My Negative Perfection.

I am not the type of person to be negative or despondent in writing. I do my fair share of being negative with my husband, talking about things that annoy me and being mad at myself for being so annoyed. Though there is something about writing that I do not want to be negative. Maybe I feel like there is some magical power of saving your own text and it will change everything. Maybe I want to be someone else when I write, someone perfect. But I know that I cannot be perfect and perfection is nothing but an illusion. This is why I am writing right now in the first place.

Last week I just got over my period, and it was a bad one. I am talking negative, “why am I living” type of bad. I have been searching on google “been off of antidepressants” for an answer and I have found a couple. I have found people who are saying around the 6th month mark up to 12 months you have some sort of change and you feel withdrawal effects again. It is not like they ever went totally away but it gets worse during this time. WHY? Ugh! I was just starting to feel normal again, whatever normal is.

Back to the beginning, I am going to be negative now. I am going to change my ways to find out who I am because I am sick of being negative to people who do not deserve it. My husband is loving, generous and just tries to make me happy all the time, he shouldn’t have to put up with me crying and being negative. So here goes nothing, here is my negative thoughts, hoping they will shine a light to something positive:

I am so annoyed with myself sometimes. I have a feeling of emptiness inside me, that I am not living the “right life.” I feel like I should be someone else, I should be working somewhere else and I should look different. I feel like I have every symptom of ADD, OCD, Bipolar, depression etc. I FEEL TOO MUCH. I know deep down that I am on the road to recovery and that I need to learn to let go but it has been a constant struggle. For the last couple of months it has gone by okay, but there are still times, like this last period where I went to the deep end again. Someday I want to know the deep-end exists and wave hello to it. I do not want to go into it. Why? Because I know better. I KNOW BETTER. Right now I feel like I sound crazy which is one of my biggest fears. I have a constant burning fear inside of me that I am going to “sound crazy, look crazy or BE crazy.” I feel sometimes that I am fighting with myself, battling this emptiness and vacuum of anything happy. I have SO much to be happy about. I have a great husband who is there for me every second, my mom is amazing and sweet, I have adorable pets, a beautiful home and I have so much to look forward to in life. I know that, but why can’t my mind fully comprehend it? Most of the time I think it does, but there are these times where my brain plays tricks on me and tells me this is all an illusion and it will all fade away as quickly as it came. Someday I will be alone, scared and empty. Why does my mind switch to that form of thinking every time I realize how GOOD my life really is? Why is it so easy for me to cry when I think about being alone someday? I think about everything that could go wrong. I think about family members who are now alone, old and bitter and I visualize myself becoming them. I am afraid of losing my happiness and my love. I am afraid of not having my husband with me forever because he is my rock; he means so much to me. I think too much about the past and the future, when all I want to do is be present.

My husband says it is my hormones messing with me, that the antidepressants are out of my system and my body has to change. I have read it and heard it from several people that your emotions/drive changes after being off of antidepressants for a while due to your amygdala and hippocampus being affected by the hormonal changes and cortisol levels. I know this and I am trying my best to comprehend it in its entirety but my mind keeps switching to “that is crap, you are just crazy.” I think sometimes that I don’t know who I am. I am having an identity crisis at the age of 28. I started taking antidepressants at 15, quite possibly they stunted my emotional growth and my system is being over-loaded with thoughts and ideas of who I am and what I should be.

What do I think I will get out of writing this and what do I want?

Maybe if I write down all my deepest fears and lay it all out there for everyone and myself to see, maybe I will see some sort of pattern and it will aid me in this current change. I will be true and it will somehow allow truth to open my eyes to reality and love. I want to be happy. That sounds so traditional and illusive but I want to have a sense of being. I want to be present. I want to be okay with living life, cleaning, working, sleeping and awaking. I want to be an adult and take responsibility for myself and my actions. I want to treat people like I would want them to treat me, with graciousness and generosity. When I am in pain, I want to learn from it instead of be so fearful of it. I want to know that I will not be afraid of what my mind might conjure up and that I am normal.

