Leap and the Net Will Appear, or Maybe it Won’t

I love it when people imply that medication is the easy way out of mental health struggles.

First, if that were true, sign me up. I think I’ve put in enough effort in the last three decades to earn a magic pill, no? Certainly, as I approach my five-year therapaversary, I have put in enough hours sitting on my therapist’s couch to deserve the occasional easy solution.

I’m not sure why suffering equals legitimacy.

Beyond that, there’s the simple fact that medication isn’t actually easy. It’s educated guessing, at best, but if one medicine doesn’t work you just try something else, right?

Tapering from one medicine to another is no joke. It’s painstakingly tedious. It takes months.  And sometimes even the slowest cross-titration still leaves you with side effects of both withdrawals from the old med and the increasing dose of the new.

I promise that most people are not popping antidepressants because they’re lazy. Rather, we are desperate for our brains to settle down enough to even let us help ourselves in other ways. We are saying that the side effects are actually better than the alternative.

Do you remember the little plastic parachute guys that used to come in quarter machines just outside the grocery store? You’d climb to the highest accessible point in your house and let them go — only to have the parachute bunch up as the soldier crashed to the ground. But, every once in a while, the parachute would open and slow his descent.

When you’re feeling really shitty, every single step taken to alleviate the pain is the leap of faith made in terror and with a questionable parachute. Especially when you’ve convinced yourself that it’s never going to get better in the first place.

It’s a trust fall when you know for a fact you may hit the ground, but there you are, stepping off the edge anyhow.

You may get rope burn from the safety harness, but it’s worth it if that parachute breaks the fall even a little.

If medication helps you get out of bed so that you can go exercise, get some fresh air, open up in therapy, or literally just the whole getting out of bed part — well, a partially inflated parachute is better than none at all.

So here I am, week ~826 of the shift from Zoloft/Cymbalta to Prozac.

Here’s the part I forgot to mention before… I can’t even see if the parachute is working. I have no way to know. I can see bigger-picture statistics, but I can’t tell if the change is making a difference for me, because I can’t be my own control. I don’t know what I would feel like otherwise.

What I do know, is that I’m writing this blog post. I know that I emailed my therapist last week to tell her how much I hate therapy, which is a good sign in its own twisted way. I don’t hate it, obviously. But acknowledging that hard work is hard requires more buy-in than just going through the motions.

I’ve got a partial draft of an essay for (potential) publication, which a couple of weeks ago I would have said might never happen again.

Yesterday, I resubmitted an essay to The New York Times (I figured they could probably use something lighthearted to read, ya know). Within an hour, I had an enthusiastic yes back from the editor. This wasn’t a new essay, it was one that I already knew she had been interested in last year, but my timing was off. And yes, my brain has spent the last 24 hours fighting me tooth and nail to invalidate the whole thing. To come up with reasons why it’s not a big deal. It’s online, not print. On and on. Do you like how I buried this news deep within a post?

Then I cried in my office because my dad isn’t here to see it.

Do I wish there was a magic pill that would let my brain act less like a masochistic squirrel on speed? Of course. Would it be lovely if I could not overthink and fight myself about every single thing? Yah. Even if I could flip that switch long enough to have some breathing room and deal with the deeper causes, that would be wonderful.

It turns out that the fall isn’t the hard part, it’s the climb back up to do it again. Each time a little more tired and with new wounds. The hope is that as you claw hand over hand, you pull down tiny pieces of the mountain as you go.

And since you know you’re going to have to jump again, if a pill might possibly patch even one hole in the parachute, that’s all the better.

Also… New York Times, y’all!