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I don’t think I want to know who I was before SSRIs.

Which…sounds problematic. Take a deep breath. Let me explain.

Also, I’m going to get deep into talking about mental health, depression, anxiety, and a little bit of self-harm, so if those things are too much to think about today or ever, maybe this is your place to stop. Have a good day! Drink water! Eat a good meal! Love you!

So, wow, I’ve known for (*counts on fingers*) a really long time that I was depressed. I guess “know’' is not the right word, necessarily. I certainly do not recommend self-diagnosing (close out of the Webmd tab open on your laptop/tablet/phone right now), but there were definitely always signs that something was up. I, of course, don’t remember the very first panic attack, the first suicidal thought, the first time I put a value on how much my life was worth, but I can still feel how hard the ground I frequently curled up on was and how heavy yet somehow numb my body felt, I see what socks I was wearing and how dark it was outside in my peripheral vision, smell the air I hyperventilated in. I remember the relationships it helped me ruin, a few of the hundred (and counting) times I looked in the mirror as it pointed out what I should hate about myself, the burns and bruises it created on my skin, the meals I didn’t eat or over-ate, all of the perfect days it clouded, all 4 of the times I almost let it win. As a product of the 90’s, growing up, therapy was the butt of a joke. Medication made you a social leper, people encouraged their loved ones not to talk to you. Talking about your feelings out loud made you weak and belittle-able. So, I stayed in this abusive relationship with my own mental illness for a really long time, uneducated about the what, why and how of it and even perpetuating the hurtful stereotypes that suppressed me, as well.

The first real sigh or relief I got from my mental illness was through Girl Scout camp sleepovers, which…sounds not like a real thing but hear me out. The first hint of visceral vulnerability for me was when we would talk about ~boys~ (Ah to be young again…) I remember the anticipation of wiggling down into our sleeping bags and waiting for our chaperones to shut out the lights before going to their own sleeping arrangements so we could immediately roll over and giggle about cute boys in our class. The relief in letting out a secret that just felt like the most dire thing in our young lives was unmistakable…even if we would forget about these boys and be on to new ones by the next time we were at camp. It taught me the beauty in relatability even if it feels silly and simple now. (Also, sitting here and silently thanking the god of time for giving me better taste these days. Not perfect, but better.) It made me understand that sharing and feeling could be safe with the right people. From then on, I found these moments of peace in vulnerability by backyard campfires sharing how those boys we giggled about once were now only making us rage, laying on trampolines and staring at the stars while we tried to piece together why it felt like our parents didn’t understand us, around a kitchen table talking about how life was harder than we had thought it would be, sitting in a parked car in an empty parking lot until 3 a.m. after a social gathering, comforting each other as we fought with our own insecurities. I found that vulnerability taught me about friendship and how togetherness was a useful band aid and teacher but not a salve. Putting the cure to my illness on the opinions of others no matter how well-intentioned they were was not kind to me or to my friends and it would never work. So, I sought more solutions.

It was really hard for me to even admit that the way I felt was some sort of problem that could be solved until I was in my 20’s. I believed that as long as I was hurting myself and not anybody else that it couldn’t really be a problem. What I never factored in was just how blind my mental illness had made me. For years (decades even) I was keeping really important secrets from friends, pieces of my life that were changing who I was in front of their eyes. I let a lot of them drift out of my life and even pushed some out because I thought that was easier. However, through this journey one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that the purpose of life (if that’s even really a thing) is not for it to be easy. If you want happiness or success or peace, that simply doesn’t come with ease. It wasn’t fair to them to cut ties so swiftly, in fact, I wish I had seen how cruel it was and how much I would still think about it today. I wish I had known how even just communicating can change your life. I try to live without regret and I do, for the most part, but sometimes I think I would gladly take the opportunity to go back in time and just be more honest if it meant that I would have caused much less pain and maybe relieved some of my own sooner. I thought for sure that getting older would make me more confident and less hurt, that running away from the things that had hurt me might take it all away. To be fair, it certainly helped some of it (distance can be an aid, but is not an answer, in my opinion) but depression just kept coming back like Poltergeist (II). At this point I was heavy in my Brene Brown, Pinterest quotes, Inspirational but Irreverent Female Empowerment Podcasts, “Girl, Wash Your Face” obsession. (Who am I kidding? Other than “Girl, Wash Your Face,” I’m still about those things.) I had started my self-help journey and found inspiration in those but something was still missing. I still found myself staring up at the ceiling at night letting every little misstep tell me my life wasn’t worth living. How the hell was anyone ever happy? How did people find purpose or even a sense of reason? Little did I know that the lesson I would need would come from anything other than happiness.

