for the past few months i’ve been lurking on an email list for hacDC, a local hackerspace where geeks can work on pet projects and so on. a few weeks ago i saw an email go out about how person in particular had suffered from depression, and figuring that other geeks might want to meet up sometime to share their experiences, he organized a meetup group to do so. i saw the original post go out, but i didn’t go for some reason or another. i completely forgot all about the group until i saw a reminder about the second event scheduled to take place today, and considering i felt in a really down mood this morning i thought i might as well attend.

yesterday evening spelchec and festive and i went out to tryst, a coffeeshop / café in dc, and when we returned to my apartment bruno_boy came on up and we were all looking at possible places for me to hang up different pieces of art that i have. i already had that one sketch by dan hung up on my wall, but i had a few other prints and posters and such that i wasn’t sure where best to hang. so, we explored some possibilities.

this morning while i was getting ready for work, i was thinking about all the art i have that i can hang up, and i thought about how the portraits of cynicalscribe and myself that i had commissioned from paigeyiscrazey was all framed up nice and i really like how it turned out, but then it occurred to me that i’ll probably never really get a chance to hang it up on display since seeing it on a regular basis would probably bum me out too much. perfect – i hadn’t even been awake for 30 minutes this morning and already i was feeling miserable.

so for the first few hours at work i felt really crappy. and, while i had nothing to do with either of these, i saw on twitter how one of my friends broke up with her boyfriend yesterday so now she was all emotional, and then later i saw one of my roller derby friends change her status on lj from “married” to “it’s complicated” (which got a few concerned messages from a few other roller girls before the post was removed, so who knows what that was all about). so that all wasn’t making my mood any better either.

(also, at lunch i saw carolyn hax’s column in today’s washington post, and thought that was kind of coincidental, too, heh!)

then i saw the reminder about the geeks & depression meetup for this evening and figured i might as well go. it wasn’t just for people who had a diagnosis of depression; the actual description is: “We’re geeks. We do strange and interesting things with technology for fun as well as for profit. We also get depressed to varying degrees from time to time, and sometimes it becomes a lot to bear. In the past year we lost a few of our friends and colleagues to depression, but it doesn’t have to be this way. You’re not alone – none of us are. The purpose of this meetup is to help one another through the rough times and enjoy the good times. If you’re a geek of some kind and have or are prone to depression then we would love to have you.” while some of the attendees had significant bouts of depression and were/are being medicated for it, there was also discussion of (attempted) suicide, or therapy, and so on.

we met up at a restaurant in rockville and there were only 5 of us there (including me). when everyone else gave their background i said how i was probably going to be the black sheep of the group since i’ve never been diagnosed or anything but sometimes i still find myself sometimes struggling to various degrees over a year after my split, but also how someone i knew committed suicide several months ago (one of the guys i knew in my dc metro MINIs car club), and so i thought it would be helpful for me to have a new group of people i could talk to for a fresh perspective, but also to get to understand depression more since i wasn’t very familiar. overall it was an interesting meeting; the other attendees commiserated over types of medication they could or couldn’t take, insurance difficulties, blood work, MRIs and behavioral therapy, and so on with other stuff that even if you weren’t diagnosed with depression (like me), it was still interesting to learn about these things from other geeks.

while i didn’t talk that much, i probably did most of the talking all at once when they asked me questions and i went into more detail about why i was there and how i’ve been feeling, and it felt good to talk about how i felt with people i hadn’t talked to before and who didn’t know the details.

so, my life is now even more fight club-esque as i visit support groups that i probably don’t even need to visit. when i first arrived about 45 minutes early, i wandered around the barnes and noble next door to the restaurant, and i flipped through the latest copy of MAKE magazine. how convenient that it has an article on how to make your own soap!

next meeting is at the end of february. i may or may not go since i might have something else scheduled that same day, but it’s nice to know that people can form support groups like this for those who need them.