Digital Minimalization Day 22: The Books on my Father’s Nightstand

“I don’t really believe in diagnostic categories,” my psychiatrist said one day after I’d asked him to give me one. I was shifting from one drug to another, so it seemed like a relevant question. I’d had anxiety and panic and depression. But I’d come in for a state that I had started to think of as something else. Not full fledged mania, but something like it.

“Bipolar 2,” he said.

“The disease so nice they named it twice?” I asked.

My psychiatrist flashed a pained smile. It was an expression he used a lot, along with his sympathetic smile and his delighted smile, when I said something we both found fun or interesting.

I’d figured my mood swings weren’t bad enough to make me bipolar. In my abnormal psych class the teacher, a clinician, had told us about a patient that had spent his life savings on aquariums, pumps, tubing, chemicals, and told his wife that he’d had a eureka moment, and they would be rich soon.

“Fish,” he said. “Need never die.”

So, you know, I was never that nuts. Not quite.

So I’ve deliberated for years as to whether my depression was bad enough, to be called that, I thought of my hypomania (means a little mania, almost mania) as being happy and believing in myself, my periods of hyper focus and inattentiveness as totally normal, and my panic attacks as a full on mental health issue, because you know, the emergency room visits.

So I was focused on those, and figured the other stuff was just me being a hypochondriac, which as far as I know, they don’t give you pills for?

The ADD diagnosis came in my 50s, when during my long delayed therapy my psychologist told me that the degree to which I was beating up on myself to get shit done wasn’t normal.

Of course it is,” I told her. “Everyone has to make themselves feel like shit all the time about the stuff they need to do, or how the fuck does that shit get done?”

“Some people just do what they know they have to do, without hating themselves,” she told me.

“Really?” I said. “Huh.”

Suddenly, a lot of my life made sense.

But we were talking about withdrawing from social media, and nostalgia, which I have probably not called by name. Nostalgia always seemed stupid to me. For me, it was the show Happy Days, which my father told me was bullshit, a 50s without the cuban missile crisis and the nukes in the b52s circling the globe and McCarthy and a stultifying culture of Normalcy at All Costs.

Then my father died, and my mother died, at ripe old ages, and we were all stuck inside for the last few years; as a writer in a big city, your writer friends all move away all the damn time, and also, your hair falls out. You have kids and they’re little then they’re six foot tall creatures who leave home and you don’t go to parks and play on the swings anymore.

They tear down all your favorite places, or they become banks you don’t use, or cell phone stores, or sit empty and dark in the COVID era, staring at you like the empty eyesockets of a discarded Halloween skull.

And you find yourself falling into the past. And it’s a lot like depression. And you look it up, you google, “is there a cure for Nostalgia?” and you read about nostalgia, lots of common sense things, mostly that they have given up on the idea that it’s a bad thing most of the time. It’s seen as vital to identity, vital to coping with loss.

So finally, I’m right about something just me being a hypochondriac, as I find the books from my father’s nightstand on the net and buy them and hold them and study the covers and remember the boy who gaped at them, particularly when they featured the scantily clad women. But the space ships and robots were almost as awe inspiring.

I smell them and I read some of the stories.

I guess I’ll come back to the present some day soon enough.

Social media, as I said before, did glue me into the present, in a way that a daily NYT read doesn’t seem to. My feed, which, I realize now, is where my friends mostly are. It’s sad that I let a brutal monopoly do that, curate my friends and present them in a format that works for me.

Should I ask if I can call these people on the phone? I have talked to a few that way now. Should I go in a grab a few more? Or try to schedule a monthly zoom party? Or some damn thing?

That last thing seems like a cool idea… but middle aged people tend to be busy. Pretty soon, though, it will be retired people I mostly know. Maybe then.

Oh, and my father never believed in my bipolar or ADD. He humored me about them, though.

“I suppose the scarecrow’s diploma can still be of use,” he’d said.