - of earth-shaking rage and fear, and manic energy so huge it could only be exploded out my fingertips in brutal, unstable bursts of kinetic force. And also the days of utter nothingness, the fuzzy brown lull periods where for 72 or 96 hours I would be like melted plastic poured over a couch: sickly, gluey; mottled colours and stale, chemical smells.

That was the year when I first understood the mistakes I'd made in high school, when Mark had been in the worst of it and I simply hadn't the experience to get why it just wasn't going away. Everybody who's outside depression thinks, somewhere deep in their hearts, that it's controllable: that to some extent, no matter how minuscule, the afflicted person can take hold of themselves and make a change - snap themselves out of it, get help, make things better. They think that on some level, it's still just a choice, a problem with a solution, an illness with a clearly-definable cure. And for all the arrogance of my own belief in my smarts, I believed it too.

I was wrong. I was a fucking asshole. And when it came for me, and everyone around me was telling me all of the things that I'd believed mere years ago - that all I had to do was get a doctor, that everything was going to be okay, that this problem was easily solved - I wanted bloody vengeance. I wanted to rip their patronizing throats out and play mighty bagpipes in the rain. When you're in it, you feel like you'll never get out. And when you're outside it, you just don't have any fucking idea what being in it is like.

And yet, I got out. I didn't get out through any heroic act or great moment of courage. I got out in the most monumental instance of self-involved spite of my entire life. Someone who mattered to me more than anyone had told me, in a moment of supreme foolishness, that I didn't deserve to be happy. And before I actually destroyed her for it, I wanted to be sure that she wasn't right. It was that simple. When I make war, I don't fuck around... but I like to be sure my head's on straight before I do it.

So I signed myself up. I got the help. I told the whole story for the first time in my life to a woman who'd spent all of twenty minutes in my presence; I admitted to her that I'd been hurting myself, which only one other person even knew about... and as spiteful as my initial reasons for seeking help might have been, doing that took courage. Staring into the face of someone who actually has the means to help you, and having the balls to go all the way and admit just how far down into the shit you've let yourself fall - fully detailing the scope of the problem that you are now at the mercy of this other individual to solve - that's heady, heady shit. I've had only a couple of moments like that in my entire life. (The others were more fun.)

She gave me over to a psychiatrist, a fat Jamaican man in his fifties or sixties who took one look at me and put me on Paxil and told me that I was to come see him once a week for psychoanalysis. I didn't like one single bit of it. Didn't like that it was so easy, didn't like that the appointment took all of twenty minutes, didn't like that it didn't make me feel any better coming out of that office than I did going in, didn't like that the answers were still weeks and months and years away. Didn't like the process. Still don't. Still want miracles and instant fixes. Tonight in my journal I called it wanting a bus-crash-level change in my life. They do happen, those miracles, but they're random and rare and thereby worthless. Everything else is the tiny shit that takes way too long and seems way too hard.

Three weeks later I was completely unable to come, and probably more manic than I'd ever been in my life, a pair of Paxil symptoms which dovetailed rather neatly together in that horrible night when I spent five hours masturbating to no good effect. Out went the Paxil, and in came Wellbutrin, and to my astonished horror, that fucking pill was literally a purple emoticon of mental health. The goddamned curved lettering on the face, the eye-and-nose-like scoring above... who writes this shit? The Happy Purple Pill, as I inevitably started calling it. It wasn't a small amount of glee that saw me writing a giant, purple, talking happy face into the script for I Have a Hibachi at my Wit's End a few years later. Some things, you just can't make up.

My shrink pissed me off completely by continually dragging our conversations back to my relationship with my mother and father; I would much rather have been bitching about my absentee girlfriend or the general horror of having coasted out the tail end of my university career without a single fucking clue of how to achieve all the grand illusions roaming about in my head. He was pretty dogmatic about his Freudianism, though, and maybe it helped, or maybe I just needed the pills. It's the great secret of the anti-depressants: they aren't ends unto themselves, nor should they ever be (and it's sickening to witness the degree to which they are prescribed as such), but the people who hate and fear meds just because they're meds are about as misguided as the people who think a depressed person can just snap themselves out of it. When used properly, anti-depressants simply relieve the omnipresent emotional pressure that has been eating your mind since the depression began. They take some of the weight off your shoulders, and maybe with a little coaxing, you'll actually be able to take a few steps on your own. Life takes over and does the rest for you: there is no cosmic force more proactive than the simple realities of momentum. Once you get going, it's harder to stop than to stay moving.

It took a while, but things took hold. By that winter, weekly psych trips were no longer necessary; by the following spring, I asked to be taken off the Happy Purple Pill, because - without exaggeration - I was literally perceiving a happy, pinkish glow about the edges of the tangible objects in the world. It felt like an achievement, and still does; looking back, I really haven't achieved much that I've wanted to in my life, but I solved that one. It almost feels superheroic; at the very least, it's a big part of The Story. The nightmares now only come when hearing tales recounted (which I'd never heard when I was younger, and which probably would have helped) of the years of mental unhealth that have plagued generations of my family back a hundred years; I am so fucking glad that I was born when I was born, when the wool of misunderstanding about depression was finally being lifted from the eyes of the world. Fourteen months of suffering in helpless silence was long enough; I can't imagine a decade. Or two. I can't believe it wasn't until a year after his death that I even knew my grandfather had fought this monster for longer than I even want to think about. The secrecy - the "we don't talk about that" that has always surrounded the disease - is as bad as all the common misconceptions about what it feels like to have it.

Well anyway. That's the first part of the story.