I wanted to make a little update here to remind myself what it feels like when my meds are working. I started taking them again three days ago, which I do not think is long enough to take effect, but then again maybe it won't take the full amount of time that it took the first time I began taking them, for it to be effective again. 

When I am correctly medicated, I have a brain that acts like I imagine a normative brain acts. I wake up and I am excited to do things that make me happy. I usually have a plan for how I am going to spend my time that day, whether I am working or off work. I have a kind of "set" variety of things that I regularly choose from: usually writing, cooking/meal prep/painting/going to the gym/or watching movies. Once upon a time I frequently included reading as a part of that list, but as my phone and social media habit has expanded, my attention span for reading has dwindled to an extreme low-- something I may delve into more in a future post. 

At the time when my business was more at the forefront of my attention, I spent at least two/thirds of any given "day off" doing business admin things, but as I have taken my hiatus that time is now freed up to do more fun and relaxing activities, which I have loved. 

Usually I am out of bed by 8 on a non-work day, and I spend about an hour making and drinking my two cups of decaf coffee and preparing something to eat for breakfast. On a work day I will spend the same hour in the morning, but add in packing a lunch as well as dressing and washing my face/doing makeup if I am wearing any that day. 

On a writing day I will either set up at the kitchen counter, since my work desk is currently not set up, or I will get dressed and go to my local coffee shop to work for a few hours, usually until lunchtime. On a gym day, I'll normally spend an hour after breakfast cleaning the house and then get into gym attire and drive to the gym. or if the weather is nice I will walk there.  Once, I walked there, but on the way home I was regretting that choice and have never done it since. 

On an art day I will often put on a movie and set up my art table in front of it, then spend two to three hours painting. I learned to paint only recently, by which I mean that my dear friend Kel took up painting during the early days of pandemic (I believe) and then when she was comfortable with her techniques, she started inviting me over for "art days." I hadn't really ever worked with paint and didn't consider myself much of a visual artist, but with her gentle guidance I started to feel comfortable putting color on a canvas. Now I partake in this activity with a regularity that would have shocked a two-years-ago me. I find painting to be a really good outlet for my feelings that are harder to describe with words. I wouldn't say that I am at any kind of expert level with it, but I am proficient enough to make things that I consistently like looking at and I am developing quite the collection of canvases and completed works on wood panels. 

The thing that surprised me the most when I went off my meds temporarily was how little I suddenly came to care about any of it. I had zero interest in making it to the gym, or working on my novel, or putting colors on canvases. All I had the energy for was to put something on the tv and lay on the couch and watch it. Mainly I was looking for escapism, I think. To a certain degree I wonder if this was why I voraciously read books as a kid and a young adult, in order to escape the dull mundanity that being low on serotonin feels like day after day. I certainly started to feel, in the past month when I was on my break, that every day felt so much the same, and I was not into any of it. 

I am very glad to be on the other side of that, and so very grateful that I have a much better understanding of myself now, of the need for the medication and that it is very real for me. I think the reason I had to take the break was to know that it was in fact doing something for me. It had been six years since I started taking them, as mentioned in my previous post, and I have done a tremendous amount of personal work in that time, including two rounds of personal coaching and several years of therapy, working with a business coach, starting an art therapy journal, and becoming a coach for others. But it is important for me to see that although the work I have done is very real, the meds were likely what made all of that work possible for me to do, and I would like to keep on being able to wake up every day and care about what I do with my time. During the past six years I have been able to set goals and reach them in a way that I never had prior in my life, and I have been letting the goal setting slide in favor of "just living" which has been good for me. 

Maybe it is time for me to start setting some small, attainable goals again. Maybe. Anyway, nothing profound to share here, just some minutia of my day to day that I wanted to record for myself. 

If you want to read some stuff that is more curated for public consumption, subscribe to my Substack below. I am going to try to have something published to share there about once every two weeks. 

https://open.substack.com/pub/noemieixchelsnowdance/p/getting-started?r=28qasw&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcome=true

Note: This Blog was originally created in 2010 for my first business, Zen of Self Yoga and Shiatsu. I have since owned three iterations of that business: Circle of Light Healing, Circle Reiki and Somatic Healing, and currently, Queer Ixchel Collective, which is an arts organization dedicated to teaching writing and the arts to Queer and Trans Youth. Therefore, the name of this blog will be changing, to an as yet determined title.

As of now, you can find me writing here, as well as at my writing/Poetry blog (Link to be inserted at a later date) and follow my Instagram accounts @hedonist_Utilitarian (personal) and @QueerIxchelCollective (business.) 

