In a sea of social media posts where seemingly everyone I know is hitting nothing but picture perfect traditional milestones — engagements, marriages, babies, houses — there’s gotta be one person who will be honest enough to talk about some of the moments which never get photographed because they aren’t made for it. I’m doing this for everyone who is drying themselves out. Maybe someone reading is going through this right now. Maybe they will in 10 years time. Or maybe they never get to this place and keep a cocktail of pills flowing for the rest of their life. (I hope they don’t.)
I worked hard this year to gradually wean myself off of my longest relationship to date: Xanax.
I’ve been taking Xanax since 2017, a few years after my first panic attack and a handful of medication starts and stops later. This was the one which clicked for me. The first time I took it I was on a plane. It lulled me into immediate sleep while everyone was still boarding. I woke up when we had been in the air for about an hour and ordered myself a sandwich and a drink.
I felt incredible. Seriously, it was the best I’ve ever felt in my life. Everything was so serene. When you feel this good, you are willing to do whatever you need to so you can keep this feeling for as long as possible.
Flash forward to 2018 and 2019 when I was paying off my student loans and later 2020 in the pandemic, 2021, and 2022. In the final three years, I was cycling through the pills too frequently. Usually a lot more than 10 MGs a week.
Xanax acted as a sleeping supplement more than anxiety aid. Almost everything happening in my life at the time was shaking hands with some other form of insanity. Every time I go back into my brain and remember this period of time, every time I attempt to write about it in a deeper way, there are so many moments where I wonder “Was it all so bad?” Yes it was, Heather’s brain. I had to build my own version of Rome in a few short years and there were all these shitty concessions I had to make to get there. Back then, I needed those pills to guarantee nine to 10 hours of sleep every night so I didn’t completely drop all the balls I was constantly juggling. My mood when I started to run out of my prescription was revealing of how close to the edge my overall sanity had become. The worst day for me was the two to three day period when the bottle was empty and I needed a refill. I despaired when I didn’t immediately receive one like clockwork, wailing hysterically on the inside. I rejoiced, buoyant with selfish happiness, only when I had a full vial.
With such emotional highs and lows, it shouldn’t come as much surprise I lashed out when my doctor suggested it was time to begin weaning me off in February 2023. Everything about this ask felt like a personal attack even if was meant to mitigate the issue of me taking way too many pills on a weekly basis. I did not like the implication I had a problem. I felt frightened at the prospect of losing the one thing in my life which could guarantee falling asleep in 10 minutes and not waking up once until the alarm went off. And I was filled with seething contempt thinking about the people I am loosely acquainted with that go on Instagram and post pictures in their Stories of themselves using the #zoloft hashtag with no added context. They kept their meds while mine were being taken away.
Mostly though, I felt alone. There were not many people I could talk to about what was going on with me. What good would it do if I could? It wasn’t like someone else could wean me off for me. The sounding board was myself.
Sometimes I need an initial outburst, a flood of feelings, a moment to react, before I can start to warm to suggestions and accept them. For as terrible as being off Xanax sounded, I wasn’t born on medication. I felt confident I could rise to the challenge and wean myself down to a smaller weekly dose. I believed, eventually, I could get off them completely though I had no real idea of when it would happen. Date TBD. My doctor had set a timeline for me to get down to half the dose by June. Over the months ahead, I started to wean myself down from 10 MG to 2 MG each week of benzos and then from 2 MGs to none each week.
The first month I committed to doing this was agonizing. I did it in gradual stages. First, I stopped taking medication on the weekends. Then, I started easing into going one day in the work week without it. None of it was enjoyable. I had to readjust my body to not receiving medication it had come to rely on for sleep at night. It was harder than ever to coax my mind and body to sleep during normal nighttime hours. I took afternoon naps or slept in the off hours whenever I felt tired. I could not get the 10 hours of sleep at night I was accustomed to anymore, so I figured I needed to meet exhaustion the moment I felt it.
I was tired when the sun rose. I was so tired. I drank coffee and dealt with it. I did feel victorious enough I had been able to get back three nights a week without taking anything. I decided to start going several weeknights in a row without Xanax.
This is when it felt like every brain cell I had was waging a revolution against me. My brain kept me perpetually wide awake. I’d get in bed at 10 PM and lie there as my brain and body screamed “I don’t know how to shut down!!!!!” Hours had passed by the time I’d fall asleep. I’d close my eyes for what felt like 30 minutes and I would wake up exhausted.
