I really think Dooce (Heather B. Armstrong) nailed it last week when she blogged about Britney’s recent troubles and how her own postpartum depression gave her insight to Britney.
It’s becoming clear in Britney’s erratic behavior that she was self-medicating for something…perhaps postpartum depression, perhaps her career or the end of a marriage.
Craig Ferguson also monologued about this - his comments are very sweet, and very funny:
I’ve had my own flirtations with depression, and it’s not pretty. When I was first out of college, I was *lucky* enough to land a high-paying job with a big consulting firm. Typical weeknight activities for most of our project team included drinking, eating and drinking more. We’d go out every night and drink, and drink some more. We had a lot of laughs, but it wasn’t pretty. Most of us were single, making more money than we could spend, and half the team was from out of town, living on expenses.
Occasionally, my girlfriends and I’d go back to my college town and hang out with a friend that still lived there, post-college. Of course, we’d drink - and a few times I got so drunk I wouldn’t remember my behavior the next morning. Such as getting into a shouting match with a stranger - or stealing something from the bar we’d partied at (pint glasses, at minimum).
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was self medicating. Because I was depressed, hated my job, hated programming, hated most of my co-workers who were even more ass-kissy than me, hated being a computer programmer in a nasty loading doc-cum-project headquarters. All of us hated it, though some stayed on. I saw older friends (at that point, older meant 28!) who had jobs they hated and mortgages that kept them from quitting. It sucked, big time. I rolled off the project at the first opportunity, and sat on the bench for a while - working on CBTs until I would be called up again. I called a favorite advertising professor and told her I didn’t really like doing what I was doing. She knew that, she said - she knew I wouldn’t like that but knew I had to find that out on my own. She offered to connect me with a few advertising agencies in St. Louis. And a couple weeks later, I was laid off from my shiny programming job. Happily, less than a week later, I signed with an ad agency on Sept. 10. It was the first offer I got - at more than 40% pay cut. But I took it, because it was an opportunity and I had a mortgage. And the next day the World Trade Center came down.
More on this later.
