"you are not depressed"

I am still trying to process this. I tried to phone C and talk with her about it, but it went to ansafone... so I was left with my own thoughts. Some of those thoughts have dissolved into doubt and confusion... when this morning it all seemed so clear.

I had an appointment with my own GP this morning, as a follow-up to the appointment I had with another last Tuesday - to talk about taking medication. I had long fought it - for over 2 years, in fact. Terrified of putting on weight, losing control, planing the edges too smoothly. I've been fighting a battle with myself in recent weeks as I watch people who started the race way behind me, overtake me, and draw nearer the Finish Line. The finish line being somewhere in Happyland.

My own GP is a good woman, a mother of 3 teenage girls: healthy, smiling, perched proudly in a frame on her desk. We discussed medication (nothing like the conversation I had with Tuesday's GP) and she agreed to let me try my Drug of Choice: Edronax... which is a noradrenaline re-uptake inhibitor. My symptoms of near-catatonia, lack of motivation, drive, volition - are not low-serotonin symptoms, but what I think are low noradrenaline. She asked me to talk a little more about my symptoms. She paused a while and said... "A, I don't think that you have depression." She elaborated on this by saying that I am nothing like I was years/months ago, when I would sit in her office and sob. She made suggestions that I Do Things, and socialise, and have fun, and go shopping. It wasn't as flippant as this, but she qualified it with concern.

Much of this comment resonated with me, and I felt a sense of immense relief when I left the clinic. I felt that I had been released from shackles of my own binding.