Everything felt too bright in the mornings. Sharp with a bizarre copper aftertaste. Too much sunlight. I needed sunglasses like I was hungover. There was a strange amount of irritation and aggression in the air. I silently despised my doctor calling this “my detox.” Though I did accept it. It happened. I was changing things.
The greatest worry I had about weaning off Xanax was my writing. I was scared I wouldn’t be able to write anymore or juggle my heavy workload off of medication. At first, I was noticeably slower. Once my body acclimated to being off benzos and staying off, I discovered it didn’t change how I wrote or the work I did or the passion I had for it. The heart of me was still alive and beating. If anything, my writing got much better.
Like all things which are unhealthy for you, I wanted Xanax more than anything in the world. My body ached for it. I missed the mornings after taking the pills the most. I used to feel like I waking up in a cloud. Hazy, pretty, pink days. Back when I would get refills, I had a “refill ritual.” I would go to Rite Aid and pick up my prescription. Then I would walk next door to Fresh Brothers. I would order a personal pizza and eat it after taking my dose. Benzos used to make me hungry.
My doctor and I talked about what I could take to relax myself during my weaning. It was suggested I try taking melatonin and valerian root. I started taking melatonin and it helped me sleep so much better at night. I take it every night now.
I was still weaning, even with melatonin. I had time to think during the traditional sleep hours.
In the darkness, hours away from sleep, I’d lie in my bed and psychoanalyze my personal life.
I thought about how so few of the major friendships or relationships in my lifetime have been privy to all the “eras” of Heather. Only a small handful of people have seen me through most of the timelines of who I am. Sometimes this is a distressing thought. The idea that everyone is only ever meeting me and knowing me at the age I am now. The history of a relationship with me – as friends, as lovers, as acquaintances — is always going to be quite young moving forward and just as short as it was in the past.
Often, I wonder what kind of space I occupy in someone’s life.
What does any one person who considers me a friend really think of me? Is anyone having fun? Did we learn anything?
This year, I asked myself big questions about people I had in my orbit or on the outskirts of it. These questions related to friends and lovers alike. Were we friends or did we work at the same company? Did I like this man I had been dating or was I trying to fit into some sort of impossible mold of a woman he wanted and would not budge on which I couldn’t be for him? What did I have to gain from these people? How did I become a better person because of them? How did they contribute to my growth, my happiness, my sense of self?
Everything hit a head when I came to the most important reckoning of all. Did I want these people to be in my life or was I addicted to the serotonin rush of seeing their messages and believing these messages were a sign of being wanted and needed?
I had not taken any Xanax for a month on August 9. I was less than a week of embarking into a massive project at work, something I had been working on since May.
Over the last few years, I have been lucky to make many inroads with my career. This last summer was the hardest I’ve ever worked in my entire life. It beat out the summer I spent working on the Icons Gala event by a mile. I spent three months deeply immersed in a sponsored series I was leading while still working on the other dozen daily items I was responsible for and doing all of my freelance on the side. In August, most of my days started at 6:30 AM and ended after 4 PM. I ate, slept, breathed my job. You’d think this would be something unpleasant, that I grew to hate it or I felt stressed out or there was some part of me that struggled somewhere but none of this is true. I was incredibly busy, but it felt good. I had a pep in my step, a balance to what a normal person would think was way too heavy of a workload for one person. Truth is, it has been like this since I started this job. I never worry or feel pressured because I like what I do. I really like it! (For whatever reason if I did feel pressured, I like knowing how I could always tell my managers and they’d help me dial it down.)
It was a successful sponsorship and we hit nearly all of our impression goals. The sponsorship lasted two months. 61 days. Not a day passed where I did not give it my full attention. When site traffic was so-so — not super high and not super low, in a strange floating middle ground I didn’t really like — I went back to the blueprint. I came up with more ideas and wrote that content up for a boost. Every little bit counts.
I felt like crying when I heard how pleased the sponsor was with the results because it was the first sponsorship I led on my own. I had worked so hard on it. My manager went on maternity leave while there was still another month left and then it really was me taking the lead.
I am at a place where I am pleased with my writing. It feels and reads stronger than ever. I’ve even gotten into the habit of teaching myself as I go along. This year, I took over more writing responsibilities in the shopping and saving money vertical. I’ve been reading up on what months you should buy everything and why and studying the savings catalogs from warehouse clubs to pitch and write content. I even apply this level of research to writing about cars as a person who doesn’t drive. Since I don’t shop very much, I like the humor found in a non-shopper dishing up recommendations each month on the best clothes, appliances, and bulk food to buy.
