My Depression Has a Sense of Humor and It Is Not a Good One

The punchline cost three dollars and had 300mg of caffeine in it.

I want to die today.

Not poetically. Not ‘I need someone to call the psych unit for me’ kinda way. Nobody needs to do anything about it. I mean it in the boringly specific way, the sitting-on-the-edge-of-a-motel-bed-and-want-to-die sorta way, where the depression just walks in without knocking and starts going through the bathroom medicine cabinet like it pays rent here.

And the reason is yesterday I spent three dollars on an energy drink at the Dollar General. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

Somewhere in a boardroom there is a marketing team that put a rocket ship on a purple can because they knew some idiot like me would see it and my brain looked at it and decided that this can might contain the ‘elixir of life’.

The materia medica. That sanguis secreto that I needed to become the peak ‘alpha wolf’ that no woman could resist. (I was abso-freaking-lutely delusional but we will get to that soon enough.)

Let me explain the situation because my depressed ramblings are probably sounding like the musings of a man near the edge of sanity (because I am a man at the edge of sanity currently) and I don’t have insurance so the only available treatment is writing and waiting for this crap to wear off.

(My prose is probably terrible today but Lily is busy doing summer camp counselor stuff so this article is just getting published as is. I might not even proofread it because I feel so dang awful right now.)

Yesterday morning I was fine. Not ‘fine.’ Fine. I slept, I had a plan, the plan being to get down to my storage unit and go through it, since I moved out of one rundown motel two days ago and across the highway into a different rundown motel, which is a lateral move except this one has AC that works. Which at this point in my life I’ll take any small win I can get.

There’s a motorcycle title in that unit. Old bike, not worth much, worth enough. Enough to get me into an actual apartment. I want to sell it and get somewhere warm before winter because winter up north doesn’t just visit - it moves in and refuses to leave. I miss Key West. I was happy there. I was also BROKE there because Key West is one of the most expensive towns in the country. Beautiful place. Charges you WAY too much to be there.

So now I’m looking for somewhere that’s like Key West except the Temu discount version, and I’m here to report that this search is going ‘great’. (It isn’t going great.)

So I’m riding my ebike down to my storage unit and I swing by the Dollar General because there are chickens in that parking lot. I don’t know who they belong to. Nobody seems to know who they belong to. There’s four or five of them and they hang around by the propane cage looking for feed and I check on them because I really like chickens (I say this as I am eating microwave chickie nuggets for lunch BUT in my defense they are super tasty).

Anyhoo… Grown man going out of his way to check on parking lot chickens.

But they’re the only friends I got.

They weren’t out. Empty lot. Oh well. They’ll be back eventually.

Went in anyway, mostly out of boredom. And there in the cooler is an energy drink I’ve never seen before. New one. Real pretty can. And I don’t drink energy drinks, that’s not a moral position or whatever, I just don’t, I’m not a guy who buys beverages named after pro-wrestling moves. But I had about three hours ahead of me in a storage unit that gets to 120 by noon, and the can is sitting right there telling me it’s exactly what I need.

So. One can. What harm could THAT do?

For about an hour I was SUPERMAN, and I have to tell you the good part or none of the rest of this makes any sense. It was great. I went through that unit like a man getting paid by the box. Found the title. Found a whole box of my grandfather’s tools I forgot I even still had, all rusted, one of them I still don’t know what it does. Some kind of... clamp? I’m standing in a hot storage unit holding a piece of paper thinking okay. Okay. Maybe this one works out.

That was the hour. I never got the other two.

Because right about the end of it the whole thing let go at once. Head felt... inflated? Overinflated? Like it had turned into a balloon and was about to pop.

I got the door down, rode back, took some Advil for the post-crash headache, and then I just sat there.

And my brain said, you’d be better off dead.

Where does that even... where does that come from?

I’m gonna try to explain this and I’ll prolly do it badly. People who don’t have this thing think depression is regular sadness with the volume turned up. It’s not. Sadness has a reason. You can walk it back to whatever caused it and that walking back is sort of comforting all by itself because a thing that started can also stop.

This is not that. This is CLINICAL DEPRESSION. This is your own head handing you a sentence you did not write, would never write, would never say out loud to another living person, and handing it over totally casual. It’s a chemical imbalance that I am very careful not to mess with (one of the many reasons I quit drinking was that it triggered my depression). I’ve been doing really well avoiding triggers and my efforts paid off with being able to turn this Substack from nothing into one of the most-widely read, wastes of time on the entire platform. I’d never have been able to do that if I had not learned how to control my depression without the battery of medications that psych doctors have been shoving down my throat since I was a teenager.

This is the worst I have felt in YEARS.

I was having suicidal thoughts. I felt like CRYING for no reason. I haven’t cried in decades and here I was feeling like I was the 12 year old kid that had just watched his dog get hit by a car all over again! I knew this wasn’t just some random event. This was something else. Something chemical.

