Depression

You know those quickie tests you come across in the paper or the internet, ten questions that will tell you whether you are depressed or not, etcetera? I am still amused by Anne Lamott's self-description as being a "clinically sensitive" person. others have twenty questions, all weaving a matrix, a psychological profile that spell y-o-u.

I always score so well on those tests; a test I can still do well on! Hallelujah! I mean, with my scores, I come close to being a National Merit Finalist. Ewww! Don't care much for that word, "final." If only my GREs could have been as strong, or my IQ. I'd be an Einstein. Maybe, were I so smart, I'd accept the results as red flags instead of leaving them to flap futilely in the wind. They are a warning that I register and deny. I mistrust these tests and the results. I think, in my denial, that these queries are just another scam, a bunko connivance to make us see more doctors, or to take some pharmaceutical companies' new wonder pill, some Quantum Leap, an Equal Epiphany and such. As if the pills could take the pain away?

As though, this hypersensitivity is something to regulate or moderate, to turn one's being into pure and simple blandness? Is it not preferable to be strong, to take the challenge on the chin and maintain the ups, the downs of self and personality? (Are these not the vicissitudes Lanneau once spoke about?) Is this me, playing with fire? Am I in mortal peril, laughing through my tears? Is simple awareness that there is another, darker side of self something to deny, to anaestheticize? At what point do we cross the line, fall off the cliff, the spin poised between balance and vertigo, function and breakdown, survival and self-extinction? Am I a dinosaur?