I feel challenged by what I write about, fulfilled by the end product, empowered to make decisions I think will take the content into the best direction, and humbled by how many people tell me they love and follow my writing.
My work has given me the confidence to live the life of my dreams and not consider the bottom falling out. There is no more bottom at this stage. I’m running up against 10,000+ hours of my craft in action. I believe everything will work because I see it work every single day.
When I’m off Xanax, I feel different now than I used to on the nights I would take the pills. My days don’t feel like the words I used to mention them anymore. The light isn’t sharp. It’s soft. Blue creeps into the sky each morning. I keep my window blinds open at night so the morning sunlight can wake me up every day. There’s not really aggression in the air like there is people trying to stir themselves awake however they can. The days feel like my to-do list of work items. A reminder of life and seasons all around me. Every day feels less like some kind of muted hangover and more like a quiet celebration. I lost the pretty pink haze. I gained dusty blue hues.
My watershed moment happened July 9. That was a Sunday, the one night of the week dedicated to taking my pills. I chose not to do it.
I had more than enough reasons why I could have done it ahead of the next day. I had three articles due, a meeting to attend, an inbox to tackle, and projects and assignments to address for the sponsorship.
All of this happens, quite literally, every single day at my job. I thought about the worst that could happen. The worst thing would be my absence. If I didn’t show up. If I didn’t do my part. There was no other worst thing to anticipate. When I thought of it like this, I realized I would be fine. I took the melatonin instead.
The next week I referred to the melatonin again. Then it became two weeks, three weeks, and a month. Then two months, three months, and even more months since I took any benzos. Your great big achievements often happen when you’re not looking directly at them.
I’d end that sentence with an exclamation mark except I can’t yet. There’s a “still” component in this work. The weaning is still ongoing.
The side effects are still around. I still have nights where I can’t sleep well. I don’t think this approach to weaning means I’ll have it all figured out by the end of this year. It will take some more time yet to get me back to where I think I once was.
I feel like I’ve beaten past the worst of it. I don’t ache for Xanax anymore. I don’t think about it. I don’t miss it.
I do acknowledge it. I took those pills for a long time so it would be strange to act like it never happened especially since there was a time when they really did help me deal with a lot of stressors. I taught myself how to let the behavior go. Letting go felt impossible in February. It felt scary (what do I do without it?) and humiliating (how did I allow myself to develop this kind of dependency?) and hard (another Rome to build). It’s amazing how possible a good habit can become with the passing of time and commitment.
I think about the silence of this summer and the quiet of this year. Outside of this blog post, and I was reluctant to write it, there is almost no one to tell or share progress. It’s not the thing you show and tell. I am my own accountability partner. I like to think I have been doing a good job, even though getting hype about not taking prescription meds anymore is not the thing you think you’re going to be doing at this age, at this juncture of life.
Then again, what am I supposed to be doing right now?
On the surface, I do know what I should be doing now. My writing talks about it every day. I should be swiftly approaching various milestones like finding my soulmate and getting married, having a child, buying a car (and uh, getting a license!), and buying a home.
The lack of traditional milestones I have under my belt used to distress me. These days though, I am not particularly afraid or worried about whether I’ll ever reach these milestones. I have other priorities.
This month, I have gotten back to one of my oldest loves again. Reading books.
It’s embarrassing for me to admit how much I read now is so... little. It’s a miracle if I read an entire book in a year. I had a laundry list of excuses for why I don’t read. The list starts with the expired library card belonging to a library in a city I no longer live in. It ends with my proclivity to clean in my spare time or bed rot after writing all week to recharge the creative batteries.
I keep reflecting on how adulthood is the place where you resurrect your love for everything you liked as a kid and it meets you tenfold. I loved books when I was younger. Loved to read and had a great time doing it.
My previous library card expired during the pandemic. A few weeks ago, I went to the Sherman Oaks Library and got a library card there. This was something I had been putting off since moving to the area. I still sometimes buy books, though many books I wind up buying often turn out not to be particularly good. Trendy and not worth a second read.
For all the time I had been out of the reading game, I kept a running list of books I wanted to read. I put them into the notes app on my phone and I saved a list in the Barnes and Noble wishlist. I decided to check out two books at a time from this list. Two is manageable. Two is a reasonable amount to read with as many hours I work a week. In a previous life, I would leave the library with a stack of books rivaling my height.
