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:
Day 5 off Effexor
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.
Night 5 off Effexor
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