Farewell Prozac

I suppose this is goodbye

2009-12-23T05:24:00.001-08:00

...for this blog for the time being, anyway.

I actually found giving up antidepressants a lot harder than I thought it would be. I found myself in a confused, bewildered state of mind, not knowing whether what I was feeling was down to discontinuation, or psychological effects of doing what I was doing, or was just happening anyway. It wasn't easy to understand any of it. I felt like I was lost, trying to grab hold of something - anything - but there wasn't anything there to hold on to. I got through that feeling of being lost and vulnerable and unable to do anything about it, because I was lucky, because my timing was good, because things tended to work out at that time, and because I was determined not to go back.

I can't tell anyone what to do and I wouldn't recommend trying to stop taking antidepressants to anyone unless they've spoken to a doctor and have undergone, at some stage, some talking therapy which has helped sort out any underlying issues which may have caused feelings of depression in the past. Even then, it's not easy, and there are plenty of times when you doubt yourself. All the support I had was from here, from those who were kind and sent messages; and from my friends and loved ones, and from myself and the fact I believed what I was doing was right. Even then, it was difficult to see through the haze and the fog to a time when things might feel different, and better.

I think that time is now. I don't want to celebrate prematurely but it is a couple of months down the road now, and things are okay. Not all better and wrapped neatly up and never to be challenging or painful again; but okay. Okay in the sense that most people's lives are full of pain, and regret, and failure, but some of us need pills at certain times and some of us don't. At the moment I don't, but I won't ever look down on anyone who does, and I'd suggest that anyone who hasn't been there shouldn't look down on anyone who does either. Because we all have times when we can't cope, and we all seek out ways to try and get better without screaming to the world "This feels terrible and I need help" - we just carry on and keep it secret, away from all others, and hope it will go away, even when it won't.

So there is a time for optimism, and that time is now. I feel that something has gone from my life, something which possibly was holding me back, which meant I wasn't able to be as assertive or sociable as I would otherwise have been - a feeling of helplessness and a feeling of giving a part of your life over to a chemical solution. That, for me, was something I wanted to change, though I can fully understand others who don't want to give it up.

After six years, then, there is no more medication. No more pills to take every day. No more excuses as to why I haven't quite done what I wanted to do. But vulnerability is strength, I think. If you can open yourself up to the possibility of things going wrong, and you not having the medication to rely on, and think that's all right, and you'll be able to deal with it, then that to me feels like where I've wanted to be for a long time now. Perhaps this really is goodbye to all that. It may not be and I may be back on here at some point. But for now, it is.

All that remains is to thank every one of you that read what I wrote on here. It helped.

Never straighter

2009-12-12T05:54:00.000-08:00

It might seem odd, given that I'm writing this in the fuzziness of a four-pint hangover - the kind that never seemed to trouble the scorers only five or six years ago - but I have never felt less contaminated by chemicals or drugs than I do now.

Not in my adult life, at least; and there are still the buzzes of alcohol and caffeine to nudge me along, sometimes. But it's a 'sometimes' and it's not a forever. For the first time in a long time, I get to decide exactly how medicated my life is; for the first time ever, I'm deciding that quite a lot of the time it doesn't need to be medicated at all.

Alcohol was the first 'self-medication' to try and cope with the things that seemed insurmountably bleak; then there was cannabis, which I loved and still think of fondly, though it probably wasn't all that ace at the time and the memory makes it seem less spaced-out and more lucid than it really was; speed turned up at university, to keep me awake and writing (though also awake and gazing into a TV screen showing nothing of interest to my ever-racing brain); then there was joyous LSD, frankly disappointing ecstasy, and cocaine; with cigarettes a fairly constant factor until my last. They all turned up like guests to the party, and all eventually got tired and called it a night.

Then there were the antidepressants - six years of various states of feeling awkward, relaxed, nervous or numbed out, and all kinds of symptoms and side-effects bouncing around the skull all the while. You don't really look at it like you're constantly 'on drugs' because that's not how it feels; and besides, the long, constant reassuring circle of antidepressants feels different to the instant hit and comedown of other drugs*. It's very different and more subtle; and you're not expecting the point at which it all stops to be a car crash or a gentle landing because you don't know if, or when, it's ever going to happen; you can quite easily imagine yourself coasting along like that indefinitely, and I'm not criticising anyone for doing just that - it's just that in my case, I felt the need to try and stop it, because it felt like it was time.

So here I am, then. Never straighter. Never less medicated. Never more vulnerable to whatever turns up inside the brain and decides to attack me. But there's another thing, too: knowing that you can do it. When you decide to do something, and you do it, and it doesn't turn out to be a disaster - despite those fears tugging away at your sleeve and begging you not to do it, not to risk what uneasy balance you have on something that may prove to be no benefit - then that brings about a kind of gentle triumph. It's not like you've sunk the winning putt or volleyed home a beautiful goal. It's one of those quiet, unheralded victories in life.

But there does come a point when you think: I can win this. And all you have to do then is win. It makes you feel nervous, excited, relieved: and then tomorrow is just a place like any other, no more intimidating than today; somewhere you can be, and see yourself being, and almost enjoy the prospect of it, no matter what else might go wrong. And things will go wrong. But right now, it feels like I can cope with whatever turns up, and I think it will stay that way. Not hope, but think. Not quite believe, but we'll get there. We'll get there.

* I guess if nothing else, taking recreational drugs teaches you something about your own body and how it reacts to medication; you learn there's a half-life to these things and that for every up (or down) there must be a down (or up). That's no bad thing to know.

Personality changes

2009-12-08T11:21:00.000-08:00

I was interested by this article I read today, which seems to suggest that personality changes might take place when people take SSRIs. I take all these things, all these bits of evidence that come floating through the ether, with a pinch of salt, as you might imagine from reading the other things I write. But then on the other hand you do wonder: is that what happened to me? Did my personality change? Did anything, no matter how subtle, shift when I started being under medication?

There's no way of knowing, of course, because there is no alternative reality to examine: there is no place where you didn't make that decision, and where your life carried on (or maybe didn't) in an entirely different way. So in one sense there's a value in trying to work these things out; in another, there isn't, because it's almost impossible to try and guess. You can ask those closest to you whether they noticed any changes, and they might say they did, or they might say they didn't, and you might wonder, no matter how honest they are and no matter how much you value their opinion, whether that's the truth or not. Who knows.

I suppose you can only look back, to the time when you first started taking medication, and try to remember the clues. The recollection is a bit hazy, but I do remember a few things, one thing in particular. I remember Christmas Day, walking down the street in the village where I lived. It was misty rather than foggy, but the smoke from the chimneys made it feel cloudier; I remember the smell of the soot, and the wetness on the skin. The soft sfumato of the streetlights glowing amber halos in the quiet air, and the flicker of Christmas lights in the window.

I don't know why I remember this, or why I might have chosen to remember this. All I do remember is a certain emotion attached to it - an emotion of detachment, of feeling somehow distant from all the things I was experiencing, like I was looking down the wrong end of the telescope at someone who was someone other than me, someone else who was placing the footsteps down and walking through the almost silent, shining streets. That person, I thought, wasn't me at all, but I don't remember any feelings of alarm of unhappiness. It just felt like that was the way things were, and that was how they would be, and that was that.

That seems quite a different feeling to how I've always experienced depression. Then you are definitely yourself, while at the same time feeling like a caricature of yourself; but your extreme sensitivity and your obsession with yourself means that you're always aware that what you're feeling is what you're feeling - even if what you're feeling isn't how you should really feel. Does that make sense? I hope it does.

So perhaps there was a personality change, a change of perception of self, a detachment from the self, from the instinct to react a certain way or feel a certain way. Does that help with how I'm feeling now and whether that's the real me, or a different version of me? It might do a little. Did it change my personality? Maybe, but it was more a change of perception, I think, and that may have led to a change in behaviour.

I still remember that Christmas Day. It was a day when I didn't really feel like myself at all. But I can still smell the wood fires and see the sparkling Christmas lights.

The people you miss

2009-12-04T07:05:00.000-08:00

I've written before about the people you miss leaving voids behind. They might not be there, but you can still feel their presence, at times, if not in a spiritual way then in the sense that you recall them, you remember them, the impression they made on you makes you slightly different than you would otherwise have been.

Depression makes you question things like loss, and grief; you wonder whether, if some of the people you loved were still here, if you didn't have to refer to them in that despicable past tense, you might have escaped the clutches of depression - you might have had the ability to be stronger, or talk things out a little more, or just be different. Things would be different, there's no getting around that. But they are not that way, they are this way.

Depressed feelings can circle around the conflict between what you want to be the truth and the way things really are. It can cause anguish, or frustration, or anger that that's the way it is: but there's a finality about death, an irreversibility, that means you have to deal with it. You can't entertain the possibility that it isn't true, because it is.

When you're depressed, there are some things that are almost too painful to think about. You can't look at the memories, because they hurt too much. Now that I'm emerging out of a life ruled by medication, I've started thinking about some of these things again. And now it's Christmas, or nearly Christmas, or getting to be that time of year again, it's hard to avoid looking back, even though you know it might be pretty painful to do it.

But you have to do it. You have to look back, because there are things there that are a comfort, not just the things that make you sad, not just the things that made you sad, the things you couldn't change, the facts that beat you, but didn't break you for good. That you made it at all from there to here is a testament to some kind of strength - and even when you feeel you've been broken, or you're hopeless, or you're worthless, you have to remember that you've made it to here. You made it through all that. You did it, and no-one else.

It's time for a bit of a confession, though it's not to the people I should be confessing it to. Going back home, to where I grew up, is sometimes too painful to even consider, though I do it because I have to. I feel like there are ghosts there. Sometimes I drive down the road where I grew up, even though no-one I know still lives there; but I can see the ghosts as the car slips down the dark street. I can see it all in brilliant daylight, me on a bicycle with stabilisers, the people who lived in every house, the conversations we'd have, and then returning home, and things like Christmas, and times when life was simple, and different, and felt easier and better, though you didn't know it then because that was all you had ever experienced.

There, the streetlamp that glowed amber outside my bedroom window. There, the garden where I'd play. There, the place where my family lived, and all the things that happened there. And there, the house where we moved to, where one day I rounded the corner and saw an ambulance outside, and someone I knew, under a blanket, hardly recognising me, and I felt right then completely alone, that whole world was about to fall apart. And it did.

I made it through, though. Did the depression come from the things that were so traumatic? Or was it something I had in me anyway? Was it something that was made worse by the awful experience of someone I loved, that I could do nothing about, that left me feeling so helpless and so hopeless? I don't know, and there's no way of knowing because there is no other world in which that didn't happen that I can go and check in on to find out.

There's just this world, just these feelings that I have. Time to move forwards. Time not to be scared of going back home. There are ghosts there, true, but happy feelings as well as the dark ones. Times I want to remember. Leave behind the other stuff, even though it hurts, because it hurts less and less, and though in a sense you want to keep the pain as much as it always was, you need to let it go, and be stronger, and fight it off, and leave it behind. Time not to be guilty about being happy. Time to be glad that depression is going, and that I'm winning, and that I did something I know they would be proud of. That means more than the fear. The fear won't win.

But what if they're right?

2009-12-03T07:19:00.000-08:00

I think a lot of people who've been depressed at one time or another will be familiar with the concept of a self-defeating monologue, a mantra of failure that nags at you repeatedly until you buckle under its terror. Most of us will have learned to treat it with the contempt it deserves. But there's always that worry, that fear at the back of the brain, in those dark places where you try and keep away from: what if there's some truth in it? What if these nasty nagging whispers assaulting you aren't just a caricature of your worst fears and all the things you hate about yourself? What if they're right?

Arriving back into a world without antidepressants feels good. There's no denying that there's a certain clarity to what you think and what you feel; you begin to trust your senses a lot more than you did. Even if it's possible the presence of medication in your system was merely a crutch to keep you propped up by a psychological device, you know that this must be a more realistic version of events than what you were experiencing before. It might not be total clarity, but it's something approaching it.

This isn't a state of mind that's without its drawbacks. Just as when you give up smoking you go through a period of awkward adjustment, when you might feel like you're coughing more and feeling worse than you did when you were smoking, so the getting back to where you used to be before you started taking antidepressants has a similar troubling effect. You feel like you're experiencing things with clarity, but on the other hand you can't be sure. What do you have to measure against it? Those days before you began taking the tablets were full of misery and woe; you can't compare yourself now to yourself then. So what do you have to measure yourself against? Probably nothing.

As I was alluding to the other day, the trouble can come with trying to work out what's depression and what's something else: what's something you need to deal with, or a large underlying problem that you've happily obscured with the grimness of depression for a few years, but which now needs your attention.

And then you come back to that monologue, that self-mockery. What if, at the heart of everything, there was a truth all along? Not the despicable, hateful truth that you exaggerated it to be, but something about yourself that was worth criticising? What then?

Then, I suppose, all you can really do is do something about it. Being free of medication gives you the courage to act on other things, including the things that hurt the most. It might not be pleasant, but it's what you have to do. At least you can see it now, and at least you know what it isn't. And it can't be as bad as your own self-hate made it out to be. Nothing to be scared of. Nothing that can't be fixed. So now is the time to start fixing it.

When the fog clears

2009-11-29T04:04:00.000-08:00

I wrote the other day about depression feeling like a fog that can descend, and lift, without warning, seemingly regardless of those things you might do to try and keep it away. It would be comforting, or might even be frightening, to think that you could be responsible for its appearance, or its disappearance, but I'm not so sure that I am. That's not to say it's a third party, because of course it isn't, but it would seem that, for now at least, I don't have any control over it.

You can either resign yourself to that situation, and attempt to be comfortable in it, and learn to adapt to it; or you can try and fight it. Well, sometimes it seems like I've spent far too long fighting, and it doesn't seem to have got me anywhere in real terms. The fog continues to arrive, and leave, seemingly independently of all those other factors going on around me, and seemingly independently of my best efforts to try and keep it away, or make it go away once it's there. Does that seem helpless? I suppose it does, but it's not a helplessness that causes me great worry any more, or great stress: it just seems to be that that's the way things are going to happen. It might change and it might not, but this is the way things are for the time being, and maybe for the future. Maybe feeling able to cope with it is better than trying to beat it, which maybe I can't do.

When you're prone to depression, though, it's a temptation to try and lump all those other feelings in with it; to imagine that the other things that make you frustrated, or upset, or disappointed, or unhappy - the things that would make 'normal' people feel that way, or would make you feel that way even if you were 'normal' and never experienced periods of depression - are somehow part of that, rather than problems on their own. It's tempting to do that, because it makes everything nice and neat: here is everything that upsets me, and that's all depression, and here's everything else, and none of that makes me unhappy. But it isn't quite the truth, and sooner or later you have to face up to that - when the fog clears, and the depression goes away, but you're still left with feelings of unhappiness, and despair, and melancholy.

It's hard to separate things out at times, but I think you can learn with experience which are the times when you're going through a time of depression. It's the whole self-defeating mantra of it, the relentless assault on anything positive, the inability to see past a couple of days, or if you do, to imagine that everything that could possibly go wrong will go wrong. I think there's an illogical quality to depression that means you can spot it when it turns up; there's something that goes against reason that you can sense sometimes, even when you're in the midst of it - which more standard feelings of unhappiness don't really have. I hope that makes sense.

