Escitalopram.

The pros and cons of messing with my mind.

So, I’ve been on escitalopram for seven months now.

It has been both a blessing and a curse.

It looks like escitalopram will be with me for the rest of my life.

The pros are:

• Far less depression. It’s not that I am happy. It’s that my emotions are completely blunted. And trust me, blunting is better than nothing.
• My anxiety has been turned down. I can still feel the anxiety, but it doesn’t destroy me like it did before.
• Disrupted trains of thoughts don’t cause headaches or nausea.

The cons are:

• Disturbed sleep patterns.
• Day long sleepiness.
• Acne the likes of which I haven’t seen since I was a teen.
• A general sense of ennui.
• Weight gain.
• Loss of appetite.
• Can’t orgasm, but sex has never been a major deal breaker in my life.

So far, the benefits of escitalopram outweigh the negatives.

No. The escitalopram hasn’t caused increased thoughts of suicide or suicidal ideations.

But it also hasn’t taken away my desire to die.

The one thing that I have realized, and that you’re going to have to realize, is that the 40 years of untreated depression and anxiety have done some long term damage to my brain. And I’m okay with that. Not that the damage was done to my brain, but the fact that my brain is damaged.

40 years is a very long time to go without treatment.

So here I am, riding out the last few years of my life, and writing about it as I go.

By March of 2023 year we should know what the Parliamentary committee will recommend for guidelines for those wishing to apply for Medical Assistance in Dying for Mental Health issues.

After that I’ll have to apply. This will probably consist of convincing 3 psychologists that I am of sound mind in making this choice.

Just recently my N.P. has realized that I am serious. He’s the one who set me up with the escitalopram. I guess that he was hoping that the escitalopram would fix things for me. But it hasn’t. It can’t.

No matter how often my father passed my issues off as being nothing more than my attempts at attracting attention. They weren’t.

Just because my father chose to ignore my issues, and refused to get me timely treatment, doesn’t make his opinion that I was just making things up any more valid than the diagnoses that I had been given early in life.

The fact that my father loved to blame my issues on my mother and her “insane brothers” doesn’t make what I’ve suffered for the last 40 years a trivial matter.

If my father and Captain Totzke had allowed the ticking time bombs of depression, anxiety, and CPTSD to have been diffused all those years ago things would have worked out completely different.

Time machines do not exist. There is no going back into the past to undo things.

Again, to be very clear, wanting to die is nothing new. My wish to die has been with me since CFB Namao.

No one can live through that type of shit and not want to die.

I know of two men who died by suicide as a result of the CFB Namao affair. And as I’ve only met a few people who were affected by the CFB Namao affair, I have no idea how many others have ever tried suicide or have ever succeeded at suicide.

And I know of many more men who have committed suicide later in life, even after they have received “justice” for what they endured.

Bobbie, you just need some hobbies.

No. No I don’t. Hobbies won’t stop the memories of CFB Namao or my treatment at the hands of Captain Terry Totzke from popping up.

Cycling! You love to ride your bicycle. Yes, yes I do love riding my bicycle. However I can’t ride my bicycle 24 hours a day seven days a week.

Electronics! Take a course in electronics. I never really liked electronics. Learning electronics was one way that I thought that I could get closer to my ever distant father. That was a bad strategy.

Cars! You loved cars! You owned a car! Actually I’ve always been terrified of cars. I hate being in cars. I got a membership at the base autoclub on Canadian Forces Base Downsview as I thought that my father and I could spend time together at the base auto club. Again, another one of my very wrong ideas.

I really hated the idea of working on other people’s cars after the night my brother and his buddy Greg brought a 6 cylinder Chevy up to Bob Beckers workshop with the idea that I could make the car run again after Greg and his buddies had pulled all the plugs, the wires, the distributor and other things off the engine.

I forget who all was there. There was my brother, Greg, an older guy in his 40s named Dom, and two older teens that had to be about 19 or 20.

Greg at the time was no small kid. Even though Greg and my brother were both younger than I was, both were physically larger than me in both mass and height. My brother at the time was so large that my father wouldn’t dare raise a hand to him.

Two thing about that night really pissed me off.

The first was that I moved Bob’s van outside so that Greg and his buddies could push the car in. When Bob’s van was outside someone just happened to steal Bob’s mobile phone from the van. Fuck was Bob ever pissed with me. And no, it wasn’t some rando walking by that stole the mobile phone.

The second thing that pissed me off was that even though I told Greg that I hadn’t worked on anything other than 4 cylinder Volkwagen engines, he was going with what my brother had told him, that I could work on anything and that if I didn’t fix his engine it was because I was being selfish and stuck up and a self centred asshole.

Greg and his buddies ended up taking the car away that evening.

Greg and his buddies caught up with me a few days later.

They beat the sweet fucking jesus out of me in the parking lot of the laundromat on Keele street. All I really remember about that night is two of Greg’s friends holding me down while Greg stomped on my head. I could barely walk after. I headed over to Billy Bee donuts on Wilson Ave. The owner of the donut shop wanted me to go to the hospital to get looked at seeing as how my eyes were getting bloodshot.

But yeah, that’s one of the reasons that I will never work on anyone’s car for any reason. And there are similar reasons as to why I don’t fix any thing electronic anymore or why I don’t really do much with computers.