On Broad hill, 5 a.m., Aberdeen last May, after a night of no sleep
On the way to the beach, that same early morning, one of those times the landscape reflects the inside of the mind so precisely
*
As with my last post from a few months ago, where my running
alleviates my anxiety and depression due to both its chemical effect (dopamine,
serotonin, and their cohorts) and also for its emotional influence (catalysed
by feeling strong and reclaiming space), this next series of posts is also a story about the
two-sided nature of my brain’s condition: something that is both chemical and
emotional, something that is partially helped by psychotropic medication and
something that these drugs still cannot touch.
I’ve wanted to write this for the past year, really, because
it occurred to me that I had been taking medication for anxiety for a whole
decade. That it has taken me nearly
another year to sit down and write it speaks rather emphatically about my
continued ambivalence about said medication.
Or really, perhaps I am not ambivalent about my medication
anymore. If I ask myself honestly, I can frankly say that I’m grateful for it.
I am deeply thankful for what it has allowed me to do and writing the long
piece that follows is a way of reminding myself why, despite the currents of
unease that still run through me. I am
indeed still afraid of being judged for taking it, for having positive feelings
toward it, and for now being unwilling to stop, for accepting that I will
probably take it for the rest of my life, and I need to keep making peace with
this, for now.
I felt I had to write this now because I was reading a piece
recently where the writer was describing her tapering-off period on an SSRI
(not one I have experience with) that was fairly heinous. And it was almost
funny how I could have predicted the four
camps the responses fell into: the voices encouraging her and sharing their own
tips and stories with difficult drugs very neutrally; those who mentioned that
they hated how they felt on SSRIs and also faced a difficult withdrawal and
would never touch one again; those who had experienced depression or anxiety but
had not medicated, and mentioned their
wariness; and then those who smugly informed the commentariat that they would
NEVER put such POISON in their bodies.
I get it, those first three responses. And I completely respect those who do suffer
anxiety and depression and choose not to go on medication or not to stay on
medication because of how awful or wrong it makes them feel either because they
tried it or it simply feels like the wrong choice for them. I have felt those things and they made sense to me at certain points in my life; I just personally reached a point where they were no longer true for me at all. In writing this, the absolute last thing I want to do is condemn others for doing what they needed to do in terms of medication or the lack thereof. But I just get so tired of hearing people who have
never been depressed, never had constant anxiety or recurrent panic attacks say
things like ‘Oh, I would never take an anti-depressant, I could never put that
in my body, I heard they don’t work,’ and all manner of things like that. I feel the bile rise in me when people continue to conflate taking psychotropic medication to function is 'taking pills to find cheap happiness'. And I cringe when I remember how at one time in my life I'd be nodding along and agreeing,
something I don’t do outright anymore, but oh, I did when I was younger, all
the time.
I did the nod-and-agree thing when I met a boy who I would later
date. We were both involved in a number of activist causes at the time, and one
day we were chatting about something, and something about pharmaceuticals came
up, and of course all good lefties are anti-pharmaceutical, and I agreed with
him on the dastardliness of such things, and he (who had never been depressed,
or anxious, I would later learn) said, ‘If I were depressed, I’d NEVER put
something like that in my body’, and I mumbled some assent, oh yes, how could
anyone do that, etc. Because I wanted to
be his friend. And I felt ashamed, and guilty, impure, and weak; I had absorbed
so many narratives about how these medications made your feelings inauthentic, or made you into a pliant and unfeeling zombie under the control of the capitalist market, took your
most unpredictable individuality and tempered it into something palatable and
controllable. ‘I’m so glad you agree with me, so many people just don’t
understand how BAD it is, etc,’ he said, and oh, off I slunk, because it was
just after dinner, and I needed to take my second dose of the day.
And we became friends, and then we dated for over a year,
and that whole time I surreptitiously slipped my pills, always hidden in the
internal pocket of my purse. I told him a bit about my anxiety, my panic (I had
to, because he witnessed it) but I never, ever told him about the medication. Not until a year or so later, when we were not
in a romantic relationship any longer, and I had been off the drugs for a few
months, but then had another breakdown and started again. I told him then I was
taking them, but not that I had before. Maybe he was already tired of dealing
with me, but we started drifting even further apart then, and I’ll now never
know what he thought of that.
I’ve told people bits and pieces of this, but perhaps never
all of it at once, or in sequence. I suppose, though, that this story is really
for myself, right now, as a reminder to remember why I am taking the medication
when I start to resent it, or feel guilty, or weak for doing so. To remind
myself that this a choice I made after a lot of hardship and a lot of
consideration; thinking back to the times where I could do nothing at all is helpful
whenever I am presently too hard on myself (which is most of the time).
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