So Sad Today (9 page)

I
T SEEMS LIKE ALL THE
cool mentally ill people are on Wellbutrin. Okay, maybe not cool, but like, my mentally ill friends.

My friend Chris said Wellbutrin is good for people like us, because instead of thinking about death for fourteen hours a day he now only thinks about it for three. It doesn’t stop death, but it stops death thoughts.

My friend Lauren, a therapist who gets panic attacks while seeing patients, is on it. One time, Lauren had a panic attack so bad while seeing a patient that when the patient revealed she hadn’t eaten all day, Lauren used it as an excuse for them to go outside and get a sandwich. She cloaked this exodus in teaching the patient a lesson in self-care.
You have to eat
, she said. But in her head Lauren was like,
Thank you Jesus
. If they didn’t leave the room she thought she was going to die.

Okay. Wellbutrin isn’t the panacea. Nothing can take away your peculiar fears and twists. But it seems like a better drug than what I’m on, which is Effexor XR: the fucking dinosaur of antidepressants. Actually, Prozac is way older. But I still feel passé.

I’ve been on Effexor for about eleven years. I started taking it a year before I got sober. At first I was so fucked up that I would forget to take it half the time, or when I did take it I would get even drunker. The Effexor, coupled with the benzodiazepines I was prescribed and the opiates I was not prescribed, had me blacking out all over town.

Since I’ve been sober, I have chosen not to take benzos for my generalized anxiety and panic disorders. This is because benzos—Ativan, Xanax, Valium—feel so good, and are so addictive, that even nonaddict-type people often quickly get hooked on them. I don’t want to awaken those receptors again.

At the same time, I don’t rule out the use of benzos, should the day come that my anxiety brings me to the verge of suicide. In that case, I would have my psychiatrist prescribe me a couple of pills to get through. I know people with anxiety disorders in sobriety who take benzos as prescribed, and I wouldn’t consider it a relapse if I had to do the same. For today, though, I choose not to take them. Even when shit gets really bad and my psychiatrist suggests it, I say no. I just don’t want to deal
with having to ask myself every time I take one if my panic attack is “severe enough” or if I am trying to get high. I feel like this would cause me more anxiety.

But Effexor has definitely been a key component of my sobriety. Psychiatrists have lowered my dosage to almost nothing when I was in periods of chemical balance and they have increased my dosage when I entered cycles of panic attacks and depression.

Two years ago my psychiatrist raised the dosage when I was finding metaphoric bats living in my chest. The increase prior to that occurred when I witnessed the death of a relative, firsthand, and you might say it “fucked me up” a little to discover, viscerally, that death is real. Both increases worked. They left me feeling more functional, less alone, less like the only people who understood me were Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre (and them just barely).

I know that meds can stop working over time. Recently, my panic attacks have been so bad that I wondered if Effexor hadn’t just stopped working altogether. I asked my psychiatrist about switching to a newer, sexier med. But she said we should try increasing the Effexor first. Stay with the dinosaur.

So I take more of it. I take a higher dose than I have ever taken. But I feel disappointed. It’s kind of been a point of pride for me that I’ve never gotten close to the maximum FDA-approved dose. Like, there was always
room for me to get crazier. Now I’m inching closer to the limit. So I wonder, am I getting worse?

Then there’s night sweats. Effexor gives me night sweats, which I’ve pretended to ignore for about eleven years. I value my mental health over my sheets, and I guess, my allure to others who might share my bed. But on the higher dose, my bed has gone from a nightly swamp to a lagoon. I already slept naked. How can I get more naked?

These questions don’t matter for long. After a few weeks on the higher dose of Effexor, my psychiatrist and I agree it is no longer working at all. I feel like I’m overmedicated, but none of the right parts of me are medicated. I feel like I’m tweaking.

We decide to gradually decrease the Effexor and introduce Prozac. We do this over a series of weeks, and the transition begins very smoothly. I feel really excited that I am having less panic attacks and anxiety in general. My psychiatrist warns me that there could be withdrawal symptoms, but I don’t have any. I am like,
Bitch, whatev
. I feel special and awesome for not having withdrawal symptoms.

But then, in my first week fully off the Effexor, I spin out into an anxiety hole so deep that it feels less like anxiety—or that I am dying, as I usually fear—but like I am in a battle with demons.

Maybe I should have seen this coming when, during the first few days completely off the Effexor, I started seeing inanimate objects as dead body parts and other haunting images. I saw part of a blanket and thought it was a person’s leg. I thought a black suitcase was a monster. But unless shit is really going down, I always think I can handle it. I laughed about the objects when I realized what they were. I was like,
This will be funny to tweet about
.

Then, on my fourth night off the Effexor, I awake away from home and feel what I can only describe as a darkness in my soul. It is like my soul is screaming or something is screaming in my soul. It is the terror of
Who am I? Am I bad? Is my life meaningless? What have I invested in? Why can’t I breathe? Who are any of you people? And, most scarily, is there a bottom?
These are all important questions, but they don’t need to be answered at three thirty in the morning in rapid-fire.

I get into a fetal position and do a “twenty-one-second countdown” technique from an ebook called
Panic Away
, where I tell the thoughts and feelings that they have twenty-one seconds to do their worst to me. I count to twenty-one over and over until I fall back asleep.

Here is an account of what happens in the days that follow:

I wake up scared and I’m scared all day. I’m scared of being scared. Scared of “losing it.” Scared of not being able to function. Scared of being hospitalized. Scared that I am not okay. Scared of what life is and if I am wasting mine. Scared that I have no home—that even the place I call home has no bottom to it and I will just keep falling under and under and under.

I feel self-conscious about sharing this publicly, because the feelings are so raw and immediate. But that’s what So Sad Today is born from. So I tweet about it.

