Over the past few weeks or so, I have essentially completed a task which I started in the early spring- a task which I have necessarily kept silent about save for a few very knowledgable, close people (read Mom)- the task of weaning myself off of antidepressants. Antidepressants that were prescribed to me a little over three years ago, in the wake of events which put my mental and physical health into a bit of a landslide. In putting me on them, my doctor had one goal in mind- get the defoggers in my brain to start working again. Get the gears to move again- get something, anything, to trigger life or desire, want.
I do not put this out there lightly. And I also do not wish to advertise what I am doing as something that everyone should do or should feel like they have to do. I am the child of a nurse- I have undue medical knowledge simply from having grown and aged in the household that I did. I know the risks that I take here. I knew the risks when began dosing myself in incrementally smaller portions, when I put the pill bottle down, forgotten, when I put it out of sight, purposefully.
It was an enormous decision for me to take the pills in the first place. I have described it as a battle of the wills, or an odd, cosmic staring contest- me versus the pills. It was an equally enormous decision to stop- and even more so to confess to it.
And there are still moments of fear. Especially right now in the newness of cold-quitting. The drugs will not be out of my system fully for another couple of weeks, I am still riding the high of Celexa-laced blood and brain cells. When they have filtered through my body enough without help from the happy pill… I have hope. But I also have fear.
In particular, there is one thing that I am almost painfully and vigilantly anticipating with tick tock ticking clock fear of full detox. And this thing that I am militantly watchful of is the return of lost time, the fog of disengagement.
Don't get me wrong- there is a great deal to be said of daydreaming and laying in hammocks, happily drinking sun and air and wasting time just being- totally disengaged from the world, from stress, from nonsense.
What I am talking about here is the terrifying hours, days, weeks, I lost to thoughtlessness- lost to staring out the windows, not daydreaming, not seeing, not even being, not really. I am talking about the moments in the mirror when the I was one body and the reflection was another- the frightening and sickening and blind disconnect of carelessness. I did not care. I could not find meaning in that reflection- and I did not care to put effort into finding it- or effort into anything.
I do not want that back. I have spent more time working around this post, figuring out what to say and how to say it, than any other of the recent past. Because I have/had lost my mind; I have/had lost my body. Because I have spent, and have had to spend, years (what many youthfully ideal people would refer to as 'the best years of my life'- my mid-twenties) cobbling both back together. Distinct and sometimes heartbreaking moments of which have played out in this blog. And because I...
I do not want to be on or dependent upon drugs anymore, but I absolutely do not want to suffer through loss of self again.
It is and has been a strange, evolving dualism of powerlessness and loss- and acceptance of both. On the one hand, before the antidepressants, I was unhinged and unwell and so unwelcome to my own mind as to be powerless- powerless to commit to anything more than rudimentary life exercises (for those of you who follow this blog or know me- you know that I could not even execute those with any degree of success). On the other hand, on the antidepressants, I was powerless to the drug, powerless to having to remember to take them- same time, same action day after day- to having to rely on them. And the heart of that powerlessness was that I never sat well with needing something… pharmaceutical… to make me me. That I needed a pill, a drug, a dose to bring back or bring out the personality that had always been there.
Today is the Equinox and in two days I will turn thirty- it seems prescient to lay myself and my choices on the line again, out there for what feels like the ten thousandth time. I don't know what is going to happen (with both the really big picture and all the little ones I constantly develop). But I know that today is one of two days every year when the natural world balances itself: 12 hours of dark, 12 of light. And I know that I am better balanced now than I have been in some time.
I am not without pain, sadness, grief. But I am also not without my Self. Not perfect- but not powerless.
And that, my loves, is what I want. I will never be perfect. But I will never ever again be powerless.
Until next time, Happy Mabon.
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