Pilvia Slath Takes Some Pills

blog/trip report

Hi, everybody,

Pilvia Slath is a nom de guerre I’m in the process of establishing. Or was. Because what happened was I hit a wall with the depression many months ago where it felt like all the momentum/optimism was converting into OCD stuff. Like, there was still direction and intention, but they weren’t personal, and they just kept pouring into bursts of frustration at imperfect cleaning and bouts of agitated checking and rechecking, always to the dirty drumbeat of hope hope hoping you find a flaw.

I didn’t feel particularly unsettled. I felt diverted.

My mother was a depressed woman, as well. Her meds used to just stop working. I decided that was what was happening to me. I asked my prescriber if I could stop taking it. He put me on very low dose trazodone for sleep. That worked for a week. Then The Palisades burned to the ground. The Palisades was my hometown, where I grew up, and returned to live in throughout my twenties, entirely in my thirties. Six weeks after I left it for the last time, in 2016, the apartment my mother and I had been living in together burned to the ground, with my mother inside. I guess if anything, this go round let me feel I could grieve publicly, whereas my mom’s fire was something I sought to suppress and hide as much as possible, and much more effectively than I imagined.

At any rate, I was all screwed up and not able to sleep, once again. I went up on the Trazodone and added supplements: melatonin, Benadryl, doxylamine succinate (that’s the good one for OTC sleep, it comes in the Good Neighbor formulary and Costco, now, also sells it; the other one is Diphenhydramine which is just Benadryl again). I am not big on the banquet of homeopathic sleep solutions including lavender, Tryptophan, chamomile; nor am I a fan of THC gummies formulated “for sleep”. I’m not sure how they can isolate that effectively. I also peppered my wakings with Propanolol. The upshot here is I was feasting on a banquet of pills throughout the night, every time I awoke. This propelled me to more pills during the day: Excedrin Migraine, Bronkaid (this is Ephedrine), bonus Vitamin B.

Swinging weakly from monkey bar to monkey bar. Dropping into the sand often. Every day off the Trintellix got heavier and I got sadder and dimmer. I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t plan in my mind to do anything. I couldn’t walk the dogs, although walking Bongo is fraught for other reasons like his reactivity (it seems to be frustrated greeting whereby he NEEDS to PERSONALLY GREET every dog and person he sees on leash no matter how far away or visibly uninterested in American Bully Kisses they are)- I couldn’t get myself energized to ATTEMPT the walks. I couldn’t visualize the walks. All I could visualize was the struggle: to get my shoes on, to get one harnessed and leashed and the other into the crate, to go through the training process at the door of “Sit” “Wait” wait wait wait “Break,” to hold the traffic strap (shorter loop closer to the attachment point of the leash for literally short leashing the dog in high traffic situations) in one hand and the far end of the leash in the other- CORRECTLY (thumbs through loops, never wrapped around the hand which can result in breakage of same). And that’s just getting out the door. More despair attended the thought of doing the rest of the walk. I was terrified of my neighbor’s reactions (real and perceived), and angry and resentful that I went ahead and gave in to getting a puppy I’ve spent over a year trying to train who I can’t walk peacefully and casually like I see literally everybody else doing. Every day I anticipated more rejection and judgment from the neighborhood. It was very hard to imagine encounters where I might deescalate successfully. All I could picture was the dread, then the horrible startle of his CRAZY STRONG LUNGE, the answering yank of my long bones from their ball-sockets, the calamitous barking. And let’s not forget the embarrassment of it all. All the little insults were stacking up day after day, papering my insides with self-loathing.

It's been a week since I went back on the Trintellix. It’s already a lot better. I feel attuned to the alarm but not overwhelmed by it. Moreover, I’ve stopped hating myself for WANTING rest, peace, a break, an easier go. It is easier to be comforted by little random fantasies (like that I’ll go back to sleep for a few hours as soon as Dr Rock leaves for work) that were prior gutting me with their temptation. What a bad person I would be to do such a thing. What a bad person I must be to even think it.

I share this portion of my life in the blog today perhaps as a reminder to myself. I can do very well in this life, but I must attend to my brain as an organ in need of support. When it takes the shape of an enemy, that means I am neglecting something.

I was excited by the idea of stopping the antidepressants, I admit. I hate the weight. I hate the sexual inhibition. It remains a quelling one-two punch in terms of interpersonal side effects, and to be honest one I didn’t much notice or care about all the years I was in Maine, single and celibate. I mean, I did notice the weight. But I really had nothing else to do for recreation except exercise. A few hours in the YMCA with my headphones and their spotty WiFi powering my mashup playlist were my relationship with my body and pleasure at that point. It’s true that I have many more intimate relationships now, all day long, all life long. The husband is a forever deal. The dogs and cats are forever deals. Maybe I was internalizing my sense of depletion, projecting it onto the meds. Trying to model satisfactory consumption by taking more pills.

Maybe it was just a brief experiment that proved the initial hypothesis. My psyche requires my help modulating our serotonin. The brain needs it, the psyche needs the brain, and hey, look at that, the dogs need a walk. Should be fun.