Off my meds. Feeling OK.

Part of being on antidepressants is the kooky thing where when you have been taking them long enough, you think you don’t need them. You feel fine. Which is what you took them for in the first place.

I don’t always feel that way, but I am a guy, so sometimes I just plain forget to take them. I put the pills by the sink in the bathroom, in the kitchen, or anywhere else I am sure to be in the mornings, but invariably, they become part of the background decoration of that area of the apartment and I just look right through them and don’t remember to take them. Then the next day, I’ll be freaking out about something, or feeling panicked or shitty, and then it occurs to me that I forgot my pills.

I had that happen again three weeks ago, however, I didn’t notice missing my pill for four days. And by then, it wasn’t because I was panicking. I just noticed I didn’t remember taking a pill for several days.

I had started to take the pills back in Fargo, when I was trying to help fiancé find work in the area while keeping going at a job I no longer found challenging or fulfilling. I had started to skid down the sadness road. I thought about death a lot, not like suicide, but  just a sort of thinking about death a lot way. It’s just easier to think about death than a job you don’t like, a family that doesn’t support you or your fiancé, a job market that is insane, and a world that thinks so little of everything you do.

Yeah, so I got some pills. They helped. I didn’t think about death quite so much. But things were still shitty beyond reckoning. By this point, we’d moved to the cities, wife had a job but not me, I had cut off my family because they didn’t support my wife and any attempts to explain my feelings about the situation were met with a general statement about how it was all in my head. To be frank, I haven’t tried speaking to them since March and life has gotten a lot easier without them. They’ve tried to get in touch 3 times since then by email. The last one had the sentiment “We miss you and will welcome you back whenever you are ready” which is nice, but again asks me to accept all blame and that I’m nuts and that they did nothing wrong. Also, wife sent a lengthy response in May or June about what they could do to make things right, but they haven’t taken us up on it.

Anyway, a few weeks ago I accidentally quit taking my pills, and by the time I noticed, I also noticed that I was OK.

Part of this, I think, is the general state of life affairs right now. I’ve got a job I love, I get to work with Wife and have lunch with her, I don’t have to deal with my family, and wife is out of her own hell hole of a job at Hennepin Technical College. Things are going well.

They could always be better. Wife is now applying to job after job and going through the same mindfuck I was going through in my job hunt: mostly that you can take two hours out of your day to go visit with an interviewer, send a thank you, send a follow up a week later, and still never get the common courtesy of a thank you for applying call or even a note to say they went with someone else. I go balls out and want to send a snide letter, but wife still thinks it may be possible to be hired after three weeks of hearing nothing and doesn’t want to send anything even slightly aggressive. I talk a big game, though. A few weeks ago, against my better judgement and at wife’s request, I reached out to the mnartists.org editor to see if she was interested in another piece from me. Though she can’t explain what she wants, and the pieces she publishes are far less professional than she seems to think they are when my own pieces weren’t meeting some professional standard she said she had, she seemed to think that it was me who couldn’t meet her expectations. Rather than get snipy, I just let it go and wrote a piece for the blog that I still haven’t had time to retool for pitching to other publications.

Then I watch shows like New Girl, a show I like, but last episode the main character is trying to get a job, is sitting in a waiting room with 5 other applicants, which NEVER happens and if it did you should run away since they don’t know how to stagger schedules so people aren’t waiting for hours. She breaks down and cries during her interview, freaking out the interviewer. Later in the episode, she goes back and interviews again. We are meant to believe that this attitude got her the job. BULLSHIT. There were five other perfectly reasonable people in that waiting room who probably didn’t break down and cry during their interview, and you’re telling me she got it over them? I hate America. Still like that show though.

Another thing along those lines is movies about mental illness. Everyone gets cured through sheer force of will. How fucking American, right? If “It’s Kind of a Funny Story” has it right, all we need to get through crippling depression is to spend a week in a ward, and all our problems will be magically solved.

So anyway, I have been off my meds for three weeks now, and I’m doing OK. It’s weird to get emotional over things now. Songs can get me misty if they hit me at the right time. I wept through the last half hour of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which is a really awesomely good movie, but probably not worthy of a good cry. This is painting me as a crying conundrum, but it really isn’t that often, and it’s during genuinely emotional things and not over seeing something like a puppy in a teacup. I’m enjoying these new emotions and the catharsis they bring rather than not feeling or bottling to boil over later.

Not sure if I will continue to try life without meds, or if I will go back on them. Wife is in my corner either way, so that’s nice.