The best thing ever…

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 10^th 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.

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.