So I tried to nap. Cold room, good pillow, couldn’t sleep, could only lie there running the hits, and if you’ve got this thing you already know the track listing, how alone I am, how nothing works out, how I’m still doing 80 hours a week to stay exactly where I’ve been standing for seven years, like a treadmill? Or I dunno…. Yeah, Like a treadmill. You’re moving forward but you aren’t really ‘going anywhere’. (But HEY at least you are moving, right?)

Picture a grown man flat on his back on a motel bed in the middle of the afternoon with the AC running and nowhere in the world he has to be. That’s the picture. He is not going anywhere and he knows it.

That went on a while.

And then a different thought showed up, a better one. Wait. Why am I feeling like this. Because I should be FINE. That morning I was fine. Nothing happened. No bad news, no fight, nothing in the mail, no anniversary of anything. The math didn’t work, and I’ve done this job long enough to know that when the math doesn’t work you stop feeling and start looking.

So I looked it up. What I found kind of pissed me off.

There’s a psych journal out of the UK called Public Health and what these people did was go pull 57 separate studies on energy drinks and young people and dump them all in one pile to see what was in there. What they found were a litany of mental health issues associated with energy drink consumption. Depressive symptoms. Panic and anxiety behaviors. Increased suicide risk.

And there’s the kind of study where they follow the same people for years instead of grabbing one snapshot. A journal called Depression and Anxiety. They followed almost 900 people in Australia from age twenty to age twenty-two and the energy drink use tracked right alongside depression, anxiety and stress in the young men. Two years. Same people. Same results.

But here’s the one that got me. They looked at caffeine and suicide risk across something like a million and a half people and the coffee drinkers came out with LOWER risk. Which means it isn’t the caffeine. It’s the rest of what’s in there. Taurine, sugar, and the half dozen other chemicals that they shove into these drinks that you need to run a Google search just to know what they actually are in there to do and it ALL hitting at once.

I’ve had depression for a long time. The treatment resistant kind, the chemical kind, the kind where the pharmacy is just a list of things that didn’t work and the list keeps getting longer and nobody ever takes anything off it. And the worst part isn’t the bad days - it’s the good ones because I can go weeks feeling fine. Months. Working, writing, riding around, being a guy. Long enough that some idiot in the back of my head goes hey, maybe that’s over? Maybe I aged out.

Then it hits.

And usually there’s no reason at all, which is the part I have never once been able to explain to somebody who loves me and wants to help because they’ll ask what happened, and they mean it, and the answer is nothing. Nothing happened. That’s what makes it a disease and not a mood. My nervous system is a smoke detector that goes off when a guy two apartments down thinks about toast.

If you’ve got clinical depression, the real kind, don’t drink these. Not one. Not just this once because you’ve got a storage unit to clean out. Your brain is not running the same software as the guy in the commercial jumping off a helicopter on a snowboard. That’s the whole public service portion of today’s program. Cost me three dollars, an afternoon, and however much of this week I don’t get back. You get it for nothing.

And if I go quiet a few days now you know why. This article was so hard to write and I know it’s not very good. I just cannot think clearly enough to write up to my normal standard right now. I’m in a motel room across the highway from the last motel room with the AC going, waiting on my own blood to clean out whatever chemicals that drink put into my body that triggered the worst episode of depression I have had in nearly a decade.

Seven years I’ve been one bad month out from having nowhere to sleep but thanks to Substack and readers like you, I’ve got a door that locks, a bike that runs, and a title to a motorcycle that’s going to turn into a train ticket somewhere the snow is something you only see in Christmas movies.

That’s not nothing. You people are the only good thing I have in my life right now and I thank God for every one of you, which is a sentence I’d have been embarrassed to write ten years ago and now I just think is true. I might be miserable right now but at least I have my readers.

So thank all of you for being here.

If you are suffering from clinical depression, in the US you can call or text 988 and get help. It’s free and it’s not a big dramatic thing, it’s a phone call, and part of the reason I’m around to write this is that I’ve made a few of them.

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If this made you laugh somewhere you probably shouldn’t have, think about a paid subscription. The Wise Wolf is one guy with a bike, one recent journalism graduate currently teaching children to canoe, and an operating budget that would embarrass a lemonade stand. Subscriptions cover a motel room, an internet connection, and eventually a mailing address in a place where I don’t have to own a snow shovel. They also keep me conscious and upright enough to go on telling you what I find, which as this week proved is not something either of us should be taking for granted.

Help keep the Wise Wolf howling.

Sources

Lake A., Visram S., et al., systematic review on energy drinks and young people, Public Health, January 2024. 57 studies, 2016 to 2022. Kaur A., et al., ‘Consumption of energy drinks is associated with depression, anxiety, and stress in young adult males,’ Depression and Anxiety, 2020;37:1089-1098. Raine Study cohort, Western Australia. ‘Caffeine Withdrawal,’ StatPearls, NCBI Bookshelf, National Institutes of Health.