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.
Day 11 off Effexor
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.
Day 12 off Effexor
I’m going back on fucking Effexor.
Day 13 off Effexor
I’m not going back on fucking Effexor.
Day 14
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.
Day 15
I’m going back on fucking Effexor.
Never Getting Over the Fantasy of You Is Going Okay
IS FAKE LOVE BETTER THAN real love? Real love is responsibility, compromise, selflessness, being present, and all that shit. Fake love is magic, excitement, false hope, infatuation, and getting high off the potential that another person is going to save you from yourself.
Of course, nobody can save you from yourself. But it’s easy to ignore that reality. Simply project your own romantic ideation, childhood wounding, and overactive fantasy life onto another human being. Even better if the person possesses fewer inner resources than you. Like, the less basic coping skills possessed by the object of your obsession, the better the fake love.
One form of romantic obsession is to become infatuated with someone who actually exists. With this type of romantic obsession, you project your entire fantasy narrative onto a person in your life and attempt to get them to comply. You take a living, breathing human being and try to stuff them into the insatiable holes inside you. These holes are in no way shaped like that person (or any person). But you believe that this fantasy person will fill you, because he or she possesses all the imaginary qualities you seek in a lover. And how do you know that he or she possesses all of these qualities? You put them there.
Another form of romantic obsession is to fall in fake love with a person who doesn’t exist at all. With this type of romantic obsession, you fall in love with a magic hologram of a person you create based on a distant image. This image may be of a dead person, an online-only person, a famous person, or a cartoon. But he or she cannot be a flesh person whom you actually encounter in waking life. In this version of romantic obsession, the