I Am Not Depressed

Part of life these days is video calls with docs and in at least one of those interactions the doc inquired about my mood.  They let me know that if I found myself depressed there would probably be something they could do medically for me to help out.  I was curiously unconflicted:

I am not depressed.

Today the family went out for a stroll.  My wife, myself and my son donned masks and weathered withering looks from people not wearing masks.  We listened to people complain about how the bus drivers insisted on masks.  Gib5on and I went into a store to look around and maintained our spacing and cleansed off with hand sanitizer afterward.

But I am not depressed.

This last week it came out that the President's campaign booked online ads leveraging Nazi code words and images.  Facebook finally acted and took them down, but not without a run first.  It has been reported a little bit in media that reaches me through my feeds, but not through anything I see on TV - and I watch lefty, batshit media (at least according to righty batshit critics).

But I am not depressed.

There are people protesting for their lives in the streets.  This last week those protests reached my front yard.  I took Gib5on out to witness the protest and tried to explain what was going on and why those people were there and what it was they were trying to say and to do.  Gib5on is 6, but we can't stand by and let this go without at least trying to contextualize events for him.

But I am not depressed.

For the last two years we've been in a slow moving process of rebuilding curriculum at work.  Top to bottom changes take a very long time to line up and secure buy in, and that's in an environment of strong leadership whereas we're trying to get it done in a period of leadership transition.  Now we're trying to work it through incorporating all of the above, and do it by the end of August.

But I am not depressed.

It is difficult to grapple with emergent public health, politics, and racial inequity issues without realizing that although at the moment they are acute that none of these things are new.  A pandemic wasn't ever an if but rather a when, and we were not prepared.  The politics have become more and more brazen, but the goals aren't really new and we've allowed it to fester.  I don't think anyone would argue that racial problems started a couple of weeks ago.  At least I hope there wouldn't be anyone that thought that.  None of this is new.

But I am not depressed.

Nothing getting our attention today is making any of the other things any better.  Economic inequality is out of control.  The education system in the US is not nearly what it should be.  As a group we are not the shepherds of the environment we ought to be.  We're doggedly holding onto old solutions at the expense of better solutions.  Even when it seems like there's a step forward it is often obscured by something that saps energy like a stride in the sand.

But... I am not depressed.

When you are in care at Mayo they have you fill out this questionnaire every time you check in (and with 2 to 3 appointments every day I used to check in a whole lot).  There are two questions and you answer each on a four point scale:

I used to have a running argument with docs that it seemed wrong to answer "0" to the second question.  My reasoning was that if as a person you were even a little aware of what was going on in the world that you wouldn't be able to talk about "being down" as being "not at all."  I spent a lot of time putting an "X" next to the 0 but not in the box - on the other side of the zero as if to say: "I'm not unhappy, but I'm not oblivious."  Sometime a little while back I just gave up on the argument and started marking the zero box.

It does seem though that if you have your head up and you are looking around that you have plenty of reasons to be depressed.

But I am not depressed.