#depressiondiaries

my mood swings and disappearing hope for living is become increasingly worse everyday and not hurting myself has become an achievement.

I don’t know when we all decided it was normal to scroll through Facebook and see a stranger’s mugshot between a recipe video and a Christmas meme, but here we are. And it hits me every time, this heavy, sick feeling, wondering how the hell we got so comfortable turning someone else’s worst moment into our afternoon entertainment. You know the moment I mean. You’re scrolling. You see a blurry…

The sun beams through the pine trees, warming my skin as I sit on a weathered picnic table dusted with pine needles and cobwebs. Bugs land on me like I’m a buffalo grazing in the middle of a meadow. I swat them away with my arm, flicking like a buffalo’s tail that never seems to stop. My body is still, but my mind? Not so much. I’m deep in thought, lost in the noise between my ears. NF plays…

Okay. I made a pact with myself that I would write about my first week on a new antidepressant drug. To be fair, it’s been a little over a week already. Since February 10th, I’ve been taking one pill of Desvenlafaxine a day. Prior to that, I spent a month and a half going cold turkey w/o Escitalopram, which is the drug I took for a little over 2 years - always the same dosage of 10mg.

I think I should start by describing why I stopped taking Escitalopram in the first place. And this is a funny story. I went to visit my parents for the holidays, where I spent two weeks. Before that, I was extremely stressed with the year-end at my job, since I had to finish quite a bunch of different bureaucratic administrative processes before Dec. 31st, and also because I had my finals at this new undergrad major I started online (Statistics). I even had a major muscular spasm in my back that left me unable to walk or stand for 3 days, which had got to be psychosomatization. Anyhow, in the midst of all this, I forgot bringing the adequate amount of medication to this trip: I only brought an almost empty blister pack with three pills. As soon as I realized it, when I was already there, I knew I was fucked. I had no prescription to buy a new box, and I also felt so damn stupid because I had a full month’s-worth box just sitting at home - some 800 km away. So, the only thing I could do was bear the moodswings and the sweats and whatever would come along with the process of having Escitalopram leave my body slowly throughout those two weeks. Needless to say, family quarrels and bursts of cry ensued.

When I got back to where I live, I already had an appointment with my trusty psychiatrist only a few days later, which was a major relief. After I described the situation to him, adding that aside from the moodswings in the first week I felt no major side effects, he went on and suggested that I just stay off the medication altogether for a while. If I was showing good signals staying off of it so far, if I was commited to exercising and eating better and acquiring healthy habits, perhaps I could stay healthy without medication. As much as I appreciated his suggestion and I knew that I had support from him in case I felt whatever I could feel in the meantime, I did have my doubts. Nonetheless, I moved on with my life.

Oh honey, let me tell you. Two weeks were fine, I was busy getting back to work (mind you, work that I don’t particularly like but don’t know how to escape from), dealing with quarantine life again etc. By the third week, what I feared the most started crippling in: a dense cloud of depressed mood, confusion, lack of focus and just complete dreadful feelings about myself would cast over my head and I felt increasingly more miserable. First I was just unable to go to the gym, which I was doing really well in the first two weeks since returning from my trip. Then I started having some difficulties sleeping, then difficulties staying asleep - I’d wake up at 4h30 and not be able to go back to sleep at all. Not every day, of course, but more often than not. Then it slowly started taking over me: I was increasingly unable to laugh or even smile at anything, I felt extremely irritated about getting to work or doing whatever daily task I had to accomplish. Of course it also translated to a worsening of my self-image, looking at the mirror became increasingly difficult. Then the “bigger picture” also got worse and worse: I didn’t quite understand why I had to stay alive, feeling stuck in a place and in a persona that wasn’t me. I felt disconnected from reality, like I was in a video game or something.

Last year, before the trip to my parents’, I was also doing bad. Indeed, this was ever since I moved to this place to live alone - which should be a bliss! I can do whatever I want, be whatever type of person I believe I should be. But all I could feel, even under medication (Escitalopram 10mg), was an utter lack of joy for the condition of living as a human being. After all, I have no dreams, no plans, nothing to look forward to. Things I liked a lot in the past, such as writing or music or cooking, became nuisances for me. Slowly, I started giving into that feeling. So you can imagine how much worse I got after leaving the medication entirely.

But I had compromised with myself on one thing: I want to get better. I don’t want to waste my youth hating myself or hating life, because I know that as much as I had a lot of suicidal ideation, I just wouldn’t do it. I knew it. I know that life comes in many forms and has many different angles, there’s got to be one that I like to look at. There’s got to be a nice lens to look at all this mess and feel content. I “just” have to work toward that.

So I decided to go back to antidepressants.

I’m glad to say that Desvenlafaxine had a very short onset of action for me, I could already feel its effects in 3 or 4 days. What I feel right now is some sort of chemically induced “emotional stability”. The fundamentals of my life have not changed: I still have a very low image of myself, I still feel lost as to who I am, what I like or dislike and what I want to do in life. However, I at least feel like I can set those thoughts aside and not obsess over them for some time. I can breathe a little! And this has been helping me organize a course of action to counter these bad feelings. This week, I said goodbye to the therapist that had been following me since September ‘20, but with little to no therapeutic effect on me, and contacted a new counsellor to start sessions with her (it’s a she now). I also know that I have to get back to eating healthy, which I slipped off of for a while during the worst weeks I had, and stop drinking alcohol as a mechanism of escape since it doesn’t lead me anywhere. I am still alone, but I can finally see the connection between my feelings of loneliness and the elephant in the room that I was denying big time: COVID-19 and quarantine life! It’s obvious that I feel lonely; if I’m lonely now, when I think back at my late 2019, for example, I was going out so much and meeting so many people - especially coworkers - that it was a bit too hectic. I dialed back a lot, but perhaps too much, and wasn’t aware of it. I have this silly tendency of denying what’s right in front of my nose. And as much as I like spending time alone, I don’t like doing that because I have no other choice - and this has been happening repeatedly in the past year or several months.

I’ve been telling some friends that care about me that I feel optimistic. And I do! At the same time I know the size of the challenge that lies ahead, I have no option but to go ahead and take it up. And I’m optimistic because it is definitely going to be something near a rebirth. Imagine, I have to find out who I actually am! Who I want to become, what I find beautiful, what my true moral values are, what’s important to me, what I want to avoid. This is a humongous task, but I’m privileged enough to be surrounded (even if online) by people who support me and believe in me, and also to have access to adequate counselling and medication. In many ways, I am already thankful and I know I’m already in the process.