Sertraline days (interlude)
‘[Blah blah blah] my short-lived relationship with anti-depressants [blah blah blah]’—Cat, 10 September 2023
Well, jokes on two-months-younger Cat because, ten days after putting that poetic sentence out into the universe, I booked an appointment with my GP for, apparently, having a ‘20% intent of ending my life’. Their words, not mine. Basically, a perfectly lovely apprentice wellbeing practitioner with a D4 accent asked me, over the phone, how much I felt like killing myself—or something to that effect—on a scale of one to five. I said one, just because, and somehow he converted the innocuous, solitary uno into a probability thing which made it sound that much more awful. (Can you blame me? Can anyone really, honestly answer zero to that question?) Guess they don’t allow for nuances between desire, intention, recklessness, et cetera, in wellbeing school. At any rate I don’t know how one can seriously measure this, uh, feeling (I hesitate to put a label on it) on any kind of scale. Like, what, give Cat a gun and nine times out of forty-five she’d put it in her mouth and pull the trigger? I’m not sure that’s how I’d describe it. At any rate the odds didn’t sound so bad at all, though Man from the Southside Who Sounded a Little Too Cheerful for the Occasion went droning on about risk and sharp objects for another ten minutes. Have you ever felt, how often do you feel, have you ever hurt, do you think you are likely to hurt—? Yes, I don’t know, every day, or at least that’s how it felt—feels. Depends on how you define it. No, not other people.
All this to say that things in the last two months have not exactly been great for my brain, my mind, my self—however it is meant to be embodied in this ever-deteriorating flesh cage of mine. Throughout the unusually long British summer I had been looking forward to all manner of things—to writing, to reading novels, to hearing back from long-distance friends, to waking up at seven in the morning and existing and going to bed by eleven in the evening—until one day I wasn’t. I wasn’t, then I didn’t want to, I struggled, then I just couldn’t. A switch flicked, a fuse blew, a thread, razor-thin to begin with, decided to snap inside my head. Existing suddenly seemed so difficult and burdensome and, most of all, pointless. Turns out it’s pretty hard to drag yourself out of bed and eat and shit and wash when your brain doesn’t see—can’t find, can’t remember, can’t pull out of thin air—a reason to. Who knew.
There is no need to go into the gory details, really. Poetry and clichés abound for describing this sort of thing (again, I cannot, or perhaps refuse to, name it)—personally I like to consult Plath or Mishima. The long and short of it is that things got bad, then worse, and worse, and worse, before it got better. Kind of. And slowly. I take a little pill every morning and it makes my body go a little funny: my sleeping pattern is fucked, I have absurd, almost absurdist dreams that would make Freud sick with envy, my memory is as foggy as London on a postcard and I am so terribly, excruciatingly slow. The last one is the worst—there seems to exist a time lag between the outside world and my self, a frosted glass window which muddies, muffles, mutes. (I realise shortly after writing this that, of course, Plath has already used virtually the same imagery, only infinitely more deftly.) But the time difference is also what protects me, stops me from jumping off a cliff whenever I see red. It makes living more tolerable, and my thoughts less cruel. I don’t know exactly how it works, and it’s