So there comes a time when the fog clears, and you feel that you're not in the middle of an episode of depression (not that these are discrete chunks of time, of course; depression can come slowly or suddenly, and it can leave just the same) and generally things are OK as far as that's concerned, when you can still feel unhappy, or disappointed, or trapped, or fearful, or desperate, or sad. It's easy enough at that time to simply write those feelings off to depression as well, but as I've said, that's not quite right. Because the truth could be that those feelings need attention, and sometimes they do need fighting, or investigating.

It's difficult to do so, because being prone to depression can lead you to wonder what the point is in investigating the cause of things, when depression can strike at random and might not necessarily have a root cause; and what the point is in fighting it, when depression isn't always going to go away just because you take up arms against it. That can make you vulnerable to other kinds of more everyday melancholia. When the fog clears, they might well be there, and they might well mean that there are other problems - problems that don't have anything to do with the depression that can be there as well. I think it's important to separate them out, and then take a look at what's going on, and try to figure out what's depression and what isn't. It's not easy to do an audit like that, and it takes time and it can be pretty emotionally exhausting, but I do think it's worth it. Because what you can be left with is a series of problems that need addressing, which will make ordinary everyday life better, if you can sort them out; and which won't add to the burden at those times when depression might sink down.

When the fog clears, you can be left with things you might not want to deal with as well, which you've happily concealed from yourself in calling them symptoms of depression. That isn't easy. But it's something that needs to be done.

Inertia

2009-11-28T01:27:00.000-08:00

Depression creates a kind of inertia, and it's hard to get your mind out of that way of thinking. You feel trapped, but it's tempting to look back and wonder whether you were really ever trapped at all, or if you trapped yourself. Tempting, but I'm not entirely sure that's right. When looking back it's easy to place yourself, as you are now, in situations where you behaved differently, felt differently and were different.

Those of us who have suffered the torpor and melancholy inertia of depression will know it's actually not as easy as it sounds to just give yourself a kick up the arse, and do something. Not that easy because, at the time, it doesn't seem that possible, or possible at all. Perhaps you're trapped by the tendrils of your own self-defeating conscience; perhaps you just can't bring yourself to face other people, or the world outside, or whatever it is - but it feels like being trapped, so much so that it becomes that. No amount of convincing or cajoling can make your mind decide that, in fact, you aren't trapped, and that you're free to get up and do anything you want, whenever you want. That's not how it is.

It's hard to understand from the outside, which is why it can be frustrating for those friends and relatives who attempt to help. They see a simple problem with a simple solution; and it's inexplicable, and infuriating at times, for them to look on as you 'fail' to solve it, or 'fail' to see the obvious that's right in front of them, yet somehow not right in front of you. It takes a lot of patience to deal with someone who's depressed, and at that point in depression where all seems lost, and inevitable; at that time when nothing seems worth doing, when everything will fail, when life will crush you, and is crushing you, and you are powerless to do anything but suffer.

But sometimes you do end up retreating into smaller and smaller spaces - not just physically, perhaps not leaving the bed for hours on end, or zombieing away in front of the TV; but in terms of thought, as well. Smaller and smaller room to manoeuvre inside your head. Smaller and smaller goals - just get to the end of the day; go down to the shops, eventually, yet it ends up happening just before they close rather than right after they open; just see things through, and wait for the change to come.

Depression can close you down, make you feel restricted in what you can do and what you can't do. It might seem obvious to others that there are no chains and no restraints, nothing really holding you back except your concept of the world; but to you, that's not how it is. To you, those fears and expectations, that dread of what might go wrong or how you will fail, that is real, because you can feel it, more real than anything else; and it will prevent you from walking out of the front door, or getting out of bed, or going out in the evening, or getting into a conversation, or interacting with others.

There's the inertia, that feeling that nothing will change, that you are floating in an ink-black sea, waiting for the moment when you lose the energy to keep treading water. That's how it is. But things do start to move. They change, gradually and gently. People don't suddenly clap their hands and think "Right! I'm glad that's over!" - or maybe they do; I didn't, and don't. Your view changes. Possibilities start arriving again. You start looking up, and around, rather than down. You start expanding the world, beyond yourself, so it includes others, the people you know, and even strangers. The front door doesn't seem so much of a danger. Outdoors is open. Time to walk outside.

Writers have something they call a block - when they come up against an inability to just write, when the words find it hard to come out. I can't help comparing that to feelings of depression, except it's not just the writing, but everything, that's blocked. It's the ability to live normally that becomes trapped; it's your whole self that's inert. But it doesn't last forever. Just as writers learn the workarounds that will get the words flowing again, so it's possible to learn ways of extracting yourself - distracting your mind with simple tasks, or a series of very small goals; or simply waiting, without worrying, which is what increases the tension, and stress, and makes it so much worse.

There are ways of doing it, and it does go away. As I say, though, it's very difficult for others to empathise, unless they've been there, unless they can know what it's like to go through those feelings of being trapped, of fear of doing anything. I think we have to be patient with them, just as they are patient with us; and know they are trying to help, and appreciate it, even if it's not quite what might work for us.

No-one stays trapped forever, and the times when I feel that way are less and less. I don't think I really felt that way very much when I was on medication, and now I'm back off it, I can sense elements of it returning, but not so much to scare me, and not so much that I can't handle. I still feel this is worth it, this attempt to return back to what you might think is 'normal life'. It is harder than I had imagined, and I do get strands of those old dark feelings returning. But they don't stay for long, and they're not enough to entangle me, and I'm strong enough to break them.

The fog

2009-11-24T13:27:00.000-08:00

One of the things that differentiates depression from, say, just feeling lousy is the way in which it surrounds you like a fog. Whichever way you turn, it's always going to be there. Feeling rubbish, in contrast, is something you have the option of forgetting about for a few minutes, and which doesn't cloud your view of everything else - even if you're having a particularly bad day, you might not necessarily expect tomorrow to be just as bad, whereas if you're depressed, you probably do, or might even expect it to be worse.

Every now and then, the fog descends, and it's hard to see a way out. You're always on your own when you're in there, and it's not as if there's any map that tells you which way to go to get out of it - or, at least, there doesn't seem to be one that I've discovered, no matter how many times I've been through those dark, familiar feelings that turn up every now and then.

I like to think of it like a fog because it's something you can't fight, yet it envelops you completely. It's all around you, yet it's nowhere. You just get overwhelmed by it, swallowed by it, and then all of a sudden, there it is, everywhere, clouding everything, unavoidable, inescapable.

It may be the case that life without antidepressants will mean that these episodes turn up more regularly than they did when I was on medication. It would seem to be the case, given that I don't really remember them happening so much when I was on medication; I tend to recall things being quite flattened out, without plunges into real despair and depression, except on a couple of occasions. Now that I've given up the tablets, I've already had one major slip into the fog, and that was this week. That could be coincidence, of course, but it's worth keeping an eye on.

I think the only thing that I can do to try and work a way through these episodes, when they happen, is to try and reinforce in my mind their temporary nature. And it is always temporary. Even in the darkest days it only seemed like it would go on forever; it never did. But when you're faced with something that appears endless, what can you do? You can only assume it is endless.

It's also a characteristic of depression that it skews your impressions of time. There appears to be no future, just an inevitable, miserable present that stretches out forever, in which you are incapable of changing anything, except for the worse, and only your mistakes will continue to be repeated, and you are helpless to do anything except suffer. That's how it feels, and it's hard to position yourself in a place where you can say: Wait, I've been here before, and I'll be here again, but things won't go wrong forever, even if it feels like they will; I remember things getting better before, and they will again, and if I just cling on to that, then I won't feel like I'm overwhelmed.

But I think that's what I have to do, and this project, however long it lasts, is part of it. By writing about everything, including the times that feel most miserable of all, it's possible to isolate them for the events they are, rather than the permanent crack running through your life that you can convince yourself they are. There will be bad days, but good days too. The bad feel more intense, because they make you feel threatened, and tense, and fearful; the good don't feel so intense, despite being enjoyable, because there's not that element of fear that kicks into the animal parts of you and sends the heart racing.

"One day at a time" is what you might hear a lot of people say when giving advice, and I don't think it's bad advice at all. It's easy when you're not depressed to say that - so easy for people to think, well why don't they just go for a run, or get out and do something, or not feel so sorry for themselves? It might work for some, but certainly not all, and it's wrong to imagine, when you're not depressed, that when you are depressed you'll be able to see things with the same eyes, because you won't.

All I can do is just write this, as a letter to myself, the self that may come back here (I hope) in times to come when things are dark, and it feels like the fog will never leave, and that misery is all there is going to be, and it will stretch on forever. All I can say to myself is: cling on, it never lasted forever, and it's not going to start lasting forever today. There will be a time when things begin to change. You might not be able to kickstart it or affect when it turns up, but it will come, and you will feel better when it does.

That's not the way it works

2009-11-20T23:00:00.000-08:00

Ideally, this would already be over. Everything would have been tied up in a neat little parcel and sorted itself out. I would have had my epiphany, realised where things were going wrong, decided to change everything, then just become a better person. Then it all would have ended and I could have carried on with my everyday life in comfort, knowing that it was all going to be all right, and everything was going to be fine.

That's not the way it works. I didn't think it would be, of course. But you always harbour a glimmer in the back of your mind that perhaps everything is going to be easy with this, this time, somehow; that this time, things are going to be less complicated, more reliable, more kind to you - you've only got to want things to get better and they will do. That's the hope, isn't it; but I'm afraid to say that I can't report that's what's actually happening.

I'd love to. I'd love to sit here and say, well, it was a piece of piss to get rid of the Prozac, and since then, everything's just opened up for me - the job offers have flooded in, everything's going great guns and I've managed to crack those toughies in the deep dark unpleasant places in my brain about the stuff that's too painful to even think about.

That would be great, to be able to say that. But it's not going to happen. This isn't going to be some neat transition from one place in which I was under medication, and struggled a bit, into another place, where I'm not under medication, and everything's completely peachy. I didn't think it would be. I never thought it would be. But I had hoped that it might be, just a hope, not more than a wish, a dream, an idea that wouldn't involve more heartsearching, more struggle, more getting things wrong and then having to work out how, and why, and saying sorry, and then having to try and work out how to put together the broken bits before even bothering to start on the stuff that needs doing.

No. This next bit is going to be just as hard as it was when I was first trying to contemplate quitting the antidepressants. Because this is the bit where they're pretty much fading away, and where they're becoming an irrelevance. That leaves not so much a void as a question, or rather lots of questions. Such as: did they really help me? Or: did relying on them create a false impression that depression was the only problem I had? Or: was it just easier to deal with things when I could accept that I was depressed, and therefore broken and fucked, and that I couldn't make things right again, and was destined just to live life as a broken person? And: am I really going to achieve anything by doing this? You know, cheery questions like that.

The questions still come. Some from me, and some from other people. I don't take anything for granted and I don't assume I have some, or all, the answers. I just can only think what I think, full of contradictions and mistakes, but it is me, and I have to listen to that. I am challenged on everything I say, and think, and feel, in everyday life; this is the one place where I can at least have an attempt to say something decisive, to say "This is how I feel" and not instantly be told that's instantly wrong. I treasure that. I may well be wrong, of course, or think that I'm wrong, or know deep down that I'm wrong. But there needs to be a place where you can say what you want and be able to escape that, for a few seconds at least. For me, that place is here.

All there is, right now, is questions. How much longer will this go on? Will it get worse? What about all that other stuff, from real life, creeping in and making it all worse? What about all those other problems which are making you feel like you're suffocating? Is this depression returning? Or is it just a bad time? Questions, questions, questions. The answers will reveal themselves, eventually, in time. You can't just sit around waiting for them, though. You have to try and head off somewhere, to do something, to try and fight it.

I don't worry. Things seem bad now, but they may not be in an hour's time, or a day's time, or a week, or whenever. I can hold on, with patience, and see the changes arriving. It's not good now, but it needn't be that way tomorrow. Depression robs you of the ability to see that, so I don't think this is depression - a relief. This is just feeling like shit. And it'll go.

Back to life

2009-11-19T01:56:00.000-08:00

Back home, then, to the land of the ripoff, the grumbled conversation, the howling leaf-spattered wind... and the floor still feels like it's falling away beneath me, like an ever-descending plane, like the dream you have when you try to fall asleep but wake up instead. Everything's a bit hazy, a bit fuzzy, there's so little way of knowing what's real and what isn't - which is particularly the case when you're not feeling well either, which I'm not, though that has nothing to do with antidepressant discontinuation and everything to do with getting a nasty bug while being overseas enjoying myself. Ah well. We pay for these things in one way or another, or so it seems.

Not yet, though, back to life. Work must wait for a while until I can get better - better than how I am at the moment, which isn't good at all. But there's a stage you enter into when you've been ill for a few days - you kind of sink into it and accept it, and it doesn't feel as bad as it might if you were plunged straight into it. You begin to see the parameters of what's possible change, and you begin to see illness as being part of normality, even though you don't want it to be. But you can't help it - you don't have the energy to fight; you need to conserve everything you can in order to keep on going, just to be.

And I can't help likening this feeling to sinking into depression, or sinking into a life that's regulated and moderated by antidepressants. You wouldn't start here if you could, but you haven't started here; you've arrived here through a long and gradual path, with subtle changes taking place every day, so it doesn't seem at all unusual that you've ended up here. Everything that isn't normal can become normal, if you let it be that way, if it happens often enough, and if it seems like there isn't any other way, which sometimes there really isn't.

At least, when you're in the midst of some illness, with fairly obvious physical symptoms, you are under the impression that there is a pathway into this and a pathway out of it. You imagine there will be a finite amount of time that this horrible feeling will last; that these unpleasant symptoms will be hanging around and affecting your ability to do everything else. You imagine it because that's the way it is with illnesses - they come and they go, they have a beginning and an end, and after they're over you can pack them up and throw them away and think, well, that wasn't very nice for a while, but it's gone now.

It's not so easy to think of depression in that way. It's not an illness with obvious symptoms. It's not something whose beginning is easy to trace back to one significant event, or a series of events. There is quite often no 'cause' you can blame it on, so you can end up blaming yourself. Somehow you must have created this; somehow you must have made this, although you don't know how, but you suspect that someone must have, and in the absence of other information you can only conclude it was you.

That's why it's harder to kick, and why it's harder to see antidepressants as being a finite cure, like antibiotics or other medicines. It's difficult to see the outlines of depression, to know where it begins and where it ends; to know what is depression and what is merely you having a particularly good, or bad, or ordinary day - and knowing that your very perception of what is good or bad may have been altered by depression in the first place.

But, time goes on. I may be unwell in other ways, and may be taking all kinds of medication, but not antidepressants. They're still not part of my life, and it's been quite a while now. It's tempting to say that's it, that I have somehow won; but I don't think that would be entirely right of me. Even so, it's encouraging. To understand how I'm really feeling, I will have to wait until this other illness goes away, and see what it's left behind - hopefully just me, as I am, back to life.

Some things you just can't fix

2009-10-29T11:53:00.000-07:00

It's good to be able to fix things. Good, but you can't always. In those moments of severe depression, and feeling low, it's easy to think that everything boils down to you being unable to fix things, and that you are powerless to change anything for the better. Powerful enough to make all the mistakes you made, of course, but powerless to decide everything else that might happen.

That's not the truth, though it's a convincing and convenient narrative when you can't understand why you're feeling so low. So much easier to blame it simultaneously on yourself and the world: I've made everything wrong; and everything is stacked up against me, and I can't do anything about it. The worst of all possible everything. But that's not how it is.

