My odyssey of medicated depression seems like it's just beginning, but I know it's not really new to me, feeling this way. I have always been the kind of person who incessantly asks 'Why?' I was the kid who was constantly, alternately buoyed and crushed by whatever was in my world. I got high on the way people stood or the way the cloud shadows rushed over me. I frowned over drawing after drawing, over music and dancing and acting and writing, I pushed myself at whatever seemed to let the weight off, and it did. Then things started to get bad, and then they put me on some pills, and I was never quite the same. I got off the pills and found other ways to buoy and crush my mind-waves, but I still feel like I never recovered from a medicated pubescence.

I find myself staring blankly at nothing, my head pulled down by the weight of swirling thoughts and flashbacks about what coulda, shoulda been. I find myself second guessing everything I had built in myself in college. I find myself in a panic: I will be alone forever and ever and ever. I find myself missing the absurdity of hypomania, the effortlessness that sometimes came off as brash bravado, other times as pure ineptitude. I find myself a child, in a tantrum to have it all back. To have it be over. To have it fixed.

I seem to be getting over a lot of side effects of Lamictal and Abilify. I am relieved and I am terrified. This medication is becoming a part of me, dulling me just as surely as it dredged me up from the horrifying non-reality of a suicidally bleak mixed state. It is normalizing me. I can function insofar as: go to the grocery store, weeding at grandma's house, making dinner. I can not seem to get my thoughts to flow in the beautiful patterns that they would before. I could captivate. I could throw insane parties. I could get a little drunk and sing, a little high and give a lecture, or be just awake and plant a garden. I experienced bliss. I wonder what I am really like with no medication, no drugs, no cigarettes, no alcohol. Am I as weak and ineffectual as I feel right now? Will I ever be strong and beautiful inside, shining it out with every gesture, turning on a dime, communing with the sublime? I dont know. I dont know what causes a person to be this way, or how the medications work, or what to do about not knowing.

I am 22 years old. When I locked myself in my room for seven days, wandering, smoking, not-eating not-sleeping, unable to cry, unable to think at all, the only thing I knew was: "I am dying. I haven't done anything with my life - haven't changed any paradigms, haven't reduced the suffering in the world, haven't escaped my white privilege or sexism, haven't produced art that creates feelings of liberation, haven't done shit." In a way, I am and was right. The doctors tell me this is a result of inhibited brain hormones, of short circuits and deficiencies. Weird science. Mood swings. Poor decision making.

But is it about all that, or is it that I was starved and alone, cut to the bone by the world and our pains and my own ineffectual strategies of personal liberation, half way across the world, asking the most fundamental question: live unfree or die?

Now I'm medicated, 'depressed,' and still wondering when Ill be free on the inside. That has to come first, right? How could I produce liberation in the world outside myself if I cant be free from my own mind? It is in my mind that all the rules, laws, rights and wrongs got inscribed, until I started to question them. It is also my mind that created poetry and art, that described the trajectory of my dancing. I seem to alternately struggle with it and totally give up. Both manifest as this thing doctors tell me is 'feeling depressed,' a chemical imbalance, nothing to do whatsoever with the fucked up nature of hegemony, capitalism, globalization, ecological collapse, or anything like that. They suggest that with pills and time I should strive for happiness. I just want to know: how do I 'be happy' in the midst of all this? How do I 'just cope.'? Even more disturbing to me, is 'why'?