Panic attack my ass, now get back in solitary!

It's come to my attention that a certain celebutante has been put in jail for believing that her special uniqueness should be enough to let her continue to drive her car after her license had been suspended, and that just after one night, she got taken out of jail and put on house arrest because of an undisclosed medical problem.


What, they took her make up away in the slammer? Is that a medical condition?

I heard panic attack. I heard she was having panic attacks in jail.

You have no idea how this made my blood boil. A panic attack? Please. How convenient.

Maybe I'm being cruel. Maybe she really did have a serious anxiety problem.




Maybe, my real issue here is that people have been really knocking this term around and they don't know what they're talking about. It's like having a very bad headache and calling it a migraine. It's not the same thing.

A panic attack is serious. It can land you in the hospital. I never did but looking back I wonder if I should have. Of course, the first time I had a full blown attack, I was sort of driving down a major highway, in the middle of three lanes of traffic, with two kids and a cat in the car, and in my foggy brain, I thought I had to keep going. For about an hour, I wondered, detached, if I was having a heart attack. My throat was closing up. I could hardly breathe. I could hardly hear anything. My entire chest was in pain and my shoulders and arms felt numb. I don't know how I made it to my destination. I should not have been driving.

I don't know. Maybe her panic problem was real; it's jail after all, and this broad hasn't even ever set foot in a Walmart in her life. I'm sure jail scared the piss out of her.

Well it friggin well should. She should be in there. She's a careless driver, a selfish self centred princess, and has likely never had to pay a consequence in her life. Moving her into house arrest does nothing. Yeah sure her house is big enough that she won't be able to access the whole house without her little ankle bracelet doing whatever it is they do when the famous people wearing them go out of bounds. It doesn't count. She still got away with it.

Where was I? Oh yeah. Overuse of the term "Panic attack."

Now I'd like to move on to the term "Depression."

Again, serious problem that goes way deeper than being kinda bummed out, maaaan.

This guy, whom I find icky, is a rock star.



He's done a few heavy tracks that I liked okay, but I can't get past the icky and repulsive part. He is highly intelligent, gives interesting witty and somewhat icky responses to interviews, speaks in full sentences with correctly used big words, and is friends with Johnny Depp, which is almost enough to make me think he must be okay because Johnny hangs with very interesting people except that Johnny is scruffy and eccentric and this guy here is just...icky.


Don't get me wrong- Johnny can hang with all the weirdos he wants. I myself love weirdos, most of the time. And they generally gravitate to me whether I like it or not. I can see these two sharing a love of ominous looking old furniture and well cut black suits and tattoos. Okay. I'm in tune with all of that except the tattoos, since I have none, but it's all cool with me. It's just, you know, the ICKY that I can't get past. I'm sorry, Johnny, I'm not into your friend.

So, this guy claims to have suffered from depression.

I don't find this hard to believe. He kind of looks like he could. I say this because I've been told depressed people look a certain way...and that I do not look depressed.




Which again is bull, because what does how you look have to do with it? Only, that when I fessed up to people that I was depressed, I often got told that I didn't look depressed. Well I also have been told that I don't look:
a) Mennonite
b) like somebody's mother
c) like somebody's wife whatever the hell that means
d) like a non-smoker. Again with the whatever the hell.

Anyways. I digress. This guy whom I find icky, has recently gone through a divorce.


And then he found a new girlfriend.

He's 38. She's 19. She looks suspiciously like his ex-wife. Only without the bottle of black hair dye.

Which is neither here nor there, but he claims that his young lover really saved his life and that she helped him to get out of his horrible depression which was brought on by his divorce.

OOOOhhhhhhh rreeeeeeeaalllly.

Listen to me, people. Listen carefully. I do not know exactly what depression is. But here's what I think:

It is not just being sad.

It is life threatening.

It is not caused by events. It can be triggered but it isn't caused.

It cannot be cured by another person.

So I'd like this guy to get his face out of the absinthe long enough to take responsibility for his own crap, his own emotions and reactions, and quit leaning on this child bride.

Like I said, maybe I am being cruel. He could actually be struggling and if so, I honestly, sincerely, hope that he finds a way to deal with his life and that his creativity saves him. I hate the thought of anybody suffering.

If not, he should smarten up. Dammit.

Man I am cranky today.

Look, I don't rant about this in order to claim depression and anxiety as my own- I don't really want it, like it or not- and I would never want to make it sound like you have to be part of some special little club in order to say that you have it.

It's just that when everybody says they're it, it becomes the norm. We're a society of messed up fear driven nervous people, and that's wrong, because we're not- I have been dragging this crap around with me for longer than I ever realized and I am not fear driven, nervous, pessimistic or any of these things. I resent being assumed to be those things when I fess up that I deal with depression and anxiety.

I also think that when everybody's wailing on and on about ooooh I'm so depressssssed and oh I had a panic attaaaaaack...some of us who really are struggling don't get help. I have no scientific proof of this theory, I'm just irritated and spewing things that might bite me in the butt later on.

I need to look at some comforting pictures before I go.








There. Cure? No. Capable of carrying on? Yes. No more whining.