There are the minor things that go wrong - the annoyances, the irritations, the tiny mistakes, and they can add up of course. And then there are the things where your fate rests in someone else's hands - the job you didn't get, the promotion you missed out on, the people who don't really want to be your friends, the others who treat you unfairly, or unfavourably, and get away with it, and there's nothing you can do.

And of course there are, too, the things you remember, the things you couldn't fix, the things you couldn't do anything about, but which are ruined, and wrong, and which make you feel completely powerless and totally alone. An ambulance. A hospital corridor. The smell of the disinfectant. The whirr of the morphine. A face you recognise, but don't recognise, because it's so different, and because it will never be the same. A particular morning, cloudy, overcast. The clothes you were wearing. A phone call. You can't change these things. You can only experience them, and they will hurt you, and that will never change, and it's going to keep coming from now until forever.

A lot of my depression came, and still comes from time to time in those moments where it feels awful for a few seconds, where the heart sinks and the stomach kicks you, where you get transplanted to another time and another place, and you're on the wrong end of the telescope, and the world is unimaginably huge and bleak, from the frustration of not being able to change things.

But. And there is a but, before you think I'm dwelling in unhappiness. There are other things to remember too. That you were strong. That you managed to cope, despite everything, and that it made you bigger, and better. And that even the thing that hurt you the most, the one thing you wish you could change if you could change anything - that one defeat you can't ever forget about - didn't beat you. It didn't see you off. It tried. But you could take it on, and you won.

A few weeks on, things are still going okay for me. I thought I couldn't do it, and I didn't know if I could, but I could, and I am. And there have been times - many times - when I thought it might just be easier to forget about all this, and to carry on with the medication, and see how it went, and that wouldn't be so bad. And it wouldn't have been, and it's not necessarily the wrong thing to do, but I didn't do that; I've kept going, kept trying.

And things go wrong. A mistake here, a problem there, a failure or two. Things that don't go my way, and I have to try and look at them and think: I've seen off worse. And I have. Do I need medication? Not now. There was a time when I think I did, and I probably did, but not now. You don't need to be fixed, because some things don't fix, and some things can't be fixed. Sometimes you just have to be as fixed as you can be, not perfect, not undamaged, but still all right.

I'm still strong.

It's not just me

2009-10-25T15:58:00.000-07:00

When you go through something like depression, or the difficulties involved with coming off antidepressants and readjusting to life without medication, you don't do it on your own. There are all kinds of people who have subtle influences on you, who help you or trip you up, who encourage you or make you concerned - whether they know what you're going through or not. No-one lives their life in isolation of others, no matter how much it might seem, when you're depressed or when you're at a low, that you do.

It's another one of those temptations, those silent hands dragging you into the vortex, to imagine that you - and only you - can understand what's going on, or that you alone can do anything about it. The latter is largely true, to an extent, but I think we all make decisions with others in mind, and it's not possible - much less desirable - to set yourself on a train track to where you want to go, and go crashing through everything and everyone that's in the way.

As I've said before, there aren't many people who know me who know what I'm doing at the moment, the path that I've set ahead, the decision - which is the right one - to stop taking antidepressants and to attempt to live a life that's relatively normal, or at the very least untouched or uninfluenced by the behaviour of medication and its effects and side-effects. But it's not as if I live in isolation - whatever mood swings there are, are felt by those around me, the people who know me well and have to cope with me, and those who hardly know me, but have to deal with me, and those who don't know me at all, and who have to share the same space with me every now and then.

Whatever fury I feel, or whatever deep unpleasant turns towards unhappiness I have, they all create ripples that move outwards from me. There's no point in hoping that I can conceal it all, because I can't. People might not know exactly why, but they notice the subtle differences. Sometimes you think it might be best if they did know, and then they could understand; but other times you think, I just want to be treated like I'm any other person, who gets things wrong sometimes or who seems a little preoccupied sometimes, and not to get any special treatment or allowances.

So while it might seem that I'm alone, I'm not really. And I think this is something that needs to be born in mind at other times, at low times or even at times when things feel good. It's the thought that keeps, or has kept, many of us from doing serious harm to ourselves, when things have been too hard to bear: that there are others, and that it matters to them what happens to us, even if sometimes we feel like it might not matter to us - although when you look back on it, of course it did, and it does.

Some people link depression with selfishness. I'm not sure that's the case, but there's a self-involved characteristic about it, I think; a self-absorption, an introspection, which isn't healthy. Sometimes you can bee too busy looking at yourself to notice everything else that's about there; and sometimes, if you do, those things that nag away, and hurt, and damage you aren't so obvious, or can be dismissed, or ridiculed out of existence, or even just postponed, which isn't always a bad thing - not every problem can be sorted out right here, right now, and sometimes the harder you look, the more confusing it becomes, like when you stare at a word and it begins to appear ridiculous or gibberish, or when you look at a finger or a toe and it starts to take on an alien appearance.

Sometimes looking only inwards gives a false picture of yourself, because that twisted view you have of yourself, the view that can see you as a genius or a hero - or, more likely, as a failure or an idiot - is tainted with so many things, so many feelings, and when those feelings include depression, your view isn't quite right, or clear. Other people can see remarkable things in you that you don't even recognise; others can see the good in you that you thought was gone.

I say all this because, for the past few days, I've been for the first time in a couple of years virtually on my own, due to a particular set of circumstances, and it's brought me back to familiar ways of thinking, familiar ways of being, the repetitiveness, the lack of contact, the lack of interaction, and it's reminded me of how I felt before I began to take antidepressants - the caricature you make of yourself gets more and more grotesque, until each one of your perceived weaknesses becomes extreme, and disturbing, and horrific. That's how I remember it being.

But that's not how it's been these few days. It's not so bad now. The feeling of isolation is the same, but I feel that I'm looking outwards more. I don't see myself as a the figure of ridicule that the worst parts of my mind would like to draw me as; I don't see myself as magnificent or brilliant either. You need other people to provide that picture of yourself, because it gives you an idea how well you're communicating, and how you need to be in order to interact better, and be happier, and make other people happier.

And there is, of course, that other person in my life, whom I don't often mention here, not out of a desire to keep this focussed on me but because I can only write this from my point of view - at least I claim that it's so, but I know that's not the truth. People who have been through depression - and who have gone through the tricky transitional period of adjusting to life without medication - will know the impact it has on others, especially those who are closest, and loved. In a way it is harder for them, because they don't exactly know what we're going through, or how we're feeling, or how to make things better, and they can feel powerless, and very much alone themselves. And they are there when we hurt, when we don't want to communicate, when we are thoughtless, and hopeless, and stupid, and wrong. It's not a question of 'putting up with' - it's just what people do, even when it's not easy. Accepting that we can be testing, or trying, or difficult, or self-indulgent, or lost, or capricious, or angry, or whatever comes along. Accepting, not because they are weak, but because they are strong.

So it's not just me. It's not just me that's going through this rather difficult time - the symptoms, much as I would love them to disappear, are still clinging to me; I can sense the grip releasing, but not immediately, not instantly, and I am not strong enough to shake them off completely. It is just me - only I can make these decisions. But it isn't just me - whatever I feel, or do, impacts on others, those closest to me first, and those further away later. But I can't pretend it isn't there, or this is all about me. Because it isn't.

And I feel I owe it to those who are close to me, both near and far, but especially near, to go through all this, to try and achieve some kind of way out of the confusion of depression and medication; to try and get out and emerge into a place where I can just be. Where there will be problems, but ordinary problems, the problems that normal people have - houses, cars, money... and so on. Where real life is. I owe it to me too. But it's not just me.

Little sod

2009-10-22T03:06:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I feel like I'm becoming a fictional character - not the Anton Vowl of my allonym, although the missing man part of that is quite apt as I've said previously, but Frank Bascombe, from my favourite books by Richard Ford. There's a bit at the start of Independence Day where he gets bonged on the back of the head by some kids wielding a bottle of Pepsi and it immediately clouds his view of the idyllic place where he's decided to settle down.

I felt a bit like that last night when some little bastard lobbed a clod of soil at the back of my head while I was leaving work, and then scampered off giggling with his scabby little mates. What I was thinking was: Why pick me? What was it about me that made you think you could chuck a big lump of mud at me, and get away with it? Is there something about my face that leads people to believe I'm deserving of a giant chunk of loam being flung in my general direction?

These incidents lead to a bit of soul-searching, and they're the kind of thing that - if you're depressed - can make everything be part of a wider pattern to drag you down. There you are, the sadsack walking target man being attacked by cackling kids, and you can't do a thing about it, because they run faster than you, and they're going to get away with it, and even if you did manage to catch up with them, one of them would probably pull a knife, or you'd end up being convicted of something, and it would all go against you, and, and...

I think that's one of the biggest differences between being depressed and not being depressed. When you're depressed you see yourself as simultaneously the epicentre of all that's dark and painful in the world, yet also a complete nobody, a nothing, a zilch, a zero. You see yourself as, at the same time, everything and nothing: you stand out as the biggest target of all to all who would humiliate you, or upset you, or make you miserable, yet you believe that no-one sees you when it comes to handing out praise, or good thoughts, or kindness.

The truth, of course, is somewhere in between. But it's hard to rationalise the evidence and be empirical about your experiences when you feel so low, all the time; the natural conclusion is to suppose that somehow, you are the cause of all this, that you are the agent that is making this all go wrong. There must be something about me, you think, which is making all of this happen; I must attract the attentions of people who would seek to harm me, while at the same time repelling those who might offer me friendship, or happiness. And that's not true either. But how can you see when you can't see, when there is something preventing you from seeing all this?

I think, looking at it all now from the point of someone who has been depressed, who knows that way of thinking, and who is almost on the verge of escaping the ties of medication, that for me it's always been a question of perception. What causes what is the hard part to work out. Do you think that way because you're depressed, or does being depressed make you think that way? Or do they encourage each other in a self-defeating whirlpool sucking you down?

Perhaps it doesn't matter. Perhaps what's really important is working out how to cope with it. Antidepressants are a way of coping, but I don't think you can just sit still on them and hope that they'll make you bulletproof. A lot of other things need to be worked out and changed, so that if it starts heading downwards again, you're strong enough to ride it out. And then of course there is a time when you might feel you want to live without antidepressants, as I do, and you need to be ready. And some little bastard with a clump of earth isn't going to drag me down.

What I've noticed

2009-10-20T09:34:00.000-07:00

It was vaguely warm when I began all this, not yet autumnal, and now the leaves are tumbling down, marking the amount of time that's passed - three weeks and counting completely medication-free; seven weeks in total since I started to stop. It's a long time, and a short time. I look back on 'then' as if it's ages ago, at times; but there is no vast difference between 'then' and 'now', just a few subtle changes, and a shift in mood - a shift upwards.

I have a few observations so far, symptomatic and otherwise, and as this appears to be developing into a 'looking back' piece, it might be worth trying to collect them all together, in one place. As I always say here, this is my experience, and it may differ slightly or wildly from anyone or everyone else's. All I can report on is what I've been through myself.

Headaches

These started quite early on, and I was ready for them, as I'd experienced shocking headaches, almost migraines in strength, during my first aborted attempt to become medication-free, when I'd rushed into it, and taken it all too quickly. They came, just as I'd thought they might; but when they did, they were less intense than they were then, and less painful, and lasted for less time. They are still around, but it seems like it's not going to be too troublesome to handle.

Wandering off

I'm a daydreamer at best, but I've noticed that I've found it hard to focus on one task at a time - the mind, ever-busy and seemingly overloaded, flits from one task to another, incapable, it seems, of settling on one thing at a time. I don't know if this is a good thing or not. It leaves a lot of things unfinished; but on the other hand it means some things get started which might not have done otherwise. I'd prefer to be able to concentrate on one thing at a time, but that's not how it is at the moment. The mind is a bit fuzzy, a bit frantic. Hard to explain how it's fuzzy and frantic at the same time, but it is. Organisationally, it's like looking at life through frosted glass; there are shapes, but no detail.

Sleep trouble

I'd expected this to be a lot worse than it has been. Generally, sleeping has been OK. But there have been times when I've woken up and not been able to get back to sleep. That's about it, but dreaming seems a lot less frequent and a lot less vivid than it did before. That's no bad thing, as at times they've been disturbing, deeply unpleasant, uncomfortable - now they're less so. I don't know what to put this down to but it is simply the case that it's happening this way.

Aches and pains

A bit of pins and needles; a bit of acheyness, but nothing more troubling than that. No more twinges or niggles than a relatively ordinary 34-year-old might expect on a daily basis. I mentioned electric shocks before; they're still hanging around, not daring to leave just yet, but getting less and less, bothering me less, worrying me less.

Teariness

Sometimes. But not all the time. It turns up and goes away just as quickly, which doesn't make it too bad, if a little disconcerting when it takes me by surprise, which it occasionally does.

Appetite

I seem to have more of an appetite, but not greatly so. I seem to be grazing throughout the day rather than eating at mealtimes.

Is this boring you?

I get things like this ^^^ all the time, or thoughts like this. I seem to be questioning everything. It's hard to let go of stuff, or say stuff without immediately questioning it, worrying about it, analysing it endlessly and wondering how it might be analysed by anyone else. I worry that I'm boring people, or boring myself, or annoying people, or getting things wrong, or being clumsy, or being arrogant, or being inept... or anything. Do you see what I mean? I am so concerned about my impact on other people, although I really shouldn't be. Happily, though, I seem able to just get on after a few moments' panic, a few moments' frustration and overanalysis, and then just carry on. Which is probably for the best.

Finishing things

It's easier to get things finished. I don't know why, given what I mentioned above about starting lots of things at once, but getting things done seems somehow more simpler, less troublesome. There seems less confusion, despite the fuzziness, if that's not too much of a contradiction.

Knowing it's going to end

One of the most useful things you can learn by doing what is euphemistically termed 'self-medicating' is that these things have an end. It can be hard to see, when you're in the midst of an experience of drugs, be it a short-term something or other, or a longer-term commitment like the one I'm leaving behind; but you gradually learn that these things have half-lives and the return of effects, or feelings, or symptoms, might not necessarily be part of any continual process of being affected, but is just a little peak or a little trough, or whatever, on the way back to what you might call normality. This is just a drug experience stretched out over a longer time frame, but the highs and lows are becoming more predictable.

That's the best thing of all. You reach a point - and I can't really say when it was; it's more of a sense of being made gradually aware of the presence of something that was there all along - where you know it's going to end. Where you can see that you can achieve the thing you wanted to achieve all along. Where you can see that there is a way out, and there will be a time - not so long from now - that all the fears and concerns you had about this will be memories, just like the taking of medication will be a memory. And then there will be new things to face, and new ways to look at the world, but this is what I wanted all along, and I'm going to get there.

It's hard to realise at first, but you get it eventually. You realise: I can actually win this. I can actually do this. You don't want to get overexcited, or overcome with relief, because you know yourself the tricks that the mind can play on you, and how you've been cruelly disappointed in the past by getting it wrong. So you keep the thought to yourself, and you carry it around with you, and it becomes more and more obvious, the more time goes along; and when the leaves scatter along the street in front of you, and it's autumn already, the nights get shorter and the air gets colder, you know that actually it has been a long time, and that this will be worth it. No time to celebrate, not yet. But nearly.

