Tag: antidepressants

I walked a thousand miles just to slip this skin – day 92

Day 91. I was out with work last night. I caught the train home at 9.30pm and, unusually, was picked up from the station by my husband, who managed to get off work early. We came home and sat in the garden in the sweltering July heat with a couple of beers. We stargazed in between games of fetch with our four-year-old border collie. It was perfect. Perfection, like happiness, is not an end in itself, but rather a moment in time. They say perfection doesn’t exist, but it does and I experienced it last night in those relaxing few hours in the garden with my boys. I realised in those few hours I can be a good wife, a good caretaker of our dog, our home, our family. I can make good decisions. I can choose to be angry and jealous over irrelevant things or I can choose to let go. In that moment of clarity – ironically through the fog of beer – I committed to trying to be a better version of myself every day. I’ll fail sometimes, but that’s okay. Fail fast, learn fast.

I slept beautifully after such a wonderful evening. I woke up this morning with only one thought on my mind. 92 days later after beginning my withdrawal from antidepressants, I took my final 25mg tablet of sertraline this morning. I can’t believe I have made it to this point. The last 92 days have been a real mixed bag – this I expected. There have been extreme highs and lows, but mainly just a lot of “in-between”. I’ve cried more in these last three months than I have done in the preceding six years; I think perhaps my body was purging itself of more than just the medication. I’ve felt more sharply where normally there was a dullness. I’ve slept better on the whole and had some long periods of decent eating and exercising, permeated with a few weeks of pure laziness. I have survived some crippling withdrawal symptoms. I have loved, hated, shouted, felt the crushing nothingness of indifference and apathy, and come out the other side. I’m here and I’m ready for the next six years.

Thank you for being on this journey with me.

Image result for poems about healing

 

 

I walked a thousand miles just to slip this skin – day 47

I did really well over the weekend. A combination of seeing friends, getting out and about despite the rain, and having a lazy day on Sunday. It went all too quickly and I’ve spent the first 36 hours of this week feeling a bit grumpy. As I’ve discussed before, I’m never sure if my grumpiness is directly linked to my depression, my withdrawal, or if it’s just general malaise.

I am not a morning person and it shows – ask any of my family/friends. I’m not sleeping well, despite what my smartwatch tells me, and this continues to have a huge impact on my general mood. The dreams I’ve had the last two nights have been bizarre – thinking back to my first round of withdrawal, I experienced some very inconsistent sleep. This, I think, is almost certainly part of the withdrawal. Thankfully, the restless sleep and crazy dreams settled down within a week or two, so I’m hopeful this will peter out soon.

Ugh.

 

I walked a thousand miles just to slip this skin – day 42

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again,

because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause;

who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Theodore Roosevelt, “Citizenship in a Republic”, 23rd April 1910

I walked a thousand miles just to slip this skin – day 41

It’s been quite some time since I updated my blog. I’ve been away on holiday to Poland and also had my Mum visiting for a few days, so my time has been taken up with lots of fun, relaxation, and distraction from the world of antidepressant withdrawal – no bad thing! But now is a crucial time for me and it’s important to not lose focus.

Tomorrow I will take my next step towards full withdrawal – reducing my daily antidepressant dose to 25mg from 50. It feels less scary than over a month ago when I had no idea how withdrawal would actually feel. Reading back through these blog posts has been enlightening and reassuring – I’m glad and fortunate that I’m one of the people who has not suffered from the extremes of antidepressant discontinuation syndrome. Bar those first two weeks of withdrawal symptoms, I have found the entire process manageable – thus far.

I make no assumptions about the next phase of my withdrawal. I’m making a conscious effort to avoid creating elaborate scenarios in my head about how this might go (this is something I have a terrible habit for doing in most situations that cause me anxiety – it takes a lot of energy to rationalise with my inner catastrophiser!). It may be fine. It may be awful. I will find out in the next few weeks and I’ll write about the journey [almost] every step of the way. Thanks for sticking with this blog (assuming you’ve read this far…). I hope you’ll stick around for this next part of the adventure.

I walked a thousand miles just to slip this skin – day 26

It’s been a week since I last wrote a blog. I’ve had another week of minor mood swings, but largely I’ve slept well, kept active, and been relatively happy. This has felt like one of the easiest weeks so far on my withdrawal.

