Prozactly

Losing paradigms to gain my self back again

Please excuse my two posts in 24 hours. I typically have a few different drafts going at any given time but, as I worked through this one tonight, I felt inspired to get it out into the world now. So now it is. The worst that can happen is nothing, right?

---

It wasn’t on purpose, but it seems fitting that way back in 2018, I took my first half-dose of Prozac the same week that….

• I sang a Van Morrison song (Crazy Love) at my friend’s mom’s funeral, defying all odds and staying just this side of the debilitating tears. Don’t give me too much credit for keeping it together, though; there are more bullets here…

• I attended a second funeral, this one for a beloved neighbor who was a friend to all but especially to my kids. I had visited him in the hospital just weeks before with my son. He seemed like he’d be fine, so his death was unexpected and tragic. If our neighborhood was a sitcom, I think his name¹ would’ve been in the opening credits. That’s what he meant to everyone.

• My wife’s side of the family observed the one-year anniversary of my brother-in-law killing himself and the resulting emotional shattering that can and will never fully clean up. It’s an ongoing reckoning.

• I lost out on a job I wanted pretty badly and felt like was mine for the taking— another in a string of impostor-syndrome-drenched “am I actually any good at this?” blows. I was trying desperately to achieve escape velocity from a job that had devolved from dreamy to nightmarish in under a year. That story—or those stories—will have to be another post(s). In relation to the other bullets here, this one feels awfully #firstworldproblems.

• I also “sang” at a third funeral, for the stillborn baby, delivered at 8.5 months, of two dear and shell-shocked friends. I use quote marks for “sang” because I tried but mostly wept through the first third of the song and sputtered through the rest. And I hope to be forgiven and understood that singing the Beatles’ “Blackbird” at a baby’s funeral service was/is overwhelming, even if it pales in comparison to what the baby girl’s parents experienced. I still feel a lot of shame for not being able to give my friends the song they’d hoped for.

But the first half-dose of Prozac and the above bullets were unrelated. None of those bullets were causal. Prozac and I had been on a collision course for some time—you know, finding a therapist and then finding a separate person to prescribe and blah blah blah (not to mention all the years we’d been unknowingly drifting towards each other). All of that other big stuff in the bullets just kind of happened at once. Sometimes life can be an unrelenting dogpile.

I never thought I’d take drugs like this, Prozac even specifically felt like a giant neon NO WAY on my proverbial road, as far as preconceived notions go. Over the years, though, I’ve learned the hard way to stay away from the “I’ll Never's” because those seem to have a gravitational pull all their own, where suddenly you find yourself doing all the things you’d never sworn you’d never do: drinking altogether too much Diet Coke, making sarcastic remarks to an undeserving spouse, going to couples therapy that’s only for people on the brink of divorce, going to therapy alone, yelling at your beautiful wonderful kids, badtalking a good friend, firing people who don’t deserve it, backing down from a dispute at work because you’re “picking battles”, breaking commandments, eating ice cream to cope, gaining unseemly weight, road raging, shooting the proverbial messenger, and who knows what else. The Nevers seem to wait sidestage for their cue. All you have to do is say their name.

I don’t really know how I got here in the larger sense. I guess I’m still processing why I have the audacity or lack of self awareness to feel like I do. What do I have to be depressed about? What has gone so wrong in my life? What happened in between being raised in a great family by great parents with pretty much anything you could ask for and having the very good life I have? Because some days I feel like the answer is: not all that much. Chemicals gonna chemical, I guess. And I think often about this quote from William Maxwell’s brilliant book So Long, See You Tomorrow, when the narrator talks about being born with a more artistic temperament: “Who knows what oversensitive is, considering all there is to be sensitive to.”

In the micro sense, I suppose I know the way that I got here—a guy who takes Prozac—is that, while up in Wyoming to play guitar and piano at a friend’s Album Release concert earlier that year, by some blessed twist of fate, I sat at a restaurant table with two friends who told me that medications had, with zero hyperbole, changed their lives. That the balance in chemicals had changed enough in both of them to be deemed genuinely miraculous. I was in the mood—no, I was chalkmouth parched—for a miracle and had lost hope in myself doing any worthwhile changing as far as my daily emotional temperature and baseline emotional well-being were concerned. If there was a moment of truth, it was probably listening—for the third or fourth time—to these two talk about medicine that helped.