And there will be good days too

2009-10-17T03:46:00.000-07:00

When I was about nine, I scored a goal from the halfway line while I was playing Little League football. It was nearly a full-sized pitch, and it was a fluke. I'll admit that to you now (although at the time I mumbled something about seeing that the keeper was off his line). The ball rolled gently towards me and I smacked it as hard as I could. A freak wind caught it and it soared into the sky before crashing into the back of the net past the poor little kid who was trying to defend the goal. I turned around and laughed. I just laughed. And then the rest of the team mobbed me, and I collapsed into a heap, and it was brilliant.

I can remember it all - the kit I was wearing (rather unflattering green and white), the kit the other team were wearing (a much smarter blue and white), the result of the game (we won 2-1), the look on my dad's face, the pats on the back, everything.

Every now and then, when things are really dreadful and I feel like giving up on things like my attempt to rid myself of antidepressants, I have that stored away like a little film in the back of my head; and I watch it all play out in front of me. And no matter how rubbish I'm feeling, or how tempting it is to imagine that life is a series of raw deals and failures, I can't reduce that down to anything other than a feeling of complete and utter joy. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you really do win. And it might not be often, but you have to enjoy it while it's there, and think to yourself it might not come back quite the same, but at least you had it once.

Yesterday, for example, I had a marvellous piece of good luck. I've been writing my other blog for a couple of years now, and have been very lucky anyway, and have had some very kind feedback. But this post has been read almost 50,000 times. From nowhere, I had a moment where I was brought from total obscurity into just slight obscurity. And it was brilliant. And do you know what? It was as much a fluke as that punt from the halfway line. But you have to try. You have to keep trying, and sometimes it comes off. When it does, you just have to laugh at the absurdity of success - just as you laugh at the absurdity of failure. Not every day is going to be as good as that.

But it happened once. And no-one can take that away.

If only

2009-10-13T08:11:00.000-07:00

"If only" is the worst way to start anything. It's like you're admitting defeat. It's looking at those things that you can't control and wishing you could change them, but realising that you can't. If only is a kind of failure, sometimes laced with whimsy, but generally it's somewhere to dwell when you can't work out where things have gone wrong, or why they've gone wrong, or why things can't be the way you want them to be.

I think if you sink into the if onlys you end up finding that you're submerged. Such an easy thing to do; such a difficult thing to avoid. Do you ever get that thing when you're just about to drop off to sleep and you find that all your dreams are waiting for you? It can be a bit like that with if onlys, if you aren't careful, or if you don't feel like fighting them off; they can be there, waiting for you, around every corner - at the workplace, at home, in the car, in the shops, everywhere - like that creepy elderly couple in Mulholland Drive,

it's all your fears and failures, all those ruined hopes and expectations, come to taunt you, to chase you, to hound you until you don't feel like being hounded any more. Sometimes they're part of the general hubbub, that jitteriness that I spoke about the other day, that kind of restlessness and anxiety that makes you incapable of relaxing or just doing nothing without panicking or feeling agitated. Sometimes they're just there in the background, waving at you.

I have always wondered whether things might have been different, if I might have been more successful, and therefore less prone to depression, had I not been depressed in the first place, if that makes any sense - wondering what might be different now had there not been anything impeding me. Now that I am hopefully emerging into a world and a life which has not only a lack of depression but also a lack of medication, the thought keeps returning: what would be different, if only you hadn't succumbed to those feelings you felt you couldn't control? What might be different now, had you not embarked on a life with medication? What if you were somewhere else, somewhere less tedious, where the only sound in the room wasn't me typing these words and a distant cough, and the arrogant hum of the air-conditioning? What if things could be better, should have been better, but other stuff intervened?

If only this, if only that. But the if onlys are as farcical as the truth, if your truth is farcical, which mine often is. If onlys are an idealised fiction; a way of torturing yourself by imagining that things might have been different, or better, or perfect, had things not got in the way. But there's no way of knowing, no reason to torment yourself with these things - except that it can happen, and it does happen. The if onlys are as unrealistic as your wildest dreams, the things that you hope for the most in life; they're just as implausible as anything positive you might daydream about - just because they're negative, it needn't mean that you have to pay them more attention.

It seems easy to say that, of course, but the reality is very different; it's precisely because you can't see that if only you hadn't done that thing, or said that thing, or written that thing, or decided to do this when you should have done that, it might not have made any difference at all, and you would pretty much be in the same place as you are now. All the if onlys don't matter, because they didn't happen, and because they didn't, that's where you are, and here is where you are.

And here might be a thoroughly unpleasant place, a place of regret, or despair, or anything, where hope is elusive and failure seems ever-present. It might just be the case that some stuff can't be prevented, and life is cruel and random; it might just as easily be the case that we're very powerful, and our choices are important, because we're more able to determine our future than we think.

How to stop worrying about the if onlys? I don't have an answer, because I still do. I just try to mock them with the same indignation and vitriol I might reserve for those fanciful dreams. All that's real is what you've got; the hopes and fears can't be touched, or preserved - nor can your state of mind, whether it's good or bad; it's always in flux, always changing, always moving from one place to another - a positive thought when you're low, a sobering one when you're feeling good.

If only... if only... if only nothing. If only doesn't matter; there only what is and what isn't. Can't go around beating yourself up because of the things you thought might have happened. Can't sit here believing there would have been a better life, because it might have been different, but maybe not better. If only... but there is no if only. There is only this.

Electric shocks

2009-10-11T02:26:00.001-07:00

When I was about 7 or 8 I used to go round my friend's house quite a bit. His dad had an overgrown old Mini in the back garden that we'd sit in and pretend we could drive, flicking the switches and pressing the pedals. And when it rained there was an old garage where there were a couple of chairs, pots of paint, boxes full of junk and some old bits of wood - and an old two-bar electric fire that would keep you warm in the autumn or when it got a bit colder. We weren't really allowed inside the house, which was immaculate, and his dad - who called me "boy" - would chase you out if he found you in there.

At that age you like to try out stuff and you don't really know what it's going to do or how dangerous it might be. Spraying an aerosol can at the two-bar fire, for example, was a pretty stupid thing to do; that's pretty obvious to me at the age of 34. But it didn't seem obviously stupid then. What was great was that you could get a great big orange blast of flame roaring out of the end of the aerosol, and your heart thumped hard in your chest, and then the flame went out, and you were relieved that the can hadn't blown up, and you were still alive. And we'd take turns doing it, because we weren't chicken. The worst thing you can ever be as an 8-year-old boy is chicken.

My mate had clearly had plenty of time in the garage to try all this stuff out, because he knew all the ways to make the two-bar fire that little bit more dangerous than just letting it sit there humming away in an orange glow. The other thing he liked doing was getting a piece of wood and sticking it right onto one of the bars. It seemed like a good idea, so I tried it as well. I wasn't chicken, after all. And then the great tingle of electricity flew up my arm, into my shoulder, and I leapt up into the air and ran around the garage, panicking, amazed at what had just happened. An electric shock! An electric shock! So that was what it was like to have an electric shock. I'd never had one before, apart from the tingle on the tongue of a 9-volt battery, but this was in a whole new world of ephemeral pain.

And then, of course, I sat back down by the fire with the piece of wood, and did it again, and again, and again, till my arm got tired and even having electric shocks seemed boring. But that's how you explore the world around you. Doubtless some kids got blown up by doing stuff like that, or burnt to a crisp. For us it was just the same kind of thing as chewing on your little fingers and then pulling them hard against each other - just something that felt a bit weird, and was worth trying, because I guess some kids are curious and others aren't.

I recall this because in the past few days I've been reminded of the feeling of electric shocks. I remember it from my first aborted attempt to rid myself of antidepressants, when I went cold turkey and felt disastrously unwell after only a couple of days. Then, it felt like there were electric shocks all over the place. Generally, tingling down from the head and shooting along the arms to the fingertips. Not hard or painful or anything like that. Just the sort of thing that gives you a tiny jolt; the kind of thing that's there to remind you that you may have hoped that you were out of the symptoms and things were all returning to normal again, but little things keep sparking, taunting you.

And so, the past couple of days, they've been turning up. Not all the time, not even regularly, just every now and then, little bursts of energy, little twinges, little buzzes. Hardly noticeable really, but then you do notice, because you're attuned to these things, and you're aware that this kind of stuff can happen.

But like the young boy who was curious, and who wasn't chicken, I'm curious to get through these little shocks, these tiny symptoms, these little reminders; and I'm not chicken - so I'm going to do it, even if there's a little price to pay, a bit of discomfort and a tiny jolt every now and then. The symptoms have their purpose, then, if they can remind you of a time when you weren't afraid, when there was nothing to lose, when the days stretched out forever and you'd try anything, and somehow be bulletproof, and laugh off the cuts and grazes, though you might have cried at the time a bit. I'm not chicken, all those years later. I'm not going to give up.

Jittery

2009-10-09T08:49:00.000-07:00

Nearly two weeks without medication, then. I embarked on it all back at the start of September, gradually cutting back, and cutting down, and then cutting myself adrift. Being adrift, so far, doesn't seem so bad, and there don't appear to have been awful ramifications for my health, or state of mind, or a return to the shambolic, rusted-out, burnt-out state I was in before I began taking antidepressants, back in 2003. I didn't seriously think I would end up back there, but you never know - there's always the fear that you might, until you find out.

But there is something returning that I do remember from that time - a kind of jitteriness or anxiety which doesn't seem to want to shift at the moment. It's probably the thing I most readily associate with depression - as I said the other day, it's not the monotony, the feeling of failure, the sadness that represents the reality of depression; it's something else which is harder to describe and explain.

As ever with these things, you have to try and keep a lid on it during the day, while you're pottering around at work in that dead-end lifeless work that pays the bills yet nurtures your soul as much as banging rocks together or sticking lumps of mud in a big long line. You have to present an unchanging, inaccurate persona to those around you, of someone who isn't constantly agitated, as someone who finds those around you not frustrating, irritating and deeply tedious, but neutral at worst and benign at best. You represent that to the outside world, but that's not how you actually are.

How I actually am is a little tense, twitchy, fidgety. It reminds me a little of that feeling I used to have during my smoking days when I was stuck on a plane or a non-smoking train for a few hours: something is insisting itself, but not in an obvious way like you might sense hunger or thirst; it's a bit less easy to get a handle on what your body is trying to tell yourself and what you might do to get yourself out of feeling that way. I wish that I could just block it all out, but I can't. Something is nagging at me, calling for attention, but I don't know quite what it might be. Is that depression - those endless ghosts that need chasing away, or feelings of regret and anger that stab at you when you're trying to sleep or relax? Or is it something else, something to do with coming off the medication? Is that my body trying to tell me that wouldn't things be better if I just slipped a green-and-yellow tablet down my throat? I don't know, but something is there, and it's not easy to grasp, forever hiding away just out of sight, in a blind-spot, but you know it's there all the same.

I offer up these questions because I genuinely don't know the answer. What I do know is how it feels: a constant distraction, an inability to settle into any particular task, something which makes me feel like I can only nibble at snippets of things, whereas usually I'm more productive when tackling one thing at a time.

If only depression were really that passive, quiet experience that people who haven't experienced it imagine it to be.

Drizzle

2009-10-07T08:52:00.000-07:00

Sometimes the days seem to last forever, and it's hard to tell the point at which a carbon-grey drizzly morning became a slate-grey drizzly afternoon. Days merge into other days, weeks into weeks, it all becomes wallpaper, and there's a whole mass of information about sitting in the same place, doing the same stuff, gazing longingly out of the window and then seeing there's nothing of interest outside there - yet still wishing you were out there all the same - immediately discarded by the brain as being too similar to other experiences, too repetitive, too insipid to be turned into anything approaching a memory.

But that isn't depressing. I don't find that disheartening at all. There's something quite comforting about seeing the same faces every day at the bus stop or on the train carriage; seeing the same people in the same place where you work, and doing the same things, maybe in a slightly different order, but with exactly the same outcome: no outcome of any demonstrable benefit to your life other than the money that you've racked up in your bank account by having done it, and the possibilities, beyond paying interest on crucifying debts, that the money gives you. I don't find that something that makes me unhappy at all, beyond a slight sense of being crushed into submission, a growing suspicion that I've had for some time that those dreams I had for so long aren't quite going to work out in the way I wanted them to.

That's a different feeling from depression, although that kind of constant repetition can add to a sense of malaise, a sense of being unfulfilled, an idea that you haven't quite done what you wanted to do and have therefore failed - and that can't help when you aren't the cheeriest face on the block in the first place. But I think it helps for me to see that kind of disappointment and frustration as being something separate from depression, firstly because I think it is, and secondly because there are other symptoms, far removed from those "I'm fed up" long deep sighs that go on for days, which it's important to focus on - especially if I'm going to be able to recognise if things are getting better, or worse, or are staying the same as I go through this little venture of mine.

Things at the moment aren't quite like one drizzly day after another. There are tiny things to notice, tiny changes which may mean nothing or may mean something, they may be the other side of the arc, having entered medication, now leaving it. It's hard to piece them together but I merely present them for my own memory, not to suggest any wider pattern.

There's a sense of lightness, a queasiness perhaps, maybe a jittery quality to my thoughts, and my mood seems closer to being on the verge of emotional spikes or plummets than it usually is - though that may be the result of other things which are going on at the moment and needn't necessarily be because of this. I try not to draw conclusions - I just experience, and I log it all, and I think about it afterwards, to see if anything keeps turning up. At the moment, a slightly frantic feeling, a desire to get things done, a quickness to frustration and feeling wounded when it doesn't quite work out. More than usual, I'd say, though do I mean usual for before I started medication or during? I don't even know as I write it, but I think I'm thinking back only over the past couple of years or so.

And there's the tendency towards anger, as I expressed yesterday. I wouldn't even want to pretend that this blog represents some kind of contemporaneous journal which records my every waking thought, because it doesn't; but in the interest of accuracy I think it's understandable to be angry on here if I feel angry elsewhere; it's telling the parts of the story that seem relevant to me, as far as my own feelings are concerned. I always give as good as I get, anyway; and I get scrappy when I feel like I'm being patronised by others, even if it's not necessarily the case that I am.

I can't pretend otherwise and write this entire blog as a stoical, heroically brave adventure in which I always succeed and react in the right way. Quite often, when behaving as my true self, I don't succeed at all, and I feel useless and ridiculous, and I get angry when I shouldn't, and I feel disappointed in myself afterwards for having done so.

There are flashes of anger, and regret. But it is all me. It is all the result of my choices and once written it shouldn't be unwritten or undone. If I write something I'm unhappy with, it would be dishonest to edit it, here at least. I wish I had a typewriter, as I used to do, so I couldn't even re-write those sentences that don't quite come out the way I want them to, and see the process of construction, and how the thoughts come out. But those days are gone. You'll just have to take my word for it that this is how it got written, and I didn't polish anything, because this isn't the sort of thing that should be polished; it just is, and it's here, and it comes out how I think it, and I don't try and construct anything. To do otherwise might be to miss out on the good stuff, the tangents that work.

Anything to avoid the drizzle.

Apparently I'm wasting my fucking time

2009-10-06T15:41:00.000-07:00

writing any of this because I'm deluded about everything and being able to exist for a week without taking medication is nothing whatsoever and of no great importance. My GP says one thing, people in the comments under my previous post say another. No-one has a fucking clue, or to be more precise, they all have different clues. Look, I can only talk about this from my point of view. I'm not trying to make general points about other people's experiences; that's really not what this is for. Some people say the medication will last for weeks, others months, others days. Who am I supposed to believe? Any of you? None of you? Are you all wrong? You can't all be right.

