Return To Normalcy

About a month ago I was in class working with my students in resource when over the intercom came, “Please excuse this interruption but we are in a soft lockdown.”    Interesting.  This just means we can’t let kids out of the classroom; usually happens when they have the drug dogs doing locker checks.  Of course with the age we live in my students knew why almost instantly.  About a mile from the school there had been two murders.  Within an hour two more people who be murdered.  The gunman: a husband who wanted revenge on his wife for a divorce, killed two of her coworkers at a bank, her lawyer, and a police officer.

Students were finally let out of the classroom three hours later (an hour after school ended) after the police let us know that there was no danger of the gunman (who had now been shot).  The school emptied quickly.  I went to a coworkers classroom to see how things went for him during the lockdown.  He was pale as a bed sheet, pacing, and spaced out.  His girlfriend of a quite a while is a police officer. He had not heard from her.  Leaks had already gotten out on social media that a cop had been killed and my coworker had not heard from her.  The next day we found out why.  Her and her partner had arrived on the scene where the shooter was.  Both got out of the vehicle.  A shot was fired.  Both officers dropped to the ground, but she got up.

Now I didn’t know either officer but I had become close with my coworker.  He explained that she had been partners with him for a long time.  She was very shaken up to say the least.  He was not much further behind.  As he told the story to others that came in, everyone looked horrified, teared up, and showed their genuine concern I realized what I felt; or should I say lack of feeling.  Instead of feeling sad, empathetic, pity, concern, or anything else someone should feel I felt nothing but boredom.  I was completely bored.  It was boring.  In my mind the story was typical, a typical scenario played out like one would expect with the person’s actions, and a it ended in tragedy for four people.  I felt nothing for the people involved or for my coworker that was a mess trying to figure out how to help the person he loved.  I was bored.

As I thought more about trying to show interest it dawned on me: this isn’t right.  For someone who spent the last 9 years being medically depressed I felt ashamed that I felt nothing for these people and what they were going though.  I realized this isn’t right.  The symptoms of my depression have been virtually nonexistent for the past year.  My mood had been very stable: no lows and no highs.  It was like I just existed and observed people interacting but without any emotional involvement.  Even in my own marriage, while I appreciated her, depended on her to be there, and wanted to make her happy, the feelings were machine like.  I should do this because it is what I need to do but not because my love for her encouraged me.

So here I am.  I went from being chronically depressed to a state of extreme indifference.  After reading around and talking with the shrink, I came to the conclusion that it was probably the medication I was taking.  The medication had worked.  I no longer experienced those low lows that I was unable to get out of.  However I could not experience any highs, or feel for others’ lows.  I was flatlined.  I realized that I didn’t get excited about things and that most of the time when I experienced emotion I was either drunk out of my mind or I faked it to be consistent with what people would have expected me to show.  I decided that this was not the way I wanted to live my life.  I decided I didn’t want to exist as someone who observed things only, but I wanted that emotional connection that makes thing real.  I decided that it was time to stop taking the medication I had relied on for 9 years.

This series of posts is going to be about my time going through this.  I hope it will end with me returning to the person I used to be.  I hope to rediscover the emotional connection I used to have with the universe.