The caveat is that it’s hard to tell if what I feel is because of withdrawal or if it’s just how I’m naturally feeling. Which brings me to today. I’m seeing my GP this afternoon for the first time since I decreased my antidepressants by half. We will discuss my progress and whether it feels right and appropriate for me to withdraw completely once my doses of 50mg have finished.

I am quietly confident she will agree to full withdrawal. Watch this space.

I walked a thousand miles just to slip this skin – days 16-18

I had a really bad night on Friday. I was at home alone with my dog and couldn’t even face putting the TV on to get rid of the silence. I needed the silence. A long cry later, plus a good night’s sleep, and I felt much better on Saturday. I had a restful , productive weekend with my husband and dog.

This week is #MentalHealthAwarenessWeek in the UK and this year the focus is on body image. I have struggled with my body – trying to love it, currently hating it, previously being proud of it, a whole yo yo of emotions about it. It’s exhausting. A few weeks asgo I visited my Mum for her birthday and she handed me a shoebox of old photos and assorted tidbits I’d collected as a child and a teenager. In there was a passport-sized photo of me from my year 11 school photo, smiling away. The smile masked a raging war inside my head that continues to this day. I turned to my Mum, holding the photo up and said, “I thought I was fat when I was 16. I was nothing of the sort.” – I wish, so much, I could go back and tell my 16-year-old self that she isn’t fat. She is healthy in body if not in mind, she will go through storms and come out of the other side, she is loved, and she is important. It was a sobering moment.

So on this #MentalHealthAwarenessWeek I am trying to love my body a little bit more each day. I’ve written a mental list of all the things I like about it – my eyes. My hands. My rugby-playing legs. My daft, Wigan laugh. My hair, which my hairdresser still finds hard to believe is naturally coloured and not dyed. My long fingers – “piano-playing fingers” as my piano teacher used to say. I am holding this list in my head and reminding myself every day there are so many things to love about my body. It was useful this morning when I hopped on the scales and found myself despondent at yet another weight gain where I had expected a loss due to a week of health eating and exercise. Our bodies are nothing if not perplexing at times!

I’ve never really believed in affirmations, but I am discovering their worth now I am actively saying them to myself. Here are mine:

  • “You’re overweight” has become “you are going to the gym, walking more, and eating better – the weight, in time, will come off”
  • “You are pale” has become “you care about your skin and actually the sun is not all that good for it anyway”
  • “Your bum is enormous” has become “many women pay to have surgical procedures to get a bum like yours – embrace it, whilst acknowledging you’d like it to be a little smaller”
  • “My boobs hurt when I run” has become, as above, “many women pay to have surgical procedures to get boobs like yours – embrace them, whilst acknowledging you’d like them to be a little smaller”
  • “My thighs chafe” has become “you are moving and exercising more, hence why the chafe; in time it will go”

And so on and so forth. They’re silly and cheesy and I find this kind of affirmation stuff cringey at the best of time, but I am proud of taking the small steps to move to a more positive mindset. It can only help. I am the size and the shape I am – I am me.

“Love your body, because you only have one.”

 

I walked a thousand miles just to slip this skin – days 10-14

4th May
Spent my day with my father-in-law, who is in a [very nice] care home. Almost got broody whilst playing with my four-year-old great nephew and one-year-old great niece. Almost. Then the one-year-old started screaming and broodiness promptly left. It was a good day.

5th May
Clearly woke up on the wrong side of bed this morning – either that or withdrawal moodiness kicked in. Walked over to Otley with husband and dog to watch the Tour de Yorkshire. Got chased by a pack of cows, fell over some barbed wire, and screamed at my husband. We bickered for the rest of the day. I hope these mood swings aren’t a sign of things to come, but they feel ominous.

6th May
Woke up bright and early on a Bank Holiday no less, feeling refreshed. I then proceeded to cry for an hour because… well, I don’t think my body nor my brain need reasons right now. Watched the Ted Bundy film with friends and had a good time. Ignored my brain telling me to get absolutely smashed and refrained from buying alcohol in the Co-op. That road doesn’t lead anywhere good.

7th May
Back to work. Had a positive, productive morning, but spent most of the afternoon with earphones jamed in my ear because the noise level was too much in the office. I sent an email to my boss reflecting on my imposter syndrome – eyes welled up as I wrote, but I held it together, thank fuck. Trotted off to the gym, did my best, toughest work out since joining, and managed to ignore everything on social media pertaining to the L*v*r*o*l result. I love hate football.

8th May
It’s raining. I wish I could have stayed in bed.