Zoloft

It wasn't entirely on purpose that I ran out of my prescription last Saturday (10 days ago). The main problem was just that I didn't care enough to bother refilling it. I had been on it for about 8 months at 100mg. That's not a huge dose, but it's not completely menial either. I'm also taking 150mg of Welbutrin so I wasn't too horrified by the thought of being without it.

I've heard some pretty scary withdrawal stories. Tremors, nightmares, horrible depression and anxiety, seizures even. Not short term either, these last for months. Damn, though, I feel fantastic.

I know for a fact that it helped me get over a particularly bad hump in my life that nothing else helped me with. I always thought I'd be the kind of person who didn't need to take medications at all, much less for something so stupid as being "down." That's all in my head. Mind over matter, there's no reason to take a pill to change the way that I feel. Turns out, I was pretty wrong. I read a pretty good description of depression the other day that really struck home for me.

I've Been Losing

It's so easy to find people who are broken but give into the emotion they're feeling, and let their struggles shape who they are, and it's so easy to find people who are optimistic and constantly try to do better but have never had to fight tooth and nail for what they want.

To find people who have fought, who have scraped along, who have known what it's like to be so close to giving in and giving up but regardless of all that believe that they can be who they want to be and do what they are passionate about is next to impossible.

It never goes away. The anxiety [and depression] is literally a constant battle every single second that I'm awake. I thought I'd gotten so damn good at winning but I was wrong, and lately I've been losing.

This enemy knows no logic, it knows no truth, and has no specific environment. When you're happy it taunts you, laughs at you, and asks how short lived it will be. It claws at you and pins you down and spits in your face and asks you how long you think you can keep improving before you fuck something up, and asks how long can the fragile little light we call optimism stand up to the onslaught of everything that fucking hurts, and bends, burns, and breaks. How long do you think the light will stay on once the walls that hold it up are torn down and darkness swallows it?

The answer is, not very long. That's why you have to open the door, walk beyond those walls, and face it head on. You hit it before it grabs you, and then you hit it some more. You stomp it's throat in because you know that it would do the same to you and the ones you love. You pin it to the ground, but you don't kill it because it can't die. That's the advantage that it has over you. You can win the fight over and over and over and over again, but it will always come back. You can beat it every single day of your life, and you will, just to show the people you love that you can. Just to show them that they're worth more than it is. That the pain, and the scars, and the darkness will never stand up to the love and the joy and the light that exists between you and them.

I guess it's one of those things that you never really understand until you've been through it. That pretty aptly describes the way I was feeling before getting help from a shrink and a pill. I have more respect now than I ever have before for folks who suffer through things like anxiety, addiction, and other issues that I may not understand. I've learned through this to not judge people as seriously, because you truly do not know what they've been through or what they're going through. We can't help what we think, the way we feel. We can't control our preferences or emotions. They're there. It is what it is, right? All we can control is how we handle these things and how we act and behave.

Anyway, over the last few months (without me noticing), that bastard of a pill has been taking hold of my mind. It's been squeezing out every last bit of care or concern that I have -- for my work, for my wife, for my friends and family, certainly for my own life, all my cares had been crushed, wiped out of existence. My relationship with my wife has been in a downward spiral. The quality and quantity of my work has been in a downward spiral (and hopefully hit an all-time low). My health for sure has been in a downward spiral. I couldn't have possibly cared any less. "Maybe if I get fired, it'll be motivation for me to do something different."

The look that my wife gave me for that one. We both knew that wasn't true. I knew that my life was in the toilet and that there was nothing that I could do to make it better, because [insert situation here] would never change. There was no light at the end of the tunnel, there was no reason to even bother trying. Don't get me wrong, the ability to stop caring was exactly what I needed 8 months ago.

Now, after quitting that pill? My motivation is back. I enjoy my job again. I've enjoyed spending time with my wife, and I think she's noticed. I've gotten more done in the past ~5 days at work than I have over the past probably 6 months. It's fantastic. I hadn't even realized that my senses had been dulled to the point that everything just seemed gray, hazy, covered in a film. Sights and sounds were being filtered by a pill that removed all the color, all the emotion, all the vibrancy. Nothing had meaning, nothing had any impact, nothing mattered. 

Now, everything has color and detail again. I can see the leaves on the trees, I can taste my food and feel the texture of my clothes. I actually hear people talking now rather than just hearing them droning on about who cares what problem you're having right now it's nothing compared to this. I want to be with my wife and spend time with people that I like, rather than just sitting on the sofa playing video games to try to make the time go by faster to get it all over with and drone out all the shittiness and drabness in the world. I enjoy listening to people talk and write about things they're passionate about, things they care about. I'm ready to really start living again.

The frequent and random (but thankfully very short) bouts of dizziness and the uncontrollable (but also short lived) depressive episodes are a bit weird, but they're a small price to pay to feel as though I'm back in control of my own mind -- of my own will.

I'm definitely not encouraging anyone to give up medications, as they definitely work. I just wanted to share my experience with how a particular SSRI was working on me in a way that I didn't really want it to, but didn't even realize that I didn't want it to. It snuck in like a parasite and made roots -- really dug in. Now that I've (at least started to) get rid of it, I can see the damage it had caused. And, for the first time in a long time, I look forward to repairing that damage.  Sure, there will be ups and downs, but every experience can be learned from, and I've learned a great deal from this one.