Deep Dark Woods

The Burren

Choices are odd things.

One chooses not to smoke or drink, one chooses to live as healthy as possible, one chooses to battle one's demons and mostly keep the black bear hidden out of consideration for other people. One exercises, sunbathes in moderation, gets fresh air.

One avoids choices detrimental to one's health, such as recreational drugs, extreme sports and doing things which would firghten the children. Then one day, with the best possible intention, a respected doctor prescribes a drug which should help alleviate one's rapidly worsening depression and decent into unreality.

The drug helps up to a point, but less as time goes by, and the side-effects and need for ever stronger doses, to say nothing of incipient psychosis due possibly to prolonged usage, increase. One researches, reads, researches more, visits psychiatrist after doctor after councillor, is referred for a holiday in the local mental hospital and pays higher and higher medical bills for the privilege of not getting one's health, mental or physical, restored.

Then one day a psychiatrist tells one, after the shame and misery of all the good choices gone bad, that one is choosing to be depressed and that one can equally choose to be un-depressed.

So, one makes another decision- right...wrong...better...worse?

One quits the drugs and starts down the long, rocky, weird road of withdrawal symptoms. The track record of people managing to shake this particular drug is very low indeed (possibly hundreds out of millions) but I have to try. And you know the thing that makes me sure I am making the right choice for the now is that despite the sick-making, head-frying, painful, jittery, fevered, frantic, frightening withdrawals, there are no depressive, bi-polar or psychotic symptoms.

But its hard work.

I should have taken to drink'n'drugs'n'booze years ago and maybe I'd have had some fun out of it first?

You know the lines of Robert Frost's poem?

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Its true, but at least I have begun 'the way through... my...woods'.