It’s weird, you can be “so sad today” and still be scared of judgment. Like, how much mental illness is “acceptable” and how much is going to be “too much”? Someone DMs me, “We convince ourselves that we can own the identity of the anxious or depressed person. Then it sneaks up again.” It’s like,
I got this
. Then the mental illness is like,
No, I’ve got you.

A little better than the one before. I wake up once again at three thirty a.m. with the night terrors, but now I know what’s going down. It’s no longer an amorphous, emotional rendition of Munch’s
The Scream
. It’s Effexor withdrawal. Instead of spinning all the way out, I’m like, okay, these are just sensations I am feeling from the
withdrawal. Don’t buy into them. I go into the bathroom in the hotel room where I am staying and do some yoga poses. I haven’t done yoga in years. I think
you should be doing more yoga
and
why don’t you?
and
get back in the yoga game
. It feels good to be admonishing myself about yoga rather than my profound, existential badness. I feel almost excited by the experience. I’m still scared but I also feel like,
You really are strong, gurl
as I do a crappy tree pose in the mirror.

All day I feel like I am on acid. Bad acid. I eat lunch in a restaurant with a painting of Marilyn Monroe on the wall. Marilyn is laughing and she looks gross and terrifying to me. She seems to be saying,
Hahahahahahaha, look how they have sold you my corpse! Look how they have sold you the American Dream, the vacation dream, any dream to distract you from asking too many questions about existence.
I’m not sure who this “they” is exactly. Maybe it’s the government? Maybe it’s a machine we are stuck in as we all angle for our own stuff only to become a sad girl eating in a yuppie restaurant, freaking out internally while appearing “fine” as she tries not to choke.

Then I get to a part of the “acid trip” I enjoy. I drive out of town, into the desert, and walk around on some rocky-desert thingy. For a few minutes, I feel like everything is going to be okay and that I am okay, because the
wide-open space won’t judge me. I feel wild and alive. I take some of the rocks with me, even though whenever I take “spiritual souvenirs” they never end up holding the same magic and it’s better to just keep experiences like that in your heart maybe.

But mostly, it’s hard to enjoy the faux–acid trip because I keep running into the same fears I had when I used to take psychedelics for real, like,
What if this feeling never goes away?
and
What if I’m like this forever?
I’m always scared that every feeling is going to be permanent.

No night terrors last night, but then the day is awful. I try to watch stand-up comedy in bed and suffocate. Mostly, I am just exhausted. I am exhausted from dealing with this and exhausted from trying to convince myself that I’m not dying. My friend says that whenever I start to feel weird I should just say to myself that I’m sick, but I’m going to get better. I keep making these strange sounds just to make sure I’m still alive and breathing. I hope this shit has a happy ending.

I am scared. It’s fear on top of all the fear chemicals that are being released in me. They are just like
whoosh
and it is very hard (impossible) not to believe you are dying, or about to lose it, when your body is having a chemical
terror response. I am looking for evidence to reflect my feelings back to me. My chemicals are like,
DANGER! Doom!
I feel alone and angry and scared. My head is like,
What if I fucked myself changing the meds and I’m never okay again?

I wake up in a panic, covered in sweat and stinking. I jump in the bath and then go back to sleep. I have a dream about the person who I may never fully get over. In the dream, he goes down on me with a pacifier in his mouth. I come really quickly.

I try to answer my “what if” questions with “so what” answers that diffuse them.

I am desperate. I buy a blue crystal from a New Age store that’s said to “bring serenity.” I know that I officially live in California because I’m carrying around a crystal in my bra. I reach in, while driving, and feel around to check and make sure it is still there. Some bro looks over and thinks I am feeling myself up. Good for him.

I call my psychiatrist. I tell her that I’m feeling surging anxiety. She says there’s no way I’m in Effexor withdrawal anymore. Maybe I am on too much Prozac? She tells me to decrease the Prozac.

My friend gives me a tarot card reading and says that I am going to be fine. While she is reading the cards, I have a panic attack. She points to a card called “Strength” that shows a woman taming a lion and a card called “The Fool” with some dude dancing on the edge of a cliff without falling off. I feel like I am not taming the lion. I feel like the lion is attacking me. Also, I think I am going to fall off the cliff.

I call my psychiatrist again, even though I don’t want to be a nuisance. Now she thinks I might not be on enough Prozac. She tells me to increase the Prozac.

I talk to this crazy girl. She tells me that people with
anxiety shouldn’t take Prozac and that I should get off it or I will go “over the edge.” She says that I live in California now and I should just “green juice it.” This is one of those girls who doesn’t stop talking shit or gossiping. The only thing she knows about meds is that her sister works in pharmaceutical sales. I feel tempted to take her medical advice.

Other people give me advice too.
Don’t go back on Effexor, ride it out, it might take months but you can do it, I believe in you!
I don’t believe in me. Not at all. Everyone thinks I’m going to be okay except me.

I’m going back on fucking Effexor.

I’m not going back on fucking Effexor.

I’m driving my car on the highway and I have to take a shit. There is nowhere to pull over. For the first time in ten days, I experience a sensation more powerful than the anxiety. I feel grateful for the feeling of having to take a shit and having nowhere to take it. I am like,
Yes
. I feel like myself. But then I take the shit. And the anxiety returns.

I go to a work-related meeting. This dude is talking
about sports. He goes through every sport before he even gets to the matter at hand. He does basketball, football, baseball, hockey. He even does golf. I am scared my head is going to pop off. I’m not even there. But what’s scarier than the feeling in the meeting is the feeling after the meeting. Usually, when I am in an anxiety-inducing situation, I experience relief as soon as I leave. But when I leave the meeting, there is no respite. Golf dude is gone but I am draped in a thick, gray, pulsating cloud.