I was feeling a little gloomy the other day, so I ran some errands, just to get out of the house. When I turned on the car radio, someone was explaining how studies show that people who get depressed also wind up with smaller brains.
"Uh, oh, " I thought. "Now I'm not only depressed, I’m scared, too." Plus, if the little gray cells atrophy with depression, at some point there may not be enough firing synapses left to jump-start a good mood.
If IQ is tied to disposition, only a few laughs separate smart from stupid and, at the time, I couldn’t drum up even an insincere smile. I decided to change the station to something a little less enlightening but, by then, my palms were sweaty and I could feel my heart revving up. Uh-oh. Fast heartbeats. You don’t suppose . . .
Drat! I read somewhere that depression and heart problems might be linked too, but I couldn’t dwell on that because I would become even more upset and my outlook would surely get worse, shrinking my poor cerebrum even faster. I was afraid, by the time I pulled back into my driveway, if I could even find it by then, my brain would be the size of a shelled walnut.
Hopefully it wasn’t due to a dwindling IQ that I told my husband about my fear of being daft in addition to being depressed. He dismissed it with a wave of his hand and said there are tons of obscure studies out there and we can’t take each one to heart, even though he knows I probably could. I’m sure he was only trying to prove his point when he quoted some research that indicated children who are exposed to second-hand smoke have lower test scores. In fact, it was suggested that any tobacco smoke children can smell is probably enough to affect their intelligence. Oh, great.
I smelled a lot of Lucky Strikes while riding in the back seat of our 1952 Plymouth sedan – the one with all the windows rolled up and no air conditioner. So, instead of making me feel better, my husband’s well-intentioned comments pushed me over the edge. How the heck can you claw your way out of a bad mood when you feel as vulnerable as a shin bone in a dog fight?
It wasn’t like this when I was little. We felt indestructible. Stitches the length of a zipper were a badge of courage. Bee stings that swelled to new heights were trophies. A knock on the head, particularly if it rose to the shape of a snow cone, was a crown fit for royalty. We reveled in such things. We were giddy with simplicity and just ignorant enough to look on the bright side. We didn’t know enough to worry. We didn’t know how much better off we would be if we only knew how bad off we were.
Nor did we give a passing thought to bad moods. We just built our forts and skipped naively through each day as if the sun would come up tomorrow and all of the swelling would go down.
Now that we’re way over grown, we have medical advances to thank for longer lives. They have also given us a whole bunch of new worries that threaten to shorten those lives, or at least shrink our brains, because we’re so depressed from being worried about what we know.
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