I suppose that is the point of this - if I may use that overused dirty little word now associated forever in our brains by tawdry reality shows and people singing some fucking karaoke shite for their dead dads - journey is to explain and express what is happening to me, as it happens, without wanting to try and relate it to anyone else's experiences. I can't really do that if I want to be honest to myself, though of course I am interested to learn from other people's experiences as to how things go and how they progress.

It's just that the more I learn about what I am going through and what I am doing, the more I begin to realise that the only person who really knows, and who really understands, is me. I'm the only one able to try and interpret the things that happen - a slight buzzing, fuzzy feeling in the head, pins and needles in the tips of my fingers, a sense of panic without any real cause, which leaves me feeling a little anxious, tense, prone to anger. Or maybe I'm just making it all up? I don't know. Perhaps I'm exactly the same as I was when I was taking a tablet a day and entirely the same, and it's all just in my fucking mental head because I'm some kind of fucking dick who can't tell the difference between one thing and another, or who is just incapable of doing something simple, or understanding something simple.

But no. No. I'm not that. The uncertainty is being overcome by feelings of confidence, a confidence that has come ever since I decided to cease my medicated life. I'm not going to be derailed by other people telling me I'm experiencing nothing, or what I'm going through makes no sense, or that basically I'm just pissing in the wind. Fuck that. I know the things I feel. I know them because they are happening to me and to no-one else. This is me. These are the things I feel, and I write about them as accurately as I can. And if that makes me different from what you might expect, then just listen, and don't raise your eyebrows as if you know better, because do you know what? You don't. And I do.

Released

2009-10-06T09:21:00.000-07:00

So. I've been without medication of any kind (except for the odd blast of the asthma inhaler and a couple of painkillers) since Saturday, October 3rd. That's over a whole week in which it should have worked its way out of my system until, finally, there's nothing left of it. That's the theory, anyway, although there are those who say it takes a little longer than that for you to be completely free of all the symptoms, or the discontinuation syndrome.

It's hard to know if the bubble's settled in the middle of the spirit level with something as complicated as your own sense of contentment, or otherwise; it's so hard to know what the mean should be, or how much is too much, or how you should be feeling, all those other factors that affect your mood notwithstanding. Sense of unfulfilled life due to poor career choice in dying industry, with imminent threat of redundancy always around the corner? Yes. Sense of disappointment with many life choices? Yes. Sense of sadness and loss relating to people who aren't still around. Yes. But are they things that make me feel anything beyond regular frustration, ordinary weariness at the things that have gone wrong, the mistakes I've made? I'm not sure. But I'd like to hope that it's all small stuff, or if it's not small stuff, that it's big stuff I can cope with.

There's a feeling of escape, but also a feeling of adjustment; that the world is full of new possibilities - which were always there, of course, but which didn't seem like possibilities when I had to restrict my life to one of constant medication. I think there's a sense in which you imprison yourself a little with a regime of medication, particularly one which may well control your mind as well as your body; you get used to the feeling that you're submitting to some other control over you. It's not just a reliance on the medication but also a submission to it, a feeling of being overwhelmed a little, albeit in a benign way, just as you might feel when you're sitting in the dentist's chair or waiting for an operation, except stretched out over every day that you live.

When you aren't submitting to something else's control over you - even if you concede that the control it might have had over you was limited, and that you could possibly have made exactly the same choices had you not felt that something else was in control of you - you automatically feel more responsibility for your decisions, and your feelings. You think: well, this must definitely be me, now; now that there isn't anything else in the way. This must be what I'm like.

You also start to wonder if you're going to behave like an ex-con adjusting back to life outside of the regimented world of prison; or a family pet moving to a new home. You feel like it might be easier to go only a short distance to begin with; now that there's an entire world out there, you can go and do anything. Not, as I say, that you couldn't have done it all before. But now there's no excuse not to. It's nice to know that you could, if you wanted to, even though you don't.

It's a comforting thought when you're worried about straying into extremes of emotions. When you can restrict yourself to thinking that you can only feel certain ways, or that your feelings are in some way contained by medication, then it's as if you can relax. You can see the boundaries of where you can go, and you assume that you can't go over them; perhaps that's what makes you not go over them, although I tend to think the medication does have a strong role to play, and it's not all self-delusion. I just think the routine, and the knowledge that you're taking something, does have an additional effect, which is a calming one, a reassuring one.

And so, while I'm tentative at first, and it's difficult to cope with emerging into the escape of normality, whatever that might be, the freedom it offers is something to be celebrated.

The void

2009-10-01T14:35:00.000-07:00

I don't know if stopping these prescription drugs will leave me with a void where they used to be, or whether everything else will just fill the space that was left behind. It's hard to find hard and fast rules, because everyone's experience is so different. In the end you end up coming to the conclusion that you can't really come to a conclusion, because you're not the same as these other people, your experience isn't quite the same, that so many other factors are different in your life, and a million other reasons why everything is still unknown.

But if there is to be a void, it won't be the only one that I have. You come to terms with the absence of things, the absence of people, and although other things come along, and other people come along, there is still a void, a void of emotional expectation if nothing else, a jigsaw piece that other piece will fit - a shape that reminds you where something, or someone, used to be.

We all have these voids - the schoolfriend who moved house, and whom you never saw again; the friends you meant to keep in touch with, but you didn't; the exes you said you'd still be friends with, but aren't; the people you miss, because they aren't around any more. They all create voids, and you realise the voids are there when you think of their faces - the way they spoke, or their handwriting, or something as simple as how they looked when they were angry, or upset, or cheerful, or their face was contorted with laughter and the tears ran down their cheeks, and the tears ran down your cheeks too.

It's not so hard when you know that person is out there, somewhere, living their life blissfully unaware that you remember them, or maybe even aware, but as unable to contact you as you are to contact them; and sometimes it's better that way, because some people belong in a certain place, in a certain time, with a version of you that was maybe younger, or more naive, or less easily tired, or whatever. Maybe we keep an idealised imago of the people we lose touch with, and that suits us, because it means we don't have to see them again, and recall their bad habits, or faults and failings, or the things that frustrate us about them. Sometimes, though not all the time, it's better to remember those people who exist only as voids as the parts of them we liked the best. Sometimes you lose touch for a reason, and when you go back, you remember why, and it's disappointing.

But of course there are other reasons why there are voids. Sometimes you don't choose for people not to be in your life, but they go anyway, and there's nothing you can do about it. Most of us, as we get older, carry around the voids of others who have left us because they died. I know I do - so many more than I would like to have.

Grief itself is something that can lead to depression, I think, or a welling-up of feelings that can tip you into that way of being. A sense of hopelessness arrives, which overwhelms all those frustrated feelings of wondering why, of trying to work out how, of trying to understand those things that can't be understood - what it is that takes the wise and leaves me behind, someone so much less wise, someone so much less good. It's not just coping with the void itself, but knowing that the void will always be there; that you will always have to live as someone who has had someone precious, only to see them die suddenly - or, perhaps worse, wither away in a long drawn-out battle with an illness they couldn't ever hope to win, but tried anyway.

You begin to look at yourself and question yourself - you can feel guilty or responsible, though those feelings tend to fade away as you accept there were some things you could never change; but they're replaced by feelings of uselessness, when you realise that of course someone else's death wasn't your fault, because nothing very much is your fault, because you don't have the power to control other people's lives, and they will suffer and be hurt and die and there's nothing you can do about it. That can lead to depression too. When the one thing you want, more than anything ever, is for the person you love to stay alive, and you can't do anything about it except hope, and that hoping isn't good enough, and you're not good enough, and you don't get what you want, because this isn't about you and what you want, or what anyone wants: this is just about what happens, and you're just a spectator among many millions of spectators, not the protagonist in some grand narrative.

And then you have to come to terms with the fact that your heart will always be broken. That you will always have to associate a person you loved with feelings of grief as well as everything else you remember; that their void won't be the optimistic, rosy one you choose for those people who drifted out of your life, but one which is, no matter how full of cheerful and happy memories otherwise, always tinged by the fact you know how their story ended, and you know that it's ended for good.

Then there are voids that come with grief in other ways. It's realising that a person you relied on for love - unconditional love, in the case of a parent - and support, and everything that comes with that, won't be there for you. It's a selfish feeling that comes after all those that reach out to the person who has gone: it's where you realise that they can't be there for you again, despite all that they've taught you, despite all that they did for you; that they won't be there, and can't be there, to share anything else with you in the rest of your life. You can look up to the clouds and imagine they're looking down on you if you like, but you know they aren't, not really.

But if you can live with that - and I have for a while now - then you can get stronger because of it. If you can keep going, even when there is no-one to support you and no-one to help you, at least not the person you always went to for support and help, then you realise that you're stronger than you thought. If you can live with that, no matter how much it hurts and no matter how much you wish every day that things had been different and people who are gone were still around - if you can keep going despite all that, then leaving a void of medication starts to look like a much easier prospect, almost trivial in comparison, although it isn't. Just as when someone you love dies, you find love and support from other people, even though it's not the same, but you accept that it never will be; then when the support of medication is gone, you can look for that support from elsewhere, and probably get it too, if you feel ready to. And I do.

We all live with voids. My life is not especially tragic or sad, just as tragic or sad as yours is, or anyone's is. It just so happened I lost a few people a little earlier than I should have done, or hoped to do, and I always wish they could come back, but they won't. Maybe that is what made me strong, not what made me weak. Maybe that's what gave me the kind of strength to finally be at the point where I can feel like I'm going to beat depression; not what caused it in the first place. It's hard to get to a place where you can get to think like that. So hard. But maybe I'm there now. Maybe the voids don't hurt. Maybe they give you strength.

My last cigarette

2009-09-29T12:33:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, on Saturday morning, without fanfare or drama, I swallowed what will hopefully be my last ever antidepressant tablet with a mouthful of orange squash, looked out of the kitchen window and then got on with my day. It was an entirely unremarkable act which means nothing unless I find that I'm able to cope without it ever happening again, which is what I hope.

I'm aware, of course, that addiction to something as pervasive as nicotine is an entirely different pair of trousers to the kind of discontinuation syndrome associated with SSRI antidepressants. But I wonder if there might be some way of drawing parallels between the two. Having what might turn out to be my last antidepressant reminded me of the day I had my last cigarette, and how that marked a similar change in my life between everything that was before and everything that was after. Sometimes these things happen, and they do mark a change - not the towering epiphany of predictable fiction, but an event that really does mark a difference between one time and another.

It was January, and if I remember correctly I think that there were still Christmas decorations in the windows - I'm pretty sure there were. I'd been suffering with a virus, which was gradually getting worse and worse, although I'm not really the sort - or should that be, I wasn't really the sort - to make a fuss about my health, and I just tried the age-old masculine way of dealing with feeling weak and vulnerable: to plough on through it, to imagine it isn't there, to look strong when you feel weak, just to make sure that you don't attract a stray piece of pity on the breeze.

It was pretty cold outside, and I was walking back from the bus stop, having seen off a friend who lived on the other side of London and who needed to get home. I felt like a cigarette, even though I'd been coughing a bit, and sparked it up. It was almost impossible to inhale. I just remember the smoke lingering around in my mouth like dirty brown waste, curling about my mouth and nose as I struggled to force my breath out around it. There was no way I could even smoke. There was just cough after cough after cough. I had to stop and sit down for a moment, by the side of the road, because I was a bit dizzy. You know, nothing serious, but just felt like a little rest. And I managed to get home, boiling hot and cold sweat at the same time, all the time the breath struggling to puff out between the lips.

Cough after cough. What was going wrong? I remembered an age-old asthma diagnosis which I'd completely ignored a few years before; that was a long time, and a lot of cigarettes, ago, and nothing that bad had really happened to me. Cough after cough. Breath becoming shorter. Maybe I should lie down? That's what it felt like. Just lie down and you'll feel a bit better. Sleep for a bit, you're tired. Then it will all be OK. Breath getting shorter. Coughing. Short breaths. Heart thumping, jumping, jittery. Sweat. Dizziness. With every short breath it all got worse, with every time the lungs struggled to force the air out and in, it kept feeling worse, the slight pain in the chest, the tightness, the coughing, the puffing, the dancing lights.

Something was wrong. Sometimes you just get the idea: this is wrong. This is too wrong not to do anything about it. So I called an ambulance, which arrived a couple of minutes later, and then I was on it, sitting or lying (I can't remember which) with a mask over my face. Then there was a cold bit of air between the ambulance and the hospital, and I was in a wheelchair or on a trolley or something, and there were people looking at me, and I was a little more awake. Someone took blood out of a vein, and an artery, which made me feel queasy as I looked at it stickily jetting out; then there was quietness, just the hiss of the mask, the faint cool wisps of smoke around the face, and the breathing became longer, and then I returned to life, not that I'd ever gone, and maybe I'd never really been in danger, although I always do wonder what might have happened if I had decided to go to sleep, and I never really know.

Then there were hours spent quietly in the hospital, behind a curtain, listening to snatches of other people's conversations, seeing the odd bloodied face or body getting wheeled past. Did I want to call anyone? Did I want to let anyone know I was here? No. No, I didn't. I wanted to just be alone, so no-one knew what had happened; I wanted to be perfectly isolated, to be away from it all. And the doctor said, you really shouldn't smoke any more if you don't want this to happen again.

And so I didn't. I chucked the cigarettes in the bin on my way out to the taxi, which drove me home in near silence. The sky was lighting up with a greeny grey dawn, and one or two Christmas lights still flashed and buzzed on the sleeping houses. That was it. That was as close as I'd ever been to death, and it made me feel appallingly alone. It made me realise: it's the only thing you ever really do on your own. When it happens, as it might, you might realise what's going on, or you might not, or you might think everything's going to be OK, and it won't be, and then there will just be shining corridors, and hushed voices, and that will be that, and the curtains will be drawn shut around you.

There was no such defining moment to tell me that I had reached the point where it might make more sense to stop taking antidepressants. There was no sudden realisation, no epiphany of the kind that don't happen in real people's lives, no drama, nothing like that. Just a desire. Just a feeling that it might be the right time, and that I might be ready, and that I might just have sorted enough shit out to be able to cope with this.

I don't know if it'll be the last. It'll certainly be less dramatic than my last cigarette. But that's no bad thing. Instead of being forced into making the decision by being scared, I made it on my own, in a positive way. It won't be as significant a moment as quitting smoking, probably not, but it might be more worthwhile in the end.

I'd rather be depressed than lack compassion

2009-09-28T09:52:00.001-07:00

I filled in an application form for a job yesterday. Under the 'disability' section it mentioned mental health. And I thought to myself: is depression a disability? I really don't see it that way. I don't agree with that at all. In the same way that people with other 'disabilities' shouldn't be categorised by being sub-people, as being freaks or failures who can't do the same as 'normal' types, I wouldn't regard anyone with depression as being incapable. Or a lesser person. I find that kind of logic absurd.

The whole Gordon Brown debate has produced a predictable slew of antiquated attitudes towards mental health - have a look at the other place for my take on what I think Gordy should have said to Andrew Marr.

It's sad, but not unexpected, that people should still, nine years in to the third millennium, regard people who have depression as somehow incapable and in a sense sub-human. One commenter on the other post said, for example, that he wouldn't want a depressive making 'life or death' decisions. I find it hard to understand why. Are depressives naturally nihilists - does the tendency towards self-harm, or suicidal thoughts, make people with mental problems that much more likely to disregard the facts in favour of a gloomy, destructive conclusion? Or somehow a 'wrong' conclusion because a person's judgement is clouded by thoughts of depression which are somehow interfering with their day-to-day life?