Advertising Week, my long-time freelance gig, is moving its site properties to the company which owns it. This kind of in-flux movement never happens. I’ll get to write again in January 2024. For the first time in seven years, I am not freelancing in the final weeks of the year. As much as I enjoy AW, it feels freeing to not be spending every waking hour attached to the keyboard.
My spare time has been spent back in the company of books. Reading again makes me feel like I never took such a long pause.
When I read fiction, I feel like I’m on the run. I’m galloping through the pages, engrossed in the lives of all these people who will never exist (can never exist) and getting invested in their full pockets of the world and the dramas of their lives. I want to shake some of the characters for making stupid decisions, I tear up when they grieve for losses, and I roll my eyes at some of the verbs writers overuse. (Everyone is always taking “swigs” of drinks. Swigs of water, swigs of wine, swiggy swig swigs. It’s obnoxious and amusing at once. Bring back the gulp!) I’ve always considered books to be the last frontier of non-algorithm restricted content. It’s heartening to see nothing has changed.
On that note, my mind has been more lively than ever these days thinking up little story ideas and tucking them away. Short stories, fiction, SNL sketches, etc.
My internal story machine is letting its wacky flag fly. I like to write down the weird ideas that make me smile or laugh a little. Last weekend, I had an idea for a short story about a grown woman who is trying to shed her embarrassing youthful image of winning the Guinness World Record for the longest amount of time spent throwing up on an airplane. I called it “Barf Face.”
The weird stuff is what I think people remember about me. I took a screenwriting class in college. In one of my scripts, a character ends up in a back brace after falling out of a hayride. In high school, I wrote a short story about a woman getting knocked out by a falling shelf of frozen pizzas and dying in the freezer aisle of the grocery store.
I do like to find the humor in the absurdity of life. Often, and especially now more than ever, there is a great need to present oneself as aesthetically pleasing and universally enjoyable to everyone. I think of it as making yourself into McDonald’s. It’s all carefully executed and distressingly, demands some conformity to what the majority likes so many people will blindly like your content. Humans are not supposed to be Big Macs.
Real life reminds me of that one time from when I was little. I had a brand new sparkling pink coat. I wore it out on a winter day in late February when the snow was melting and beamed with pride as I waited for the light to change at the crosswalk. Then a bus drove past me and covered the coat in brown sludge. I was horrified. It was real. It was life!
That’s not to say I’m always thinking about weird shit upstairs. I’ve got stories with a lot of heart and soul. Most are on the topic of friendship which I feel never gets discussed on the same level as romantic love. I keep those ideas a little closer to me. I am less likely to talk about them out loud because I care about them. They do exist though and they flutter around and around.
At the tail end of this year, I was writing a few pieces about money-themed New Year’s resolutions. All the ones that don’t work tend to have a few things in common. They’re often pretty vague, resolutions like saving more money or eating out less.
What works is a resolution where you go in with a plan and have set steps you’re willing to follow to reach said resolution.
I thought about this in the context of some of my former New Year’s resolutions. These were all pretty half-baked endeavors: resolutions made the same way I made a birthday wish. Wishes and resolutions for incredibly vague, general wants and desires. To get straight As, to fall in love, to meet the perfect guy, etc.
In a book I’m currently reading, one of the characters talks about how she imagined wanting someone else’s life instead of doing the work of imagining her own life. When I read that sentence, I felt my brain buzz, my heart quicken its beating, and my gut resolutely look over, raise its proverbial sunglasses, and nod once. Yep. This was a quote I needed to write down everywhere there is a surface in my apartment.
What made my plan to wean myself off Xanax successful was the timeline my doctor set to reduce the dosage and my own determination to beat the odds and reduce it even further. I had not known it was a thing I’d be doing at this age because if I looked at the lives of the people I envy (and there are many) it does not exist there (probably not!). But it did exist in my own life and because it did, I needed to make the changes accordingly.
As we head into 2024, I do have a resolution for the coming year. It is something I started the day after Christmas this year — and hopefully, I get the chance to proudly talk about it by the end of next year. Everything is laid out in a series of steps so I feel confident it’s a goal I can reach. That makes me excited!
I have a lot of gratitude for this year. I experienced massive professional and personal growth, ended a habit which was difficult to let go of, and feel like, as always, the best is still yet to come.
