Taking the full dose of an SSRI for over a year was like putting my emotions in a mental full-body cast. I could no longer truly touch them: they were shielded from me and from the outside world, made stiff in order to let all of my metaphorical broken bones finally set and heal. Aside from truly unusual, heightened experiences of joy or of grief, I felt my life in a flat way, looking at it almost as though through a window.
Safe, distressed sometimes at how distant it felt.
I used to fear medicating my mental illnesses, because I imagined it being akin to having my personality changed, to having vital parts of myself suppressed, and now I wish I could go back and tell my younger self that it’s not been like that at all. I wish I could go back and tell my parents, too, that they should have gotten me into therapy and on medication right away when they first witnessed me isolating, falling apart, and having emotional outbursts, when I eventually told them a boy in the neighbourhood had been abusing me, that they should not have told me to simply think positively, that they should not have been frustrated when I chose to stay home in my room, on the internet, where it seemed marginally safer than Out There.
I’d been living my life for years by pushing through the pain of doing everything while having broken emotional bones, while being blamed as a child as a teenager as a young adult for having been broken by others in the first place, the fractures multiplying through to adulthood with the wear and tear of everyday stresses, compounding with each additional mental blow, each new trauma I experienced.
I survived… I survived.
Here I am, alive.
The medication did not change the core of who I was, and it was not a puny bandaid over a bullet wound. It was a cocoon beneath which I was able to experience a sort of mental stillness that I hadn’t had since I’d been a very small child. I no longer experienced constant anxiety, near-daily panic, disturbing dreams, or intrusive thoughts of suicide and worse.
It was like again telling my chronically-panicked brain,
See: we are not irreparably broken, so suicide should not be an option — it is counterintuitive to even consider. You don’t need to always force us to imagine the worst possibilities. It’s going to be okay.
…and having my brain finally start to believe it.
The obsessive, viciously intrusive thoughts lessened to become bearable. The chronic anxiety and frequent panicking lessened to a degree I truly hadn’t believed possible. I had been living with it so long, I couldn’t remember what it had felt like to not be afraid of some ever-present, menacing, and undefinable quality of reality. I assumed these were normal states of mind. It was a shocking, life-altering experience.
I finally understood the combined gravity of the mental illnesses I had been living with for so many years, and began to see more clearly all the ways that they had impacted and impeded on my life and intruded in the lives of all those around me — those still in my life, and those that have passed through it and left.
I have been able to reduce my dose to half and regain a bit more tone to my emotional state, feel less like I am viewing my own life through the thick, sturdy glass of a porthole.
I told my counsellor that with the reduced dose, it felt like I was wearing the mental equivalent of a light, durable brace, like the ones my third cousin wears on her legs, no longer in a restrictive cast. Maybe I’ll wear this emotional brace for the rest of my life, or maybe I’ll be able to dispense with medication altogether, with time. Maybe I would have achieved the same result of calming the suffocating, chronic anxiety I used to experience some other way eventually. The important thing is that my quality of life has completely changed with this.
The important thing is that, you deserve to live, not merely to survive.
You deserve an emotional life that is not flat, that is not vicious in its highs and lows — but that has a rich shade, and full tone, and delectable nuance.
I deserve that too.