It's been a few weeks since I wrote up a new "This Week in Review" feature for the site.

I suppose maybe I owe you a bit of an explanation? Maybe "owe" is a bit too strong since this does involve my personal life and usually what is posted here has nothing to do with my personal life, but I digress.

It's been a rather rough few weeks years for me. I've basically been suffering from depression for years now, which I was generally able to "cope" with without any help. But then I started to get anxiety attacks more and more frequently. To those that suffer from them, you know that anxiety attacks and depression in general can be absolutely crippling.

Nothing interests you. You can't just "cheer up" as people suggest to you all the time. It doesn't work like that. You literally want nothing to do with anything or anyone. Every doubt, fear, sad thought about how you screwed up in life just comes at you all at once. Like I said, I used to be able to just wait out the anxiety attacks but it wore on me. It's almost literally debilitating for a period of time. It has certainly had an impact on my work. It has had an impact on my life. It has had an impact on talking to friends. Basically, it has kind of fucked me up. This just grew and grew and grew over the years with each bad or sad event that happened.

The latest event that caused things to get worse came two weekends ago with events that I won't get into here. I essentially spent the better part of Sunday dealing with intense anxiety attacks during the evening and night. Then all day Monday it felt like one long never ending bout of anxiety and just waiting it out stopped being an option.

I realized that I couldn't just "cope" with this any longer. Fortunately, I had a doctor's appointment already scheduled for that Thursday for something unrelated. I decided I was going to force myself to talk to him about this, something I really should've done six years ago. So, I did just that. I was prescribed an anti-depressant that I presume I will be on for the foreseeable future, and given the name of a local therapist (I think psychologist?) if I decide to do that at some point.

So that's the short and dirty explanation of things. Since I just started taking these meds, things are still kind of off. I'm obviously still depressed, it's not a miracle drug. And I'm still adjusting to them, which is kind of a new thing for me since I've never really been on any prescriptions that altered my mood before now. That's why things may be a bit delayed in going up or new content is absent or delayed. I am, however, trying my best.