I needed help. So much. Still do.

In addition to medication, I also started therapy. The yin and yang of change. Gotta do my part of the work and gotta let the medicine do its part of the work, right? Peanut butter and jelly. Love and marriage. Batman and Robin. Gil and Dave. And therapy and medication.

So, my therapist told me² (verified?) that, yes, I was in fact depressed and likely had been for quite some time. And that I had significant anxiety (she had a name for it, but I don’t remember the official diagnosis), which didn’t feel so much like news as it did validation that (thankfully) not everyone worries and feels social anxiety like I do³. Maybe it was just nice to be seen and heard, to feel like I’m not crazy for wondering if feeling the way I did/do was truly my only way forward. Or maybe it was a cleaning of the windows. Apparently I have a towering skyscraper’s worth of windows to clean, but am at least now in possession of Windex and some rags. There’s gotta be a ladder and squeegee around here somewhere.

---

When I picked up my first bottle of some generic version of Prozac at the pharmacy, sheepishly giving my name and birthdate and insurance card and wondering if the pharmacist was thinking, “Check out this loser” and avoiding even the off-chance of any eye contact, I was hounded by all the associations and internal judgment (remember? The Nevers?) and stigmas and paradigms and chemicals and failure and shortcomings and worries (WORRIES!) and shame and optimism and unrealistic hopes and who knows what else that come with it. A real fifty-ring circus of thoughts and feelings. I drove home, cut the pill in two as directed, and swallowed that half without fanfare (but with a glass of water).

I don’t drink, but lifting that glass of water felt like maybe the closest I’ve come to a genuine toast in my whole life. Intoxicating in its own way.

Here’s to help. Or hope.

I didn’t feel different at first, only a half pill into what became a stigma-shattering journey. I waited to feel the difference, hoping for some immediate and dramatic Clark Kent Steps Into The Phone Booth And Exits As Superman effect. But mostly I felt tired and think it gave me mild diarrhea.

Four years and hundreds of pills later I’m still not Superman by any definition. But my emotional floor is higher. My fuse a little longer, my days less brittle, less touch-and-go. I had spent years believing that it was just normal to be dragging this hulking, leaden, water-logged, flat-tired trailer behind me, not wholly unlike Robert DeNiro’s guilt-ridden character dragging his suit of armor on a rope behind him⁴ in The Mission.

To get here from there, all I had to do was swallow my pride about a couple Nevers⁵.

And then swallow a few pills once a day.

1. Gordon Gordon. Even his name had opening credit or sitcom character quality. Everyone called him Giege (pronounced JEEG like “liege”) and everyone loved him.

2. Also, within about 15 minutes of meeting me for the first time, I mentioned to the therapist that I “try to be pretty chill” and she immediately cut me off, almost chuckling, and said, “YOU. are not. Chill.” It was humbling to be both so reprimanded and so seen all at once. She was not wrong, not that it stops me from putting in immense efforts to come off as “chill.” Being naturally quiet has some social advantages, I suppose.

3. And I’m sorry if you feel the same or worse.

4. DeNiro’s character chooses his own penance—carrying the armor and weapons of his violent but now abandoned former life. So it’s not a perfect parallel to the unchosen burden and drag of depression and anxiety, but the image of the dragging of a burden speaks to me. In the case of depression and anxiety, the load is still tethered there to different degrees, but the therapy and medicine assist in the lift.

5. And from there, I became an advocate. Not a dealer, but an evangelist of sorts. I felt like, after my friends had helped me look at it differently, I needed to pay it forward and further normalize it. Make it less strange. When I was asked to be a leader in the mens group in our congregation (it’s called Elders Quorum, for those not in Utah), I took every opportunity I could find to mention it, just by the off-chance somebody in our quorum might benefit from hearing that the “leader” was taking antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications. If that made me less “alpha” for some of the others, I was more than fine with that. It’s made a palpable difference for me and for my family. So that’s why I’m writing this here and now, I guess. If you’re wondering if talking to someone and getting on some kind of mental health medication might make a difference, let me tell you that it could. It’s 1 trillion per cent worth a try. The worst that can happen (and this is literally what I told myself as I walked to the pharmacy and as I stepped into the therapist’s office) is that you keep feeling how you already feel, which you’re already doing. It’s ok to get help.