abt bullshit preferable.
Higher self: tl;dr
Higher self: jk
Higher self: it seems like u r scared of containing multitudes, tbh
Higher self: like, why does it have to be all or nothing? why r u just str8 up good or str8 up evil? what if u r a v loveable douchebag? what if u r a heavenly asshole? what if u r a destructive beautiful person?
Me: idk
Me: am i allowed 2 be good and evil at the same time?
Higher self: look around, bb. that’s all there is.
The Terror in My Heart Says Hi
IT 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