How wearingly disappointing to see people come out with this guff in 2009. Disappointing, but that kind of attitude is still about. I am tempted to say it's a tendency of the political right - perhaps you could make a case for it being something to do with the "me first" school of compassionless conservatism - but to do so would be the stuff of lazy stereotype, the kind of thing that I'm trying to get away from by looking at mental health issues as being something bewilderingly complex, something intensely individual, something deeply personal - but ultimately something which does not wreck your life, or make you sub-normal, or make you anything other than an ordinary, flawed human being, flawed in a different way to other human beings, but just the same in every other way.

I'd rather be depressive than utterly lacking in empathy or compassion; I'd much rather feel things too much than not feel them at all, thank you very much. Does it make me more or less qualified to make decisions? I don't know. You could make a case for those of us who've been so close to death, through or own hands or through anyone else's, being more understanding of the feelings it brings about in ourselves, and others, and the value of a human life - those of us who made it through and have reason to be thankful.

There comes a point in coming to terms with being a person who is prone to depression, as I can quite cheerfully say I am, when you have to realise that what one person can see as an affliction or a disease can easily be seen by another as an advantage, a help, a way of understanding things more clearly. If you are the kind of person who experiences mood swings, or bleak moments, you are more capable of perceiving such things in others; you become more able to understand the reasons that lie behind behaviour, how people's personalities can be extraordinarily beautiful and impenetrable things. It's something to celebrate.

Would I be happy with my heart surgeon, my airline pilot, my MP, my Prime Minister, being a person prone to depression? Of course I would. I wouldn't mind at all. I would trust them just as I would expect them to trust me. I wouldn't mind because I know that depression is something you can gain strength from. By realising your weaknesses you can work harder on them, be honest about them, and get on with dealing with the things you're not so good at. Does depression affect my work? No it doesn't. There may be times when I feel like rubbish and I don't want to come into work, but I'd reckon that applies to a huge percentage of the population, not just those of us who have a recognised mental health issue.

There may be times when I feel emotional, but I don't think it makes me worse at what I do. It just makes me behave in the way I behave. There's a fuzzy line between those habits and traits you have from your childhood and from your genes, and those things you do and feel because of the chemical imbalances, ebbs and flows, highs and lows of being a person prone to depression. You can't put your finger on why you react the way you react in a given situation. It's foolish to imagine that you can, that somehow you can uncouple depression as a spectral presence which is separate from your personality, rather than a part of your personality itself.

I feel sorry for people who can't understand what depression is. I think that's partly down to us, though, those of us who are depressed, for not standing up for ourselves more and explaining it. We need to make it clear: it's not a handicap. It's not an absence of reason. It's not an absence of sanity. It's just who we are, and it varies tremendously from one person to another. It needs to be understood more, not ridiculed or dismissed. Because we're not going anywhere. And we're not worse than you.

Cat logic

2009-09-27T04:42:00.000-07:00

Digging through an old box of junk yesterday, I found a laser pointer. And thought to myself: I wonder if the cat would fall for it? I've seen it on the TV but never in real life. So I gave it a go, and pointed the little shiny red dot at the floor, near the cat's feet.

My cat, who I might add is quite feral and generally not terrifically playful, looked at the trembling red orb for a few seconds, entranced, hypnotised. She watched it flicker across the carpet. She sniffed it to see if she could detect any life there. And then sat back, curious, perplexed. There had to be something there - there was something moving, after all, the kind of jerky movement which is hard-wired in a predator's brain to trigger the urge to attack. But when she approached the laser point, there appeared to be nothing there. The nearer she got to it, the less sense it made.

The cat looked up at me and I feigned ignorance. I pretended to have no idea where the little red dot had come from or what it was. It seemed better that way, to maintain the mystery.

Eventually, though, the cat gave up. So what if she couldn't understand it; she couldn't understand it. No amount of jerky prey-like movement was going to convince her to bother chasing it any longer, because she knew there was nothing there.

I found myself feeling slightly jealous. Here was something mysterious, inexplicable, tantalising, and the cat, legendary creature of curiosity, could simply walk off and do a crap in the geraniums without a second thought about it. No wondering. No thinking about it. No trying to work out where the light had come from or what it was, or what had caused it, or why it went away, or anything, or nothing. And then just carrying on with the day, and leaving it at that.

So jealous. Animals don't try to understand these things. I wonder sometimes if it's worth trying to understand those things we can't understand. I wonder if it might be easier just to walk away, not to give it a second thought, not to try and work out the reasons, or the causes, or the wherefores about it all, and just leave it behind. If only that were possible - but I don't think it is. Curious types like me just have to keep unravelling, have to keep being tangled up in the threads; maybe curiosity will kill us, after all.

So, yesterday was the first tablet I took in a week. I couldn't feel any difference. I didn't even notice anything. I didn't feel any different. I wonder if that's a good thing or a bad thing. I wanted to see some evidence that after a week, taking a tablet would bring about a rush of chemical imbalance, like that first cigarette used to after days of not smoking; but there was nothing. There was an absence of feeling, an absence of change. It felt as if nothing had changed, and the tablet had not made any difference.

And I kept asking myself why, or how, or trying to work out what that might mean. But maybe some things are just dots on the carpet, and there isn't anyone holding the laser pointer, and you just have to get on with it, and forget it, and never think about it again.

A little cry

2009-09-24T02:25:00.000-07:00

It's probably a scenario that goes on more often than you might think. Given that it's entirely a private affair, we don't know the extent of it, but I'm sure it's happening right now somewhere, and no-one else knows about it.

Sometimes we all get a bit teary. I'm less prone to this than I think I should be, really, but then there's no way of knowing how often people do get that way. All I have to go by is the people I know, but then I know how much I hide from them, so it's not very easy to judge.

But, every now and then, it happens. I don't know if it is anything to do with the coming off antidepressants making me a bit more sensitive, or whether I've just had a bad week anyway - which happens - or it might be the fact I was back in my home town at the weekend, which brings a few unwelcome feelings and memories pouring back into my mind; but whatever it was, I suddenly felt a little bit weary yesterday afternoon, and felt the need to be on my own for a bit.

The toilet cubicle at work - there's something so banal and frustrating about the location that it probably makes it easier for you to be in touch with those childish emotions that make you cry: the frustration, the despair, the foot-stamping it's-not-fairness that you tried to abandon when you were about four years old but has still lingered around ever since, no matter how much you've grown up in other ways.

There, behind the tasteful formica walls, you can blub away as much as you might like, with the flush as an emergency sound to mask the involuntary heaving of your chest, should someone else go into the room. A private little space that's meant for catharsis, albeit in a more fundamental sense than just releasing some salt tears, but it'll do. No-one can see you, and you can just relax into it for a few minutes, and dry it all away.

And then you emerge from it all, back into the world of work, the same indistinct rattle of keyboards and hum of computers; the same trilling of phones and murmur of conversations. And you look around and you realise that you've managed to conceal it from everyone, again; you've managed not to show them you're weak - you've managed to keep that mask on for a little bit longer.

Next time, you might not be so lucky, and someone might catch you with a tear in your eye while you're on the stairs or something. There's always that danger. But at least, for now, you can be perfectly alone in it, isolated away from all those human beings around you, without needing to explain anything. And that's quite a comfort, in a way, not having to expose that vulnerable side to anyone other than the people you really want it to. Whether we like it or not, it's easy to be marked down as that crazy person, that overemotional person, that mad person. Better to hide it all away, and keep it from them. Then they'll think better of you.

And so, I did. And that was that. And today, I don't feel so teary - just a bit sad that I do get that way sometimes. But I do.

No need to panic. No need to worry that it's something going wrong. It's not something going wrong; it's something necessary. But still, above all, something secret. A little cry. Forget it and get on with your day. Be strong, even though you're not.

Doubtful

2009-09-22T09:07:00.000-07:00

I don't mind admitting that as time goes on, I feel nervous about the prospect of what's happening.

As things progress, the reality of having that umbrella of medication taken away becomes closer and closer. And you start to think: Was this really a good idea after all? What the hell am I doing? Why should I try and emerge from the security - even if it's only illusory - of medication in order to try and escape back into the real world and into a semblance of normality, just to see if I can?

But it is more complicated than that, as everything seems to be, the more you look at it. Sometimes I wonder whether it's really a good thing to look at things more and more - whether it's like staring at your thumb, when the thing that is in reality completely normal and unremarkable begins to look like an alien object, a discomforting sight that jars in the mind.

But then, that's the price you have to pay for curiosity. How much easier it would be to simply be able to scull along the surface of life, not worrying about what might lurk all that way underneath; but this isn't something that I can do, as it turns out. I have to know. And perhaps it's a good thing to know; and through knowing, to be able to make things better than it has been.

And then there's the hope that investigating all this, going through all this process of understanding, will give me the toolkit to avoid future problems. And then there's the hope that being unmedicated might make it easier to differentiate between the problems that should really cause stress, and grief, and uncertainty; and those which should be mocked out of existence, and ignored, and ridiculed.

There's still plenty of doubt, though. Is this really the right thing to be doing? How much better will my life be now that it's happening? How much better do I want it to be? Will this be real protection, or nothing at all? And if it isn't, does that matter, or should it matter?

All those questions get louder and louder as the time ticks down to that moment when finally the body will be free of this medication, and hopefully free of it for good. The nervousness isn't a bad thing. It's a way of remembering just how important this is to me, and just what might be at stake.

Fear of failure

2009-09-20T15:02:00.000-07:00

Fear of failure isn't necessarily a bad thing - but failure isn't necessarily a bad thing either. The fear makes you want to succeed, and success is why you do things in the first place; the failure itself can be a place where you have to work out why you didn't achieve what you wanted, to pick yourself up and keep trying - and to feel the pain of failure, which hopefully galvanises you to do better next time.

You can't avoid failure; it's one of those things that will keep popping up everywhere throughout your life. At least, it will if you try to succeed. If you don't try, you can't fail; but then you can't succeed either. Life without failure would be a bleak, barren affair, because there would be no chance of success, just a series of no-score draws from here to the forever. And I can't really live that way, in a torpor of banality where nothing changes, but nothing can ever be achieved.

I'm afraid of failing in this experiment, or journey, or whatever you want to call it. I'm worried about things going wrong, and me not being able to live without antidepressants regulating my mood for the rest of my life; I'm worried that if I can't do it this time, the kind-of second time I've tried to rid myself of antidepressants, then that will be it, and there won't be another time, and I'll have no choice but to continue taking them, and that will be that, and I can't change, and I won't have the ability to control my own life, insomuch as medication and depression are concerned.

That would feel like a failure, and I'm afraid of it. That's not a bad thing. It means that I have an incentive to carry on with what I'm doing, to make sure that I'm in the best frame of mind to keep going, that I'm able to look at what I'm doing and think it's the right thing to do - which it is, as far as I'm concerned. I need to get this right and I need to do it properly. I need to be able to achieve this, and through achieving it feel that I have more control on my own life, my own destiny, than I thought I did, even if that might have been an illusion and it was my decision all along to do everything, including continuing with a situation I found unsatisfactory for so long.

But failure isn't always bad. Failure isn't always wrong. And trying and failing isn't the worst thing you can do - as I've said, it's failing to try that is the real corrosive influence on a life. It's the inability to try, when the fear of failure gets the better of you; that's when you feel helpless, and hopeless, and those feelings of inadequacy, and despair, and isolation... when they all come rushing at you, and overwhelm you, and make you feel powerless to do anything, even the smallest little thing, let alone attaining those dreams you always had.

It also depends how you regard failure, and how you know when you've achieved your goal. In my case in this situation it's a tangible thing, a certainty, a binary challenge in which there will be only failure or success, of a sort. If I manage to live without antidepressants - for the foreseeable future - then that will mean that I've done what I set out to do. If I can't, then I can't, and that's pretty much that - until the next time I feel able to try and make a run for it, to break out of the chemical cell, to escape the grasp of medication that makes me feel I'm not completely myself any more.

But it's not always that simple to define success or failure. A depressed person might see everything as a failure, might see even the slightest setback as being evidence of a pattern of failure, of a narrative in which every attempt to get anything right is met with defeat and disaster. That's a question of perception, although it's not easy to set yourself away from that narrative if you're convinced it's taking place; sometimes you need other people to remind you all the things you have achieved, and all the reasons why you're not hopeless. Sometimes it's easy to lose sight, and I know I have done many times along the way. Depression, or my experience of it anyway, is characterised by that perception, by that relentless negativity, by that lack of optimism - the optimism I spoke about in a previous post on here, which is now present, and which represents a turnaround in my life from the way I used to look at things. How it changed around is a longer story than I have time for in this short post, at least, but it has a lot to do with chipping away at that negativity, tackling it in small steps, not trying to wrestle it to the ground and defeat it but look for tiny positives, really small victories, things which you might otherwise see as neutral or insignificant but to give them the status of something gained; and then to add those up, one at a time, and take it from there and see how you get on.

Easy to say all this now, from this position, here. But I know there have been times when I have been relentlessly negative about everything. It's hard to reassure someone who feels that way - who feels that things go wrong again, and again, and again. I know that those close to me have felt such frustration and such helplessness themselves at not being able to make me see the positives in life - and I will always be disappointed in the way in which I rejected their attempts to make me feel better and acted so selfishly and unfairly towards them.

How does it change? Sometimes a change of luck is important. It's worth bearing in mind that some people, when they claim to be the victims of a series of miserable disappointments, may well be telling the truth. They may well have suffered a series of setbacks which have left them feeling that it's almost impossible, if not completely impossible, to see a way back to a place in which they feel able to do anything other than be a victim in their own narrative.

Also, though, is being able to live with disappointment - to be afraid of it in the sense that you don't want to fail, but not to be afraid of feeling disappointed. Disappointment doesn't last; it only keeps going if you want it to, if you keep fuelling it. Things go wrong, as they do from time to time, and there's nothing you can do about it. Sometimes you make mistakes, and you regret it bitterly; other times you did everything you could, but it still wasn't enough. Either situation can lead to feelings of anger, frustration and powerlessness. But then they need not last forever.

So there are ambitions I still hold, which I keep going with, despite the constant tide flowing in the other direction. I still want to be a writer for a living, despite never having been able to hold a writing job down, despite my best efforts having been turned away and politely refused for the best part of 15 years now. The fact that this hasn't yet can be viewed in a couple of ways. You could see it as evidence that I'm not good enough; you could see it as evidence that my wondrous talents have yet to be discovered or judged fairly. I think it's probably neither of those and it's a little more complicated, probably involving elements of both assessments.

But I think there's another thing worth saying, which is this: that success comes in achieving what you set out to do. So I want to be a writer, and look, I have one decent blog which gets a good few people through the turnstiles every day, which makes me happy and which keeps me cheerful, even on those days when I get things wrong or when people aren't interested in what I have to say, which is fair enough; and I have this project here, which I find personally satisfying and useful as a way of recording my feelings on this subject from day to day, but which might not necessarily be as popular or as interesting as the other site, which is perfectly understandable.