I don’t bring this up a lot because there was a victim in this and it feels heavily irreverent to talk about my pain in all of it, but I realized really recently that I’d never even told most of my closest friends about this thing that so greatly changed my life. I’m not here to claim my pain is the most important part in any of this, but it certainly taught me a lot. I don’t really even know how to navigate it, I’ll probably reveal quite a bit of my own selfishness but it’s just honest. My third year in college, while I was in my dorm, the girl next door took her own life. I didn’t know her. We’d been to one floor meeting together, I’d waved and said, “Hey,” to her a few times when we were both going into our rooms, but other than that I regrettably knew next to nothing about this life that suddenly felt very intertwined with mine. Now, who cares about my regret, in the end. Her life meant more than my need to feel less guilty or my senseless desire to figure out, “What if?” I think it was just so palpable because I felt like I knew her struggle, at least a small piece of it. I’d been held down by a similar pain before and had found something to propel me forward somehow. I felt wrong just for living, doing the simple things: eating, seeing the sun, sitting with my friends, when she should have been able to do that too. I couldn’t sleep in my own room for a while, so I spent a few days on a friend’s couch. I just couldn’t shake the thought that I could have, should have helped her, that I should have realized what was happening. It’s not a very logical thought, but I was consumed by it. I spent weeks staying up late scrolling through her Facebook page, her parents’ and siblings’ pages too. I learned she was a musician, she had a huge family she loved, best friends who she drove back home to spend the weekends with, a cat she was obsessed with. She had a whole life that was gone almost in an instant. I tortured myself reading about her plans post-grad and the passions that made her who she was. I got to a point where it was all I thought about and it ate me alive. I didn’t talk about it, really. I didn’t know what it meant and it all kind of felt creepy and self-absorbed to know so much about someone I didn’t get to know in life but now was learning the SparkNotes of through tragedy, and having it affect me. Finally, a professor noticed the change in me. I had taken a few days away from class when I wasn’t sleeping and had told her why, so she knew something had to be up. She mentioned going to grief counseling which the college had suggested to anyone in our dorm the day they announced the day it all happened, which I refuted right away. Relieving my grief didn’t feel right, like it was self-serving, and I grew up in a world that taught me my own struggles deserved to be belittled. Not to mention, I felt like I couldn’t ask for my family to pay for it or it would become a discussion and I didn’t want to acknowledge it for fear I was being dramatic or “too sensitive.” I just wanted it to go away. She referred me to a counselor on campus, one that was free that no one had to know about and told me it was my choice but that only I could really help myself. I really teetered on it for a few weeks, I was stuck in my own preconceived notions about what therapy was and meant for me. I just couldn’t stop thinking about how much I wanted to let it all out. So, one day, I bit the bullet and ended up in his office.

