Fuller Wiser

I got an odd sort of Christmas present today, one that on its surface would seem to be a lump of coal. After a blood test, I’ve just been informed that I most likely have hypothyroidism.

For those unfamiliar, here is a brief breakdown, via WebMD:

“Hypothyroidism means your thyroid is not making enough thyroid hormone. The thyroid is a butterfly-shaped gland in the front of your neck. It makes hormones that control the way your body uses energy. Having a low level of thyroid hormone affects your whole body. It can make you feel tired, weak, and depressed.”

Well, holy shit. Guess who’s been tired, weak, and depressed?

It is true that humans like to find excuses for themselves and their behaviors. This tendency is a favorite target of conservatives against liberals and vice versa. Scapegoating is as old as politics, which is as old as civilization, which started the minute someone threw an insult instead of a rock, a moment which, depending on your outlook, was either the start of enlightenment or the beginning of the pussification of man.

True scapegoating has had consequences for our culture, and blowback. How many times have you seen a comic deride a fat person by mocking their claim of a “glandular problem?” Or heard someone blowing off another person’s depression, saying they just need to toughen up?

So what does one do when a real culprit springs into view? How much weight should someone give to this possible explanation of their undesirable behavior?

The wisest thing to do, logically, would be to wait and see what, if any, changes occur after a month or so of treatment. But I can’t help a little squee of excitement rising inside just by knowing that maybe, just maybe, my fatigue and depression may not be my fault.

We in the United States like blame. We aim it everywhere: The government, minorities, the opposite sex, these kids today, and in varying degrees, ourselves.

Self-blame, or as I called it, personal responsibility, has been the petard on which I’ve hoisted myself from a very young age. If I couldn’t accomplish something I wanted to, it would not, could not, be anyone else’s fault but mine. I simply wasn’t believing in myself enough, or working hard enough, or thinking correctly. Outside factors beyond my control could never be considered, lest I be convicted by a jury of myself of making excuses and being weak.

And of course, this judgment extended to others. If someone wasn’t successful, well, it had to be their fault, didn’t it? They weren’t doing it right, and they deserved their ignominy.

If this is beginning to sound familiar, there’s a very good reason. I grew up in a Calvinist country. You can hear these same arguments being blared over thousands of watts of talk radio, blown windily through coaxial cable connectors and out your teevee hole, and shat upon the printed page all over this nation. That my old man was a subscriber to the Puritan work ethic, despite the fact that he didn’t call it Jesus, certainly didn’t help. Add to that my aforementioned mother’s insistence on the best possible world for all who simply believe in themselves against all odds, and you can see the big failure soufflé bubbling, just waiting to bust its bloated crown at t-minus 30 years or so. Blammo, and now you need a new oven.

If you had suggested to 20-year-old Fuller that he should seek psychological advice on his many neuroses, he would have treated you to a lengthy diatribe on what the hell was wrong with you and why his life wouldn’t turn out crappy like yours. True, many 20-year-olds would give you the same sort of spiel, or just ignore you, but such was my confidence that it actually drew a great many followers at that time. I believed my own delusions so much that I convinced other people to follow them.

The George Bailey bit, the world that would’ve existed in your absence, cuts both ways for me. Certainly there are people who I’ve helped, some in fairly substantial ways, who might not have found that help elsewhere. But then there are others, those who I led on crusades through the murky swamps of Mordor, seeking our destiny, the one that we were due because I said so. I sometimes wonder if they really are better off than before they met me.

I’ve contributed to derailing careers, relationships, education, happiness in obscurity, and most of it with a poor facsimile of altruism, masking the opportunism that led me to bend people around my path and accept it, at least in part, as their own. I threw my tractor beam in all directions, drawing in those with the lowest self-esteem, and driving away all others. When it became apparent that someone was no longer of use to me, I cast them off, with a heavy heart and apologies galore, but always with an eye to my own success and the belief that they would find the future that best fit their ability to accurately follow their fate.

Were it not for my being self-aware about this sort of behavior, I might fairly accurately be called a psychopath. Many successful people are, and indeed if I had allowed myself to follow through on some of my more draconian ideas, I might well be both successful and psychopathic.

And yet the very stumbling blocks I’ve cursed for being obstacles to my career success are the things that have kept me human: Consideration for the feelings of others (leading me to associate with dubious talents for far longer than was healthy), acknowledgement of my responsibility to be fair and honest in relationships (a rare quality among successful artists), and a belief that the world should be a fair place, the responsibility for which lies on all of our shoulders.

