Ron Livingston, I presume?
Careening from crisis to crisis with the support of one man's sweet-ass future jowls.
After multiple panic attacks and an agonized last week of waiting, I finally had my regularly scheduled appointment with my psychiatrist. I waited out the week instead of calling to beg for an earlier appointment because:
I constantly minimize how bad I am feeling because I don’t want to be a burden, and
I know that getting a last-minute appointment with a psychiatrist in an already over-burdened medical system was not likely to happen.
I sat down on the wheezing whoopee cushion that masquerades as a chair in his office and waited while he reviewed his notes on who the fuck I was and what particular flavour of mental illness I bring to the table. Finally, he looked up and asked, “And how are things going?” To which I proceeded to word vomit the events of the past month, including panic attacks, suicidal ideation and the intense episode I had that briefly made me wonder if I needed to be hospitalized.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F36bc38e9-7059-481d-a9f8-090745a2910b_1462x1034.heic)
I discussed my bullshit trifecta of my contract ending, dumping my boyfriend, and not getting a job while he nodded along. When I finished describing my woes he casually asked, “So, when do you predict you’ll get a job?”
I sat there staring at him for a solid ten seconds, wondering if maybe he was making some kind of joke. I can understand that he, in a profession that is in very high demand, might somehow think it was possible to predict when a job would appear, but HOW WOULD I KNOW?” I am in a specialized field in a volatile job market. If I knew when I’d get another job wouldn’t my anxiety around this exact issue effectively be nonexistent? SIR. Not to mention that the very act of asking a depressed/anxious person to predict when they might extricate themselves from that situation just perpetuates the same mental illnesses that brought them to this office in the first place. It was a good thing I was sitting on my fart-chair because it prevented me from throwing it across the room.
One plus of that appointment was that, for one blissful session, there were no comments on my weight. Hot tip for all my fellow depressed fat people: if you talk ad nauseam about suicidal ideation in your psych appointment, that may act as your golden ticket to get out of the “have you tried losing weight?” bullshit that too many doctors pull out for every. goddamn. occasion.
Side note, but you know how in the show Loudermilk, Ron Livingston plays a recovering addict who leads a counselling group and says, “Don’t drink, don’t drink” to every single person as they leave the support session? I need Ron Livingston to come to my house every night and say it. Except instead of "don’t drink,” I need him to tell me, “Don’t die” in his matter of fact way of speaking. I’m not sure what it is about him, whether it is his puppy dog brown eyes or his cheeks that foreshadow the most delicious set of jowls he will someday have, but he is fine as hell to me. And for him I would say, “Okay Ron, I’ll live.” Because if it’s not always realistic to stay alive for your own benefit, then perhaps you can keep living for a hot middle aged biscuit of an actor whom you will never, ever meet in real life.
And for those of you shaking your head at my dumb jokes, let me refer to you paramedics who also crack disturbing jokes about death to prevent the grief and trauma they experience from destroying them completely. Think of me as a paramedic with no medical training whatsoever, save maybe my expired Red Cross CPR certification and that one course I took to be a veterinary assistant, and understand that the life I’m fighting to save in this instance is simply my own. So, let me have this.
Anyway, back in my psychiatrist’s office, he told me that my current depression is situational and that I could probably manage it with a 25mg increase in my meds and the skills I’m learning in trauma therapy. And as I am not a person who can easily arrange her face into a neutral expression that hides what I’m really feeling, my expression made him hesitate and then ask, “How do you feel about that?” Seriously though, when other people are picking their own superpowers of invisibility, teleportation, and flying, I will be the asshole in the back yelling, “ Give me the power to conceal my actual feelings when someone is talking to me!” I forcibly returned my face to a neutral expression and told this man who has likely never experienced a day of mental illness in his life that, while I agreed with him that the depression was mostly situational, the experience felt very much like a chemical imbalance to me and that I was really struggling to make it through each day. This led to him temporarily increasing my dosage by 50 mg and prescribing me more Ativan. “Do you think ten will be enough for the three weeks until our next session?” he asked, and as someone who comes from a long line of addiction and is usually only prescribed only fifteen Ativan per year, I said yes. At which point he said, “Let’s make it twenty, just in case,” and were I a different person I would have internally done the clench-fist-pull-arm-down movement while saying, “Yesss” à la Napoleon Dynamite, because in another situation that would feel like winning the mini benzo lottery. Will I take twenty Ativan in the twenty-one days until my next appointment? Of course not. But at least I have the mental safety blanket of knowing they’re there if I need them.
After my appointment I drove home and packed the car to drive up to the hundred-plus-year-old cabin that my great-grandfather won in a card game (WHAT) because at the moment there is a major water main break in Calgary and everyone is being asked to conserve as much water as possible. Basically, a feeder pipe sprung a massive leak and when they investigated, they found something like five other “hot spots” that need to be repaired before the pipe can be used again. Which makes me wonder if this was a lowest-possible-bidder type of situation, because that pipe was apparently supposed to last decades longer than it had. The whole situation just makes me feel like we are inching closer and closer to the apocalypse (end times HOORAY) and makes me wonder if investing in an RSP is really such a good idea at this point.
My family is extremely privileged to be able to have somewhere to go in this crisis and I do not take that for granted, but I am cat sitting in a few days so soon I will have to return to only showering once every several days, if that. I foresee a shortage of dry shampoo and deodorant in addition to bottled water at my local co-op. It’s a crisis, but what can we really do as a city except conserve as much water as possible until this current situation is over? I know it could be much worse. But thankfully, the city its coming together like we did in the 2013 flood. I don’t know how else to end this on a positive note, but we will live through this current crisis, and I personally will survive with the help of Ron Livingston, my beautiful friends, and up to twenty Ativan.
Honestly, you shouldn’t be able to be a psychiatrist if you haven’t experiened some kind of mental illness yourself. Period.