The first few sessions were awkward. I really had gaslit myself into a deep dark pit that was tough to find my way out of. I don’t necessarily want to go into all of the details of everything we talked about, (I know I just told the entire internet about my depression but I’d love to keep some parts of my brain to myself) but being educated on anxiety and depression, things I had told myself I could in no way claim because my pain was not as bad as others, was a relief in itself. It felt silly to simplify it out loud after my counselor acknowledged, “You just said you thought you wanted to die because you dropped a mop bucket at work and you don’t think you could possibly have depression?” To which I replied, “...Good point.” We talked about tools to work through things and helped me see that even though healing is a solo process, it doesn’t mean I’m alone or even that sometimes being alone isn’t a bad thing. In the long run, it didn’t work out with that counselor. In no way do I have anything to say to not encourage people to go to therapy. I’m a huge therapy champion. Go. To. Therapy. (If it’s in your means.) Living is tough. However, like seeing any doctor or specialist of some kind, you want to make sure you have the right person to help you get healthy and, though I appreciate everything he helped me through, he just was not the right fit. I used those tools he gave me time and time again over the years, but the hard thing about time is that things tend to dull and break, eventually I realized I needed to find some new tools.

I have had so many friends discuss with me the rollercoaster that is getting medicated for anxiety and depression. I am not unaware of the faux pas that is talking about needing medication to get by, especially when it comes to your brain. I crack jokes and rant about being on Lexapro like I talk about the weather, but I understand the gravity of taking something that ultimately is going to affect my brain chemistry. I’ve had a lot of friends tell me the horror stories, that some of the medications I heard about “helping me” could maybe feel like they were hurting me too. I spent a long time being scared that I would be a totally different person, which is weird for someone who really spent most of their life hating themself and thrives on change like the insane Sagittarius she is. I guess I was afraid that I would never get those moments of joy again, that I would just live in the numbness I used to know so well, that the white noise moments lived on cold floors in the blur of unfeeling would be all life was. I weighed heavily if it was better to not have the highs if it meant I didn’t have to crash into the lows anymore. The more I felt comfortable talking to my friends about it, seeing the years of pain and fear I didn’t have to feel anymore, learning that I deserved better things that might be in my control, even just knowing that I didn’t have to start tremoring and hyperventilating every time my brain didn’t know how to cope (or even sometimes for seemingly no reason), the more I started to look into seeing a psychiatrist. For better or worse, I just desperately wanted validation so I could finally stop fighting these monsters in the dark and maybe stand a chance. Finally, after 28 years I had an official diagnosis: severe anxiety and depression. It sounds scary but I “knew” it for so long that it just made me feel calm.

My diagnosis made my life make a little more sense, it shot down the voices in my head that always told me I didn’t deserve rest. I was offered the option of starting Escitalopram, a Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI) that is frequently prescribed to those with Generalized Anxiety Disorder and depression. (Shout out to my Lexapro friends! Don’t forget to take your meds today!) I’m new to the medicated world, but one day in my car, on the way home from a hard day at work, I caught a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror at a red light. (Oh my god, how poetic.) I realized something that I’m sure other people don’t even have to question: Mistakes are not bullet points on the “reasons I should not live” list. Something I had never truly felt for myself before. Of course I started sobbing like a baby in post-work traffic (and the older lady in the car next to me looked like she really wanted to check up on me), but every couple of days I get that feeling, realizing how much pain I had actually been in for so long. It’s mind blowing to me that so many of us just accept this as our norm (somewhere around 284 million, as a quick Google search tells me) and that there are people who will never get to know this relief. Now, I’m not cured by any means. I still have a lot of work to do. I am still very much me: a person who is flawed and fearful, who makes mistakes and wrongs people and lets insecurity be her guide sometimes. Like one of my favorite comedians (and a daydream bestie), Taylor Tomlinson says: “Being [*insert mental illness*] is like not knowing how to swim. It might be embarrassing to tell people and it might be hard to take you certain places, but they have arm floaties.” I might not know how to swim still, but at least my arm floaties will keep me above water as I learn.

In my very limited knowledge as a not-doctor and not-authority on this subject, all I can tell you is research, research, research. Ask a million questions tot the right people and know when it comes to your brain and body, you deserve those answers. Medication isn’t for everyone and affects everyone differently. Though it’s frustrating, fight for yourself because only you know how you feel. At the end of the day, lean on people for support. If they don’t want to support your journey, move on. If you need someone, I’m here for you. I mean it.

-Mary