You can see the problems here. Consider the feelings of others, and you’re stuck with Pete Best and no record contract. Be fair and honest with your love interest and you’ve gotten rid of a whole section of your standard artist biography. And as for the world being fair, well, I spend half of this blog covering that ball of crap.

It may be that the onset of depression in my 30’s is merely the soft, thudding sound of chickens coming home to roost. But if this psychological process has been aided in any way by a physical and chemical process, then I may be living in a personal hell that is not entirely of my own making. When “bad” becomes “the worst thing ever,” one might be justified in taking a closer look at the old spectacles to see if the prescription is correct.

Regarding roosting birds: Walking into work today, I stopped to read a historical marker (a weakness of mine). A horrible crack-thump a few feet to my left startled me, and alarm turned to horror as I saw the source of the sound. A pigeon, who knows why, had fallen onto its back there on the sidewalk, and could easily have been mistaken for dead but for the slow twitching of its claws.

Enter personal responsibility. It was pretty obvious that the bird was not going to make it, and anyone with half an ounce of empathy knows that quick death is preferable to slow, painful throes of mortal injury. I should’ve killed it. I don’t know how, but I should’ve found a way. And yet I hurried on down the sidewalk, cursing to myself for the thing I was allowing to happen with each step away from the hurt animal.

It wasn’t my fault, I reasoned. Birds die all the time, some of them horribly. If I weren’t there, it would suffer the same fate. But you were there, I responded to myself.

But this is the 21st century, I shot back. An office worker on the way to his desk job in the city doesn’t stop and kill a bloody pigeon. It isn’t the farm. The pigeon doesn’t know what your job is, I replied, it just knows that it is in agony, and no one else is around to help it.

I knew I couldn’t argue my way out of the moral wrongness of my actions, and so I got as far away from the scene of the crime as possible, as quickly as possible. I don’t know if that bird’s dead yet, and I don’t plan on walking back the way I came, lest I find out. I am a coward, and I can’t blame that on my damned thyroid.

There have been moments in the past few years when the real level of my delusion about the world has become painfully apparent. The most recent was a year or so ago. I’d ventured out to the local Bennigan’s to get a couple of beers, a benign enough expedition. A man, or more accurately, a dude, was perambulating around the bar, talking smack and making a nuisance of himself. A guy sitting next to me started talking trash about the dude, who very soon got thrown out for his behavior, and once the dude was gone, me and my neighbor cracked wise for a while about stupid people being stupid, and how stupid the dude was.

Upon leaving the bar an hour or so later, I was rather surprised to find a white Cadillac bearing down upon my tail on the highway. A passing streetlight illuminated the passenger: The dude in question. The driver looked less familiar, but it wouldn’t be a stretch to consider that he was a friend of the dude, and had overheard my trashing of his pal after the guy got thrown out. If they were mad enough to wait for me to leave the bar, they were mad enough to kick my ass, or worse.

It’s only in moments like these that it becomes starkly, horrifyingly apparent that I have never in my adult life contemplated, in advance, a way to defend myself if attacked. Once, alone in a park bathroom but for a crazy person eyeballing me through the stall door, I came up with the brilliant idea of throwing poo in his face to distract him while I made my escape. Thankfully he left, but he could just as easily not have.

So here’s this guy and his friend, obviously well-versed enough in fisticuffs to chase down a stranger with intent to clobber, and I have absolutely no idea what to do about it. My solution (thank everloving Jebus that I brought my cell phone) was to call the cops. Though I was on the line for several minutes and many miles trying to get across the nature of my emergency, I bought enough time and probably put on enough show that my would-be attackers peeled off their pursuit and, who knows, found another body to vent their frustration on. If that hadn’t worked, or if they’d gotten me in the parking lot, I would have been well and truly fucked.

In the adrenaline-fueled aftermath of that evening, I made a solemn vow to myself never to allow myself to be in that situation again. Not just by making sure never to hit the bar alone or talk smack about fellow patrons, but by acknowledging violence as a fact in this world and making preparations for its inevitable appearance. By learning to defend myself.

Well, of course a promise of personal productivity made by the father of a newborn is a check that a wise man might think twice before cashing, and thus far its corresponding funds have remained hypothetical. Doubly so if the signer is in the midst of a crippling depression, as I was at that time.

There are many realities that fatigue and depression have not allowed me to acknowledge, or even in doing so, to do anything about. If medical treatment of a chemical imbalance can give me just a little more possibility of following through on my responsibility to look reality in the face and prepare myself for its onslaught, then it is a good thing.

So yes, I have a disease. And all things considered, I’m very happy about it. A month or so from now, getting to the root of what’s wrong with me will be that much easier.