No Prozac Nation

I went off my antidepressant at the end of 2023. It was carefully thought-out and discussed with my doctor, a decision that I came to for various reasons– not least being that I wanted to see who I was without a pharmaceutical substance making daily changes to my brain chemistry. I started the process of titrating off of Prozac the day after Christmas; the winter holidays have been a trigger for my depression since I can remember feeling symptoms of depression in my adulthood. I took no pills on December 26th, then one on the 27th, and alternated days until the 10th pill had been taken, signaling that I could stop altogether. 

The first thing I noticed which was a hearkening back to a part of my personality that I had mostly left behind six years ago when I began the medication, was a quickness to irritation that seemed to be far outside the called-for amount of pissiness at a given situation. My brain became a petty and bratty teenager which must be reminded near-constantly that the person who would not let me change lanes in traffic nor the colleague who neglected to fill the towel cabinet with clean washcloths for the day were not trying to make my life a living hell.  The second thing I noticed was that my brain became a sailor-mouth. “Dammit”s and “Fuck this–” (fill in the blank) and “Jesus Hellraising Christ!”s were being dropped at the smallest of irritations, such that I was reminded of a time in the past when I would have been saying all of these out loud to whomever was there to listen. (A drugged-me will curse when it’s appropriate, but the old, pre-medicated Noemie would be dropping F-bombs like they were confetti at a wedding; only the wedding was my life, and I was marrying Satan himself.)

“Dense Fog Warning in Phoenix,” the Alexa’s screen in the kitchen read me a news headline of the day in mid-late January. “No kidding,” I thought. My brain had been clouded by a light to medium fog for three weeks already. That morning I had looked in the mirror while putting moisturizer on my face and thought, “Do I really have to do this for 35-50 more years?”

I was 47. Throughout my 20s and 30s, and into my early 40s I had often had passive-suicidal (I would later come to learn this term in therapy) thoughts. Those thoughts were not about actively wanting to die, but rather, not-actively wanting to live. I didn’t care much for anything, didn’t really have any passion-pursuits or hobbies, was generally bored most of the time, if I wasn’t in full angst or anger or morbid melancholia; or actively avoiding those thoughts and feelings by filling the void with love-addiction, casual sex, or shopping for things I could not afford to purchase. My main recurring thought– when I wasn’t busying my mind with obsessive-compulsive behaviors to numb-out– was “How much longer?” Life seemed to be one long slog that we had to trudge through to get to the end, which was the merciful, peaceful, and quiet-soothing relief of death herself. 

And yet. When my first Psychiatric NP told me she was prescribing me with Prozac, my first reaction was, “But I’m not depressed! I just have anxiety!” 

Yes, that crippling anxiety that would not let me have a peaceful or quiet moment where I was not catastrophizing or wishing that a bus would accidentally come up onto the sidewalk and swipe me out of existence, my brain that was missing a significant amount of the serotonin it needed to exist without near-constant crippling pain of existential underwhelm, was simple anxiety. [Was what that same brain told me to be true facts.] 

I am grateful that I was able to get the mental health care that I needed, finally, when I was 41 years old. That was the year I finally took myself to a mental health facility and said, “I need help. This isn’t working for me anymore.”

The first counselor I would see at said facility did an intake with me and told me, “You seem to be coping fine with all that you have going on. You have a job that you like and a relationship that you like, and you aren’t actively fighting with anyone in your life. I am not going to recommend further interventions or therapy for you.” For whatever reason (read: her lack of empathy/my inability to communicate just how hard it was to be inside of my brain) she could not see that I was constantly battling with the most important person in my life. ME. 

I am grateful that I was aware that the counselor was further off her rocker than I was and sought a second opinion.  I am grateful that the Psych NP that saw me next was able to recognize the signs of depression. I am, furthermore, especially thankful that I saw past my own stubbornness and took the damn meds she prescribed. 

For that I was rewarded with the past six years of my life, during which I stopped hating nearly everything and cursing everything and everyone that got in my way, including myself. I now have an excellent counselor who I’ve seen for five years on and off, and a very skilled Psychiatriatric provider, both whom can see I have made many internal and external changes (the details of which are for another post) which have led me to this decision to experiment with my brain to see if I still need to be medicated, and if so, is there another med that might be more fitting?

I have not yet decided how far I will take this experiment, but as of today I am leaning more towards taking the option to go back on something. I would rather be in a brain that says excitedly, “How many more years do I get to do this crazy game called life?” versus one that says, in full doom and gloom mode, “How many more years do I have to endure this terrible game we call life?”

I have my next appointment with my Psych provider in two weeks, and I am going to continue recording my experiences and my internal world in the little yellow notebook I selected during Christmas shopping for my honey, and which, fittingly, suggests, “Shine Bright” on the cover. Why yes, I think I will.