There are so many. My thoughts are all over the place,
but I wanted to write some of it down before I forgot. I guess this particular
post is about my personal experience with Prozac. I’ve been on it now for 154
days. That’s close to a little over five months or 22 weeks. Since I started,
my life has weirdly changed a lot and yet stayed the same. I wish I could
explain some of it, and I’m still not sure if I can attribute it to the
medicine, but it’s quite a remarkable change. A lot of things HAVEN’T changed,
and that can be seen as both negative and positive, depending on your view. For
me, just the option of HAVING a view is a big thing. Before the medicine, I saw
everything as bad. I couldn’t “look at the bright side”, because there was ONLY
a dark side for me and anything else was absolutely impossible. I remember the
first few weeks when I noticed something was off. When people think depression,
they probably think people wearing black and crying and listening to emo music
while hating the world and staring at their MCR poster. They might think
cutting and/or any other type of self-harm. Perhaps they imagine suicide idealization
or something.
For me, it was sleep.
The most innocent thing. But sleep was the first
symptom. I can’t really remember much, and that’s hard to say because memory
has always been one of my strongest suites.
I do however remember sleeping 12 or more hours a day.
I’d wake up because I felt I HAD to or else I’d be wasting my days away. And I was.
But I didn’t know that. Now you might be thinking, sleep is just sleep,
everyone does it. What made it different for me was that I wasn’t just sleeping
at night. I was sleeping ALL THE TIME. I would literally sleep 10 or more
hours, then I’d eat breakfast and then take a 1, 2 hour nap and then go right
back to sleep at night for another 10, 11 hours. This went on for a few weeks.
The second thing was isolation. I wanted to do nothing but sit in my house and
watch TV. I didn’t want to see anyone, I didn’t want to talk. Everything took
too much effort. I went into this deep hole of despair. It was so hard.
A few other things I experienced were irritability at
the slightest thing, I lost interest in some of my favorite activities, and I generally
lost my interest in life.
This was July of 2015. I didn’t go to the doctor until
September. I was diagnosed with major depression on September 10th
and I started Prozac that same day- 20mg a day. I would eventually go up to
60mg, and I do think that is the right dose for me. However, a lot of things
didn’t get better- for example my concentration issues. It wasn’t a miracle
drug that immediately fixed everything. I think if anything, it allowed me to
open up and see the world in a way I couldn’t before. It lifted me. The first
few months were the hardest, sometimes I had these horrible thoughts like, what
if I took all my pills at once? I remember telling my psych nurse this and her
telling me it wouldn’t kill me, but it would probably make me wish it had with
how bad it’d make me feel. I didn’t want to die- I wanted to stop feeling pain.
Emotional pain was the last thing I thought of when I thought of my mental illness. It’s kind of the thing at the bottom of the list for me. To be honest, I’d take the pain over the apathy, the hopelessness, the dullness of life. At least when I was in pain, I could FEEL something, and to me, that was the most valuable thing at the time.
Have you ever wondered what it feels like to NOT feel anything at all? That’s how it was. Like the world had been turned off. The colors were too dim, and the sounds were dull. Once the medicine started working, it was like someone had painted a new mural. The colors were sharp and contrasting- the sounds were loud and clear. It was like this cloud lifted off and the fog disappeared and everything was noticeable once again.
Emotional pain was the last thing I thought of when I thought of my mental illness. It’s kind of the thing at the bottom of the list for me. To be honest, I’d take the pain over the apathy, the hopelessness, the dullness of life. At least when I was in pain, I could FEEL something, and to me, that was the most valuable thing at the time.
Have you ever wondered what it feels like to NOT feel anything at all? That’s how it was. Like the world had been turned off. The colors were too dim, and the sounds were dull. Once the medicine started working, it was like someone had painted a new mural. The colors were sharp and contrasting- the sounds were loud and clear. It was like this cloud lifted off and the fog disappeared and everything was noticeable once again.
Let me be clear that there are still some days when I
feel depressed. Prozac didn’t erase my depression, it merely helped me to try
to get it under control. Some days are still the worst days ever. Some days I
want to stop feeling. But the difference
is that now there’s a tiny shard of hope telling me that it won’t always feel
this way. The difference is that I can now see that hey, wait a minute, it’s
ONE bad day, there will be other good days.
That is what Prozac did for me.
But everyone’s different. Like I said, some days are still hard. I’ve come to learn that’s true even for people who don’t have depression. Having bad days really makes one appreciate the good ones.
So I didn’t turn into an optimist over night, but I did become someone who was able to see the other side. And that- to me- was the best thing ever.
But everyone’s different. Like I said, some days are still hard. I’ve come to learn that’s true even for people who don’t have depression. Having bad days really makes one appreciate the good ones.
So I didn’t turn into an optimist over night, but I did become someone who was able to see the other side. And that- to me- was the best thing ever.
