A few years back I went through a bad time, psychologically speaking, and my doctor quietly pointed out my tendencies towards depression and anxiety, then suggested a series of treatments that might get me back on an even keel.
We cycled through the usual suite of pharmaceutical treatments, discovered I had an adverse reaction to most SSRI inhibitors, and eventually settled on a serotonin drug that’s a) hideously expensive on my monthly salary, and b) will make my liver pop like a balloon if I get funky and mix it with booze.
All in all, it was a good motivation to do the hard yards in counselling to get a handle on things and get off the antidepressants. Then 2019 hit, and my toolkit for coping wasn’t quite up to the task, and when my partner quietly suggested that my mental healthy might be suffering I went back to the GP and signed up for a fresh prescription.
Now it’s 2020. The personal shitstorm of 2019 has given way to a global shitstorm of epic proportions.
And the antidepressants help. A whole fucking lot. As evidenced by the days where I take them and get shit done, versus the few days where I forgot and ended up having panic attacks over email.
Basically, compared to the relief that mainlining scotch might offer right now, there is no real measurable advantage to the booze.
But years of cultural indoctrination trains the brain to think that drinking is the right response to a crisis, and the idiotic monkey brain keeps pondering whether it would all be a little easier if I could embrace the hardboiled detective aesthetic. Pour a drink and stand at a rain-slicked window, peering out at a world gone made through the vertical blinds.
Some days, it’s hard to escape the feeling we are an incredibly clever fucking species who have trained ourselves for idiocy for the sake of aesthetics.