I don't know when this blog was originally launched and I can't find out, I lost the backup .XML (for now). Nothing that matters too much to me was lost, it'd be neat for infotainment purposes but it's gone. The birthday the title of this post is dedicated to is my own - 29 years old, the last of note before the yearly celebrations are done in lieu of THIS anniversary - for instance I will not eventually be 31, it will be the second yearly anniversary of my 29th birthday. I stole this notion from my oldest brother.
First and foremost I feel the need to say I am now healthy in every way. If by some happenstance you are familiar with the old blog that used to be on this webzone - know this: that misbegotten diary was written by an adolescent that was mentally unstable. It was started by an unmedicated teenager and languished in the midst of medication being regularly imbibed. Then died finally in 2018 after an undisclosed amount of time since its last post, which I cannot remember what it could have been.
Now in 2024 my mental health has peaked. Does this mean I will return to blogging regularly? Probably not. Maybe special occasions. I think a lot and every so often I think of things I started but never finished, or things that I simply fumbled and dropped. This blog has been one of the items I regularly find in my own head, waiting for me to acknowledge it and take another swing at it. What do I hope to achieve with it? Nothing really, I just want to be able to say 'oh yeah no I did try that again'.
Regardless I want to just share a sort of timeline and gist of what happened anyways.
During 2011 (me being 16) my brain started getting confusing thoughts of worthlessness, hopelessness.
2012 these thoughts exacerbated and this was peak 'weird' for me, I felt awkward and sad all the time.
2013 these thoughts quelled briefly with me being able to soon graduate high school and possibly start my life for real while I was also experiencing seemingly reciprocated love with a peer.
Late 2013 - early 2014 the experience of love was destroyed at the same time I was experiencing how much I disliked college. I was 18 and was not ready to concentrate on anything; especially not boring studies
I went to free guidance counseling that was advertised for students while I was in the depths of despair post break-up and feeling aggravated towards myself because of my inability to study. I checked a box on the introductory sheet that would be given to the guidance counselor that said I was having violent thoughts expressed towards myself and towards others. This triggered a sort of completely impersonal and matter-of-policy response by the school to call for police since I admitted to being endangerment incarnate.
The police didn't handcuff me but they rode me to the hospital where I talked to a doctor. The doctor called my parents. The doctor also called my parent's insurance. He instructed me to dramatize my symptoms to cover my eventual trip to the mental hospital, for which I volunteered. I spent a week on the fifth floor of Divine Providence with an Indian psychiatrist who somehow knew exactly how my brain chemistry worked thanks to him understanding some symptoms I told him I had. He told me that I had a permanent chemical imbalance that would require SSRIs to fix. Thankfully the first selection of medicine he prescribed me worked as intended!
The latter half of that last paragraph was typed with a satirical undertone. SSRIs would cost my parents health insurance $220 monthly, I was definitely being juiced for the American medical system at the expense of my own brain chemistry which can never come off of medication once it's been introduced. Am I actually a major depressive, as that Indian doctor told me I was? I'll never know for sure - my mother thinks it's very strongly possible considering her Ukrainian heritage and that side of the family's experience with the Holodomor; a tragic historical event where Lazar Kaganovich under the Soviet regime forcibly starved the Ukrainian people to the death toll of 3.5 to 5 million. It's assumed that the Ukrainian side of my extended family moved to the United States shortly after this event and the misery is imprinted deep within the very blood of those that survived and I am partially descended from.
I took SSRIs from the age of 19 until I was 26 when I was kicked off my parents insurance. They absolutely altered my thoughts and feelings I can say with total certainty. Did they work as intended in repressing depressive thoughts? Yes. They also, I feel, diminished my sense of empathy. I can't really share much more about my thinking/feeling patterns beyond that vague notion - out of a lack of words. But I can very much share the interesting pattern I recognized while I was on that medication.
If I skipped a day of SSRI medication, that day I skipped was normal. If I then took medication again after missing a day before - that day 'sped up' in my perception of reality. Every day where I had skipped my previous day's medication would go much faster. This made the tedium of working my retail job at the time all that much more bearable, but that job itself didn't do my finances any favors. Anyways.
Because nothing very much mattered to me and I wasn't making a lot of money and I didn't care for my retail job I just stopped working one day. For almost a whole year I was unemployed, languishing, depleting all of my savings in rent and expenses without income. During this time I also stopped taking my medication out of a general lack of agency and self-management. My parents consistently urged me to get a job while also giving me enough support to get by, I remember wanting to cry when for Christmas my mother gave me enough money to nearly cover my rent for a month.
Things got better. I did get a job. A job I still have and maintain perfect attendance for and pays me nearly quadruple what I used to get in retail. When I got on the company's health insurance they quickly saw that my SSRI prescription was very costly and wanted me to renegotiate my medication with my family doctor to see if I could use something else. He prescribed a general anti-depressant that was literally 1/100th the cost of my old medication. I've been on it for three years. Does it work better? Well, like the question regarding whether am I actually depressive or not - I can't really tell for certain. My circumstances are completely different now. I just know that I am in fact: not sad.
No one in the United States of America is happy anyways.
So I'm doing alright. Happy birthday to me. I love you.
No comments:
Post a Comment