Whether they're popular, or loved, or hated, or just ignored, that's not the reason why they're here. They're here because I need to write them, I enjoy writing them, and that to me is a degree of success. I find that arrangement highly satisfactory. Do I enjoy it? I wouldn't do it if I didn't; there's no commercial pressure on me to keep doing this, so it's purely out of continuity, and the desire to do a decent job of it, and the fact that simply getting the words out and written and done is a victory in itself, after so many years of being afraid that I could never be brave enough to write anything anywhere for anyone.

So I do still have fear of failure, and that's a good thing - I don't want to screw things up at home, at work, or anywhere else, or here. But if you give everything and it doesn't quite work out, then that's not failure, that's just not getting what you want, and there's a difference. For years I feared feeling that way, and couldn't bring myself to try. Just trying a little brings a little confidence, even if there are setbacks, but you get stronger every day, and you learn to see off the trolls and the people who get a kick out of hurting others. And you think: fuck you, I'll do what I want.

And then you've won.

Insomnia and other delights

2009-09-18T15:21:00.000-07:00

I am, at heart, a bit of a chronic insomniac. I say 'at heart' because I'm not really an insomniac in reality any more. I think understanding a little bit about this might help me (or you) understand my depression a little bit more and try to work out exactly what it is.

Many are the times I've simply not been able to sleep - like a bluebottle banging its head against the glass it doesn't know exists, trying to work out how to get through it... that's how I often feel trying to get to sleep but not knowing what it is that's preventing me from doing so. The mind races and chirps away; there's a constant background hum of thought, not necessarily distressed or uncomfortable thoughts, but rather an unsettled quality, a nervous energy, a buzzing, if you like, just the knowledge that something's there and I can't rest until I've worked out how to ignore it. Something like that.

I come across this pattern of behaviour often. People develop ways of coping or ways of looking at it. For me it's fairly straightforward - it's simply a case of trying to pass the time until I'm too tired to do anything else. It's a case of accepting that I won't be able to sleep, not attempting to force it to happen, and waiting for the inevitable, and not stressing about the fact that I can't sleep, because that, if anything, creates something of a vicious circle and makes the intensity worse, the heartbeat increase, the tension feel ever more present.

Of course it hasn't always been like that. The number of times I've sat gazing at a TV screen or a computer screen, my eyes almost dried out, with the first blast of green dawn shouting through the curtains, the whole world waking up, the whole world never knowing I've been awake, and didn't sleep, and didn't happen upon any epiphanies or revelations or dreamt any dreams.

It's a fairly lonely existence because not everyone is an insomniac, and if you are you are, and if you're not, you're not; and I do link it to depression, in a lot of senses. Some people will link the two things closely, and recall times of depression as having coincided with times of insomnia, and vice versa. Does one cause the other? I don't think so. I think there might be another thing at work here, where there's some overriding factor which creates the conditions for both. Both can be caused by being unable to switch off, being unable to deal with or process complex thoughts or emotions, and letting them bubble away in the background, niggling away at you, scratching at you, irritating you, forcing you to stay alert and wary, and not be relaxed, and not be able to be content. There's a sense of agitation about both, a sense of restlessness, a sense that something isn't quite right.

Now this isn't always the case. Many people I know would associate depression with quite different feelings, those of torpor or inertia or feeling slothful. And while I can understand that, that's not the case with me. For me, depression is the failure to cope. It's the failure to cope with the rush of feelings that come about with unresolved thoughts; it's a sense of failure in itself, not necessarily uniquely attached to that, but in itself a despair, a feeling that you can't cope, that you can't deal with things, that things are overwhelming you. And that's the same thing I feel about insomnia - the same mass of thoughts, the same being unable to put things to rest, the same being unable to relax and concentrate on calmness, and being forced to go over and over and over things in the mind.

But... I'm not an insomniac in reality. I very rarely go without sleep. I'm the kind of person who has the ability to go without sleep, or rather the potential to suffer sleeplessness, if you want to look at it that way, and I think I rather would. I am someone who can be troubled by thoughts and the feeling of isolation and loneliness, and it's easy to slip into those patterns once again, when I find myself on my own, and when things aren't going spectacularly well, and the same old questions start to appear. But... I have found a way of dealing with it, which means while I have the potential to suffer from sleeplessness, it doesn't affect me too strongly.

How I get around it is simply to try and structure my life a little better, to have routine, to have things mapped out in front of me, to think about a tomorrow as well as a today. Not easy, all the time. But it's good if I can, because that means I can look ahead, and the body becomes used to sleep at a certain time, rest at a certain time, activity at a certain time. That expectation brings about calmness and reassurance. It might be repetitious, but it seems beneficial, to me at least. I know it's not the same for everyone, and many people prefer to have the potential to drive to Scotland barefeet scoffing Toblerone - not to do it, but just to have the option to do it. And I understand that. I just feel quite content knowing I never will, even if I could.

Just by a bit of tidying-up of personal habits, and having a more regulated life, and taking some things out of my control, and leaving other things to other people, I find that I'm able to look forward, and avoid the restlessness and chatter that brings insomnia knocking at the door. It follows in my mind at least, because I associate depression and insomnia so closely together, that this may be part of the key that will allow me to wave away the vapours of depression when they begin to gather around me - if they do - once the medication has worn off. That's the idea, anyway. Perhaps just accepting that things need to be ordered, and kept simple, and you're more capable of dealing with things if you sleep, and have a run-up at them, rather than by worrying and fretting and stressing over them into the empty hours of the early morning... well, that's the plan.

And another thing: if I find myself staying up an hour late, or not dropping off to sleep straight away, I don't worry that I'm sinking into insomnia; I just think, well, this day is different from yesterday, and different factors apply, but sleep will come, in the end. It's that being able to see a resolution that's important. I think it will be worth remembering that when it comes time to assure myself that I'm not sinking into depression, that one bad day doesn't equal a problem, that a bad week doesn't mean we're back to the bad old days, that a feeling of sadness, or frustration, or anger doesn't necessarily mean that everything will come crashing down. Maybe that's the easy bit.

Maybe by being here in a place when I can think that I've already done the hard work.

The secret life

2009-09-16T08:17:00.000-07:00

I'm one of those people who is quite secretive about the fact I've been ill in the first place, about the fact I've been on medication, and now about the fact I'm stopping the medication and attempting a soft landing back in the world of reality, or whatever passes for it nowadays.

I'm not really one of those braver types who can shout about it from the rooftops, or be extremely honest about what they've been through or are going through - not in "real life" anyway. I can do it on here, that's perfectly easy - the anonymity, the mediation and the distance make it much less stressful to be confessional. I don't have to see any of you ever, let alone again; so there's no need to worry about how I might alter your perception of me if I tell you that I have had mental health problems. It's straightforward enough to tell a person who has a neutral involvement in your life; or who doesn't know you at all; or a friend, whom you know (or at the very least hope) will be sensitive to your feelings and predicament.

But I can't take it to that other level with those other figures in your life, and I will explain why. I've told people who've been my boss, and they have always been sympathetic and understanding - and I have appreciated that. But other people, ordinary work colleagues - no. Never. There's no way that I could ever really understand any of that, or let myself do that. It's too dangerous and I worry about what would happen.

It's simple enough, the way that I look at it. I hear chatter from others. Everyone chucks around words like 'mad' or 'mental' or 'loony' as a bit of fun - which of course it is. I just don't want to be seen as 'that mental guy' or 'that mad person' or to have anything I ever do attributed to mental health rather than the fact I've chosen to do it. I don't want to get upset with someone because they've upset me, and for them to dismiss my concerns as me just being that person with the mental health problem who doesn't have a legitimate grievance. I know that most people are decent and kind and that there really isn't anything to worry about - and that if people are going to stereotype you then they're the kind of people you shouldn't have anything to do with - but that doesn't help. I'd just rather people didn't know; that they could just see me for who I am rather than see me through the prism of illness - an illness which may well not be a massive factor in my life any more, once I'm through all this, and which could therefore be even more irrelevant, if such a thing is possible (and I'm not sure it is).

The downside to that stance is that there's no way of sharing the ups and downs with people around me. It's hard to say that you feel cheerful because the progression of coming off drugs is working out better than expected; and it's impossible to come out and say that you felt a bit wary because you knew you were embarking on this mission to stop the medication. All of that is a secret, and all these strange and magnificent changes, this whole story arc, is missing from me, in those other people's eyes at least. I don't know whether that's a tremendously good thing or not, but it does mean they can just see me for me, and not for anything else.

And that's why it has to stay secret, for now.

Back to normality

2009-09-15T08:24:00.000-07:00

...whatever that is. That's the hope anyway. I suppose in a sense antidepressants are there to provide normality, not suppress it - I imagine that's why the pleasant-sounding brandname of Prozac is so close to 'prosaic - but I can't help feeling that whatever state they put you in, it's not normality. Perhaps a better version of normality than you might have previously been in when you were suffering from depression and anxiety, of course, but is it any more real? And does reality even matter, if you aren't as miserable as you once were?

Perhaps that's one of the key reasons why antidepressants are, if not addictive, then difficult to give up, the side-effects of doing so and SSRI discontinuation syndrome notwithstanding. I think taking antidepressants puts you in a place that has a very convincing verisimilitude to it, so comfortable and reliable that you think to yourself: Why not keep being like this? What do I have to gain by not being like this? I don't think that's dangerous, but it is difficult to look at it as being a situation that's ideal.

Easy for me to say that now, of course, now that I've embarked upon this journey into the unknown and an endeavour to live an unmedicated life again. And if you had asked me three months or six months or a year or two years or three years ago whether I would like to stop taking antidepressants, I think I would have asked you why I should. Why change? When things are going along reasonably well, then why change them? Or to put it another way: when you have emerged from one negative situation (depression) by entering into one that is less negative (medicated life) then where is the harm in continuing that?

Well, I don't think there is an actual harm. But something doesn't have to be actively harmful for it to be better for you to not do it any more; that's the way that I look at it anyway. It's a bit more subtle than thinking that medication does me harm. I don't think it does. But I do think life is preferable without it; that's the distinction. Life would be better if I didn't have to take medication in order to prevent myself from being miserable and unhappy - and that's a goal worth wanting to achieve.

You have to balance that desire with what you might risk. At the moment, I don't think there is any risk, other than by considering that I may have failed if I'm unable to achieve what I want. But I think that's a risk worth taking. Feeling a failure isn't a particularly bad thing to feel anyway, depending on how you look at failure and what you think it means for you, and that's something which I will probably write about in a future post. So, that considered, it's worth trying. If you don't try, you don't know. And for me, at least, I have to know. I've got to know.

Normality, then, or something like it, is what I'm looking for. It may well seem exactly the same as medicated life, as this life seen through the vaseline filter of antidepressants, which makes everything just a little softer, just a little fuzzier. It might feel exactly like this. It might be exactly like this. In which case, I've lost nothing, except the cost of a prescription every couple of months. If it's different, then that's the reality I wanted. And if that reality makes me feel a little less happy, a little more sensitive, a little more anxious, then I'm prepared for it - I'm braced for it, and I think I can take it. I can take a certain amount, at least. How much I can take, I don't know. But that is to expect the worst to happen, and while it's sensible to imagine the worst, it's not right to expect it. There's no need to expect it.

I just want to feel that life is normal, that I am normal, that I am capable of living with those things which made me feel, some time, long ago, that I couldn't cope and I couldn't carry on the way things were going - those feelings of despair, or dismay, or disappointment, or fear, or grief, or guilt, or loss, or whatever. Whatever it was, it doesn't matter too much. The problems that I'll come across on my return to real life, or what I might think of for want of a better word as normality, may be the same as the ones I managed to elude through taking antidepressants in the first place; they may be different; there may be fewer, or more, or the same amount. Things I saw before as problems I may no longer see as such. Things I didn't, I might.

But whether things are better or worse, they will be experienced without the mediation of medication, and that's something worth striving for.

People are kind

2009-09-13T08:54:00.000-07:00

It might strike you as odd, given the kind of cynical, misanthropic outpourings that pass for legitimate content on my other blog, that I should look at people as being kind. But I think they are, on the whole - surprisingly so, given all the greed, selfishness and violence that does exist in the world. As I've said before over here, I am an optimistic kind of person, and I am feeling that way right now - and there's no reason to suppose that things might change in that view, even if circumstances change or I get doinked on the back of the head with a Pepsi bottle by a couple of laughing kids on bicycles later this evening.

No. I do believe in people. And the response from people that I know - and people that I barely know in real life, but largely through mediated electronic communication - has been astonishing since I decided to try and start this blog. People are kind, and people are decent, and people do care about other people, even people they don't really know that well. People care not because they get anything out of it but because it's the right thing to do. At least, that's what I think. I am cynical about life in general, about many people's motivations, but as far as these past few days have informed me, all I can see is a lot of good wishes. And it does mean a lot.

So, how are things going? Well I am now at the stage where I am on a gap of a couple of days before I take medication again. The gap is quite a relief because it's the absence of medication that is important, not its presence - it's during those times of absence that any negative effects might be felt by me, or where things might potentially go wrong. The longer the absences can become without anything going wrong, the better it is. The longer I can stretch the gaps, the better, until there are no gaps at all - until ordinary life is a gap, an absence, a void.

Except it won't really be a void in the sense of Georges Perec's protagonist, the man who disappeared in La Disparition, whose name I took for my life on the internet and whose story seems rather relevant - a man who disappeared. Perhaps that's how I felt when I started taking medication, and why the name appealed, far more than the idea of simply seeing a vowl disappear from the alphabet. I liked the idea that someone who had existed could suddenly go missing - that's how I felt a few years ago, which is why I began taking the tablets in the first place. I felt like I was a character in my own life who had disappeared, and that I was somehow the detective trying to piece together what had happened, to try and put together the clues, to try and work out where I had gone, and where I had been, and who I was.

The life I imagine in the future will be a lot more like a presence rather than an absence. The absence of medication will mean the presence of the unmedicated me - who may well, after all, be exactly the same person who existed under medication, or who may be somewhat different. I am looking forward to the presence of the 'real' me rather than the me who is around at the moment - that's what I'd like to think.

Drugs I've taken

2009-09-11T07:07:00.001-07:00

I thought it might be helpful to put some of this into context by having a look at some of the drugs I've taken down the years. I'll leave out the "self-medication" and look solely at things I've had that are available via prescription.

The first thing I ever took was this

medical name escitalopram, which came in a friendly box with a nice picture of a stick-man standing over a rippling pond - or at least, that's what it looked like to me. I think the idea was to try and convey some idea of calmness and tranquillity, which was what happened, after the initial period of adjustment and sinking into it. It felt a bit like rolling around on a giant carpet for a while, a giant beige carpet that felt safe and reassuring and warm. It stopped a lot of the anxiety I'd felt beforehand, which was a good thing, and it made me less nervous and tense, which was also good. That didn't last, and there came the time when the dose had to be upped.

I remember yawning, lots of yawning. Feeling like yawning almost all the time, and a slight pressure on the side of the head, at the temples. A slight laziness, a little grumpiness, and that was how it made me feel. Did everything go away? I don't think it did. But it meant that the parameters of how I felt were altered and restricted; they moved from extremes to being less exaggerated. It felt less possible to be extremely angry, or upset, or frustrated, or even delighted. It felt like there were restrictions in place, whereas before you could fall as far as you could, and there'd be nothing to catch you at all.

