How It Feels to Be Suicidal During a Global Pandemic

This is not a note.

Content warning for… just read the headline.

It is April 26th, 2021.

You’ve scheduled an appointment with a university psychiatrist to discuss the possibility of going on medication for depression. Or anxiety, or stress, or whatever the technical term is for what’s been dragging you down since 2002. A virtual meeting, of course. Even if you’re less than a week away from your second dosage of the long-awaited coronavirus vaccine, which will surely signify the start of things finally going back to normal, there’s still an apocalypse on after all.

But aside from the intrinsic awkwardness of talking to a stranger through a webcam, things start off pretty standardly. You tell the person on the other end of the webcam a little bit about yourself, what you do, what you’re like, and how you’ve been feeling lately. You take pains to make it clear that, what with there still being an apocalypse on after all, you know that what you’re feeling is not necessarily unique, permanent, or frankly all that interesting. You just know that even by your anemic standards, things are getting bad. And while you’re not looking for a particular outcome today, you want to know if medication is something worth exploring to keep things from getting worse.