End of the Year Review: Personal

We had some bad, horrible moments in 2022, as we do every year. As everyone does, we suppose. We had plenty of good moments too. 

The family is healthy, happy and busy. That's a blessing and the most important thing. 

We began the year weighing about 255 pounds and end the year weighing about 245 pounds. We had a great, great year at the gym doing hour long cardio-sessions four times a week. We still skip breakfast, have a (big) salad for lunch, and eat whatever we want for dinner. We see our appendix scar in the mirror better than ever. Our eating habits need improvement as we can't quite kick late-night snacking. Overall we feel trim and taught. Working hard at the gym, releasing those endorphins, and feeling good about it, is still the best anti-depressant we know. More on that below. 

Going over this blog, we noted getting gout half a dozen times in 2022. We no longer avoid red meat. Gonna get gout anyway, so we might as well enjoy that burger. 

We smoked more cigars than we meant to. Thirty? Forty? Hard to say we lost track sometime in June. 

We had fun with beer in 2022. 

We lost Mrs. Stroock's father after a long illness. We take a lot of pride in holding things down here while she was off in Indiana during his final weeks. 

We're proud also about the family trip to Disney World being such a smash. Really well done all around. There's talk of returning in 2023.

We've finally, since November, cut down on politics. We're no longer glued to our phone after dinner and our screen time is down perhaps 30 percent. We read the NYP, Instapundit,  Zero Hedge, and Stephen L. Miller. Let's keep up the good work. Democrats are evil, communist, sex criminals. Republicans are their rent boys. The latest culture war battles are already lost. So what's the point?

We've had a terrible temper since we were two years old. It's not as bad as when we were two, or twenty, or thirty, but it's still there. And it's sooooo much darker. Mostly the temper manifests itself in irritability and lack of patience. Not lashing out at people takes a metric fuck-tonne of work. 

In our 50th year depression is still a problem for us, and will be until the end. We've seen two types of depression. We've been depressed because a girl ripped out our heart and showed it to us while we were still alive. We've been depressed because we've been unemployed for 6 months (after 25 years that sentence is still hard to write). We've been depressed for no damn reason at all. That's when one can almost feel the chemical imbalance in the brain. 

We began the year on three different meds. We're down to one. And we only take it because it knocks us out at night.  Just this month the doctor tried to put us on an anti-seizure medication that has off label anti-depressant uses. We said no. We said hell no. Starting a new med is a process. One beings with small dosages, comes up to the normal dosage, and then waits for results. If those results aren't good (one year we went on a med that removed all inhibitions. I mean we had to restrain ourselves from yelling at people) one goes off the med slowly too. Anti-depressants work, as our late FBF Kathy Shaidle said. They worked for us when we went on them in 2005. But they also stop working. And nobody told us that back then.

Those pills have certain, uhhh...unpleasant side effects. Another side effect is long-term numbing over of one's emotions. 

Depression often comes down to off-kilter serotonin levels in the brain, or so the white coats think. This year came a pair of studies in which scientists could not link serotonin to depression. Motherfuckers, we always knew this would happen. It always does, doesn't it? 

We've worked hard to overcome our daily anxiety and our general reluctance to get out and do things. It hasn't really worked. We still feel reluctant and anxious. But we do fight through it and we get out a lot more than we used to. 

It has always struck us as odd that we can take horrible family tragedy in stride. The morning after our mother died, we woke up and wrote for a few hours. That's how you get the job, man. But events completely out of our control can drive us to depression and rage. Like politics and sports. 

It has been suggested that we go back into therapy. We have counter-suggested that it'd just be us sitting on a couch talking about our feelings...again. It'd be a waste of time. We walk alone, as the song says. 

Why has this end of the year post devolved into a long meditation on depression? I've no idea. But it is on my mind. That's a fact worth considering.

2022 was not a bad year.