Again, I view the words “normal” and “perfection” to be an illusion, but there is a fine line between grasping those views and living. We live in a world that allows people to be discriminated every day, gossip is negativity and we learn at a very young age that we have to either “fit in or get out” in most situations. People try desperately to be someone they are not and maybe that is what I did. Instead of coping with my thoughts and my bad PMS at 15, I took an antidepressant in hopes of the almighty “perfection.” Oh and let me tell you, to most people it looked like I had it down. Until I crashed, and had to pick up the pieces by taking even more antidepressants. That is the past.

The future is bright and full. There is so much now that I never had before. I have a lot to give and I have been given a lot. I am unique, unlike anyone else and not “perfect” or “normal.” I am better than normal, I am me. I need to find that light inside me every time my mind tries to blow it out and I am hoping that time will heal my emotional, hormonal or coping-skill related wounds. I think it will, at least for now.

6 Months!!!

YAY!! It has been 6 months since I have been FREE of Effexor and big pharma drugs.

A lot has happened. I have now lost about 30lbs and I feel pretty damn good. I have a different sense of awareness now about everything. It might be a little OCD, but it is better than being mind-screwed by chemicals. I have realized that I have to learn coping mechanisms because my emotions have been mildly deadened since I was 15. No wonder I used to get into so many fights with people/friends/family, I never felt right. I craved feelings of sadness, anger and doubt constantly, while on the outside looking ever so happy. The drugs do terrible things to your mind, which convey into your soul and show eventually through your body.

Speaking of that, I have learned that I cannot care. Not in a way that is mean or harsh-spirited but in a way that I have to allow people to make their own mistakes and not be angry. Just the other day I got so frustrated because someone I know was almost bragging about being put on psycho-pharma drugs. They took a random test and now truly believe they have one of those made-up psychological diseases. I felt like screaming "don't you know that you are going to ruin your mind?, don't you know that it is ALL fake and you are just buying some random doctor's vacation home?, aren't you SMART enough to realize that you control yourself and a pill will NOT make you better?" There were so many thoughts going through my mind because I went through it, it was hard and I wish that someone told me at 15 not to take the pills. Yet, this person thinks its "cool" to take amphetamines. Someday they will play the victim card when they go through psychosis, have early dementia, heart attacks or worse. Their entire view is to laugh and thinks its okay because they have "researched it" probably on WebMD or some other profit-driven excuse for a health website.

But how many people are walking around today trusting doctors blindly and never taking control of their own life? Staying glued to the media and constricting their beliefs for the beneficial doubt created by the profiteer? Hell, I was one of them not very long ago.

So basically I need to learn to control my emotions and take caring into consideration. I need to step back and understand that I cannot control this person I speak of above and that there are TONS of people ($330 billion worth) who are taking big pharma's pills and thinking they are better off. I cannot change the world and I need to accept that fact. People are still going to touch the stove even if you say they will get burnt.

You know, before, when I was on Effexor I would have probably cried and went overboard about situations similiar. Now I try to realize the problem and take steps to overcome. That is what being human is for me. It is learning, coping and changing while experiencing it all at once. I sometimes miss the mindless drone feeling that Effexor gave me, or the super fast high feeling that amphetamines gave me when I was younger but I would never give my humanity up for something like that again. That is a good feeling.

For the first couple of months my body went through some crazy changes. Whenever I felt the slightest bit of happiness I would tear up a little. I found myself constantly fighting the urge to cry. (To cry in a good way, but still) I can almost feel my brain re-wiring itself and my emotions coming back to me. No actually, the brain shocks during withdrawaling was feeling the re-wiring, LOL.

Okay, I must sleep. I just wanted to update on where I stand today, about 6 months off Effexor!! I am changing, shifting, growing and I love it...