Eventually, it seemed the effectiveness wasn't as good as it had been. We're talking about a good three or four years later now. So there came the first change in medication, to a brand that's very similar, albeit slightly different

(medical name citalopram) which had similar feelings attached to it. Though this came at another time, in another location, when my circumstances had changed, so it's difficult to compare the two drugs like-for-like. This seemed less and less effective - was it the medication or was it just underlying feelings trying to escape out of the restriction imposed on them by the medication? - and there came, quite soon after, another change, to these little jokers

and do you know what? Just the sight of that innocuous green-and-blue capsule makes me feel a bit queasy. These nasties didn't agree with me at all. I'm not saying they don't agree with everyone, of course, and I'm sure there are plenty of people for whom this particular medication has worked exceptionally well. But not me.

There were a whole host of unpleasant effects, some of which were obvious and startling, like awful constipation, or frightening rainbow-coloured bruises appearing on my skin at the slightest touch; some of which were a bit more insidious, like gently drifting off to sleep while driving along the motorway; and others, which were deep and dark and very difficult to deal with - other feelings which started to arrive. Now it's impossible to pin anything down to the medication itself, this duloxetine, but other feelings began to grip me at and around this time - harsh feelings, broken feelings, feelings of hopelessness and helplessness. It felt like my head was made of china, or pottery, all cold and rough to the touch, yet brittle and easily smashed... it was such a long, dark, miserable period. A violently horrible time, which took me from what had been a comfortable experience of medication to a place where I felt ready to do serious damage to myself, a place where I very nearly did, though maybe I'll talk about that another time.

Essentially I felt so sick, so anxious, so overwhelmed, I had to try and get off the tablets all in one go, cold turkey. That was an error, looking back, though it seemed like the only thing to do at the time. It was as if I was watching someone else living my life; I was completely and, it seemed, irreversibly detached from the soft, shapeless packet of blood and bone that was walking around in vaguely human form in my name and seemingly living my life in my place. There were staggering headaches, raging sleeplessness, awful moods... at a time when I had just moved house, changed job, and found myself distant, and away from everywhere.

I ended up going back on duloxetine, then cutting down, and finally 'washing it out' of my system, in a pretty painless few days, which led to a new arrival in the medicine cabinet, which was this:

Ah, the reassuring lemon yellow and lime of Prozac, or fluoxetine, to give it its proper and more medical name. This has taken me back to the time when I first started antidepressants, where there was a kind of comforting fuzziness about the whole experience, a smoothing-out of the rough edges and a reassuring lack of those other side effects which had made the previous drugs so bad for me personally. And so it's that that I've been taking for a good couple of years now, soaking it all up and keeping me on a fairly normal and even path. And it's this drug that I'm saying farewell to now, by cutting it down, by gradually waving it goodbye, and hopefully this will be the last one I'll ever take.

Exhilaration

2009-09-10T08:56:00.000-07:00

I find exhilaration a quite unexpected thing to be feeling at the moment. If anything I had expected the opposite: perhaps a sinking into a dark mood, or perhaps feeling less capable of dealing with things. I had also worried about feeling side-effects. But so far, no side-effects. And no feeling of darkness, or depression, or anything even approaching it.

No, instead there's been a quite surprising feeling, an anticipation, an excitement. I spoke about the feeling of fear being matched by excitement the other day; now it appears that the excitement is taking over from the fear. For now at least. But this brings problems of its own: I start to worry that this exhilaration will be something that won't be around forever, and that it might lead to some kind of crash a little further down the path.

There's no way of knowing, of course, but what is important is to try and keep my feet on the ground despite these feelings. It would be lovely to be able to just enjoy a feeling of exhilaration, just for itself, and imagine that it's something that can't be taken away, but that would be the kind of thing that could easily lead to disappointment or dismay when things don't quite turn out exactly the way I want them to.

As someone who has had to deal with mood swings down the years, you learn that things don't always stay the way they are. It's one of the ways in which you are able to deal with the down swings and the very dark times: by keeping it in the front of your mind that things will change, that everything can change, that you can change, and that the way you feel, particularly when it's unpleasant or miserable, won't last forever.

That's one of the lessons you have to learn in order to avoid feelings of despair or suffocation during those times when you're at your lowest. So it follows that you begin to see happiness as a transitory state, which of course it is, and learn that when you reach a state of being blissfully cheerful or optimistic or overwhelmed by happy thoughts, you might not be able to enjoy it for weeks, or days, or hours, or whatever.

On the other hand, there's no point in sitting around gloomily expecting a good mood to disappear into a bad one. You can't always pinpoint the reasons for happiness in the same way it's not always easy to deconstruct unhappiness or depression; so sometimes you have to just look at yourself and think: well, this is the way I feel, and I might not be able to fully understand why, but this is how I am, and this is what's happening, so I may as well accept it.

It's hard to accept these things, because sometimes you want to fight against it, especially when you're unhappy of course or feeling depressed. But you can't always fight it. Sometimes you just have to learn to ride it, and if it's good then you're going to be feeling good, and if it's bad then you're going to be feeling bad.

It seems sad, in a way, that I shouldn't be able to just think to myself: great, I'm feeling terrific, this must all be working and I'm on the right track. But it might not be anything to do with the cutting-down of antidepressants at all. It could simply be that the sky is blue and the sun's been out all day; or the leaves are pleasant in the trees, or I'm looking forward to things that are getting closer all the time. It could be all, or none, or some, or any. All I do know is that this isn't how I had expected to be. I had expected things to be a lot more difficult. It's a pleasant surprise that they're not, but that doesn't mean they won't be.

In the meantime, though, the sun is indeed shining, the last of summer, the last few warmish days before autumn really takes hold and the leaves really do start tumbling down. This time of year does bring back memories of starting afresh - starting a new school, or university; seeing summer away and looking ahead to the darker days. Darker in some ways, but perhaps not others. Perhaps.

Coming back to me

2009-09-08T07:50:00.000-07:00

It's not often that you experience something with equal amounts of fear and excitement, but that's how it feels at the moment. Excitement, because this will be the first time in about eight years or so that I haven't been 'medicated', self-medicated or prescription. Fear, because of the same reason really.

You have the idea somewhere along the line that perhaps your personality has been altered in some way by this, that somehow you aren't quite the person you might otherwise have entirely been had you not been taking the tablets. That of course could be right, but then again there's no way of knowing how you might have reacted differently to situations, short-term and long-term, had any factor been slightly altered. In that sense it's a bit fruitless to wonder about the what ifs and the maybes and the could have beens, because all you have is where you've ended up, and you ended up there somehow, and you might not have ended up there had any kind of thing not combined with any number of other things. All you can do is look at yourself and try and wonder who you are, and whether any of this will change you.

Having some kind of mental illness naturally makes you look inwardly, perhaps more than you might otherwise have done before, although it's hard to think in terms of a 'before' and an 'after'. It's tricky to pinpoint a time when depression began or when indeed it ended. There's the time you first felt that something might be wrong; then there's the point where you realised that you had to do something about it; then there was the time you sought help; or the time you started taking medication, or having therapy, or whatever. There is no date you can circle in the calendar and say that this is when it all began, or this was the event that sparked it all. There are one or two things, which I may well write about at some stage, which may be factors in all this, but it's hard to say whether there was nothing before and everything after, or whether it just made me realise the existence of something that had been around in one form or another for a long time.

Everyone's personality changes over time, perhaps not as much as we might like to think it can, even for those of us who have the misfortune (or fortune, some might say) of being one of those people who goes through the disasters and triumphs of dealing with depression. But I think there might be some sense of having more of a handle on who I am by not being on medication any more. At least, I think there won't be any excuses. It won't be possible to say "I didn't do this" or "It wasn't possible for me to do that" or anything like that, and use the excuse that it was because of depression, or because of medication to moderate and control depression. It's taking away a little bit of security that I might have relied upon for some time, which I suppose is another reason for the fear that I spoke about at the start of this post.

But there is excitement, too. Doing something like this forces you to look at yourself and forces you to analyse those things that have happened to you; it also forces you to look back and reflect on how things were before medication and how they might be afterwards, and whether it will really be any different or not, and whether that should matter. There's excitement that there's a goal to look towards and a place where you can look at called the future, where you might be different, and even if you're not, the fact that you're not is not because of any medication you might be taking.

Ironically, it was the feeling of a lack of future, of being caught in an ever-repeating present tense with unpleasant echoes of the past, which was one of the triggers for me seeking help about depression in the first place. Taking medication, or seeking help, or whatever it was that changed at or around that time, allowed me to look to the future without fear, without thinking that everything would repeat, or get worse, or simply be a version of the past that I couldn't cope with. Now there's a different feeling. There's the feeling that I am returning to being me. Not necessarily the 'me' that I was before I started taking medication, or being depressed; and not the 'me' I would have been had I never taken it: it's more along the lines of a 'me' who is the person who went through the experience of depression and medication, and is now changed by that, and isn't afraid of that, but who is looking to the future as well.

That requires optimism, as I said earlier, but it also takes a little sliver of courage: to take the leap into the unknown, to be prepared for the fear and not be unbalanced by the excitement.

Optimism

2009-09-08T02:44:00.000-07:00

It's not always a good thing to be optimistic. Most people I tend to know are natural pessimists, reasoning that if you expect the worst, then you can only be pleasantly surprised. I'm not sure if that's a good way to look at life for me, and besides, I just don't seem able to expect the worst.

Why, then, have I been through bouts of depression? It's possible, of course, that it's some kind of neurological imbalance of chemicals, a recipe that hasn't quite worked out right, and that simply by allowing the right amount of serotonin into my brain then everything is as it should be. I did think that was the case once, but nowadays that explanation just won't do. I'm not saying that isn't the case for many other people, but for me, it just won't suffice. I don't think I'm at the mercy of these funny little things like serotonin that I don't really understand; I'd like to imagine that there is some way of effecting a change on myself so that any kind of imbalance there may have been is rendered unimportant.

That's what I'd like to think - and you have to be optimistic to think that kind of thing. Pessimism leads to the kind of situation where I've imagined myself to be in a chronic state of depression, that there was no way of getting out of it, that there wasn't a way of escaping, or at least a path to follow to enable some kind of normality - whatever that is - to seep in. And I don't want to be pessimistic. In my mind, pessimism is resigning yourself to a situation you can't control, rather than attempting to control it - and possibly failing - but at least trying. I guess you don't really know until you try, and even if you do try, you might not succeed... but then even that failure is easy to take if it means you tried in the first place.

So, I'm feeling optimistic, then. Today is another day along the path, another baby step towards a situation I haven't been in for so many years. You have to be optimistic, or else you'd never take the step. At least, that's how it is for me. So here goes.

This is not like the other blog

2009-09-07T12:37:00.000-07:00

Just to warn you: this is not like the other blog. While that one is, at times, interesting, ranty and political, this one isn't. At least, I hope it's interesting, but it might only be interesting to me. Still, I'm publishing it and putting it out there into the ether, where some people might read it and some people might not.

This is just about me, which is why I've carefully ringfenced it away from the other place. And this is just the kind of blogging that a lot of people don't really enjoy, and I can understand that; too much personal shit - too much whining and whingeing and complaining about how things are so apparently important in my so-called life. I know. I know all that, you don't have to worry about that.

I hope this blog doesn't detract from your enjoyment of the other one. I'm sure it won't. And if you like the other one and not this one, then fair enough, because that's pretty much how I'd expect it might be. You don't have to read this one.

So while the other place has me looking at the usual targets and finding stuff to rant about - what some would call an 'attack blog' - this one is just a haphazard and generally banal set of thoughts and reflections on what it's like to take the decision to stop taking antidepressants, and some of the things I notice along the way - not really an 'attack blog' at all; more likely just a defence of myself, or a bit of self-indulgent nonsense, whichever way you might like to look at it, and I don't mind which way you do. In that sense, I hope it's going to be a finite thing, and that one day I can simply close the book and say, well, it's done. And that will be that. That's what I hope will happen, but of course there's no way of knowing whether it will or it won't.

This is why I find this blog interesting, at the moment: hopefully there will be some kind of narrative. Hopefully there will be some kind of progress, or maybe there will be nothing, and nothing will happen, or I might fail in my attempt to do what I'm doing. But that there is a hope means that there is hope. Things may well come together, and if they do, it will leave me with a pleasing feeling, and I'll be glad to have done this. I think whatever happens I'll be glad to have done this.

Making a break for it

2009-09-07T12:25:00.000-07:00

I think leaving behind antidepressants is going to be a bit like stopping smoking - not physically, but emotionally. It's like you're leaving something behind and starting something new. You've made a decision to change and you want to be the same, albeit different, when you're finished with it; and you have hopes and expectations that all will be well, and you'll be able to do it. You can see the empty fields that mean freedom: all you have to do is chuck the water fountain through the window and get on with your escape. That's a bit like how I feel, anyway.

Obviously I'm not going to just go and stop antidepressants overnight. That's not recommended at all. I know that while some people have done it and been fine with it, many more suffer terribly with the side-effects that come from giving it all up all of a sudden - slamming the brakes on tends to leave a bit of a mess, whether you want it to or not. So I've worked out a plan with my GP of tapering things down until eventually it's all gone and washed out of my system. Ironic to use the term 'washed out', I think, when washed out was how I felt when I started taking antidepressants - that or burnt out. I was as Burnt-Out a Case as the character Querry in Graham Greene's fine novel about the leper colony; I was someone who thought he was perfectly OK, but to others was clearly in trouble. I didn't really realise, but luckily I did, in time.

But, there it is. One tablet today. None tomorrow. One again the day after. And so on, for a while, until it's a two-day gap, then a three-day gap, and then we'll see how we feel. Hopefully, OK. And hopefully things will be all done, and gone, and there won't be the awful withdrawal symptoms you get when you're quitting smoking.

I don't think there will be, but what I worry there might be is some form of fear that my crutch has been taken away from me and that I'm totally exposed. I might feel a bit more vulnerable and brittle than usual. I might feel that things aren't really working out, and I might scamper back to the safety of the shadows, which is where I feel I am at the moment. But I don't want that safety and I don't want that crutch, deep down; I want to be free of this medication and able to look at myself and think, this is me, and I'm OK, and it's all going to be all right. That's the test. That's the worry. When you quit cigarettes you can easily go running back to it, and you feel a failure for a bit, but you can console yourself with the nicotine rushing back into your bloodstream. I don't know if that'd be the case with antidepressants, or whether I should even be worrying about that at all. I just don't know.

We'll wait and see.

Why do this?

2009-09-06T08:17:00.000-07:00

So here's what's going to happen. I am going to stop taking antidepressants. I have consulted with my doctor (as should anyone who is considering stopping antidepressants) and I've decided that the time is right for me to do this. This blog will be my explanation of what happens, how I'm getting on, what made me start doing this in the first place, and where I go from here.

It's something I've wanted to do for a while, to live without antidepressants. I've been taking them for six years now, different types with different characteristics and different side effects. Sometimes they've helped, I think, and sometimes they've made me feel worse.

But now I've reached the point where enough is enough. I don't want to have to depend on them any more and I want to see what life might be like without them. I don't know if it'll be different at all, or whether it'll just be the same but only without having to remember to take a tablet every day. There's no way of knowing until I do it, which is what I'm doing now.

Why write about it? Because I like writing about most things. I have another blog which I use for other outpourings, but this sort of stuff doesn't belong there. I think it might help me to write a diary-like blog about my experiences to try and come to terms with how my life might change and to reflect on my depression in general. We'll see how it goes. I might just get bored and bin the whole thing; you never know. I might not even be able to live without antidepressants, which is a possibility that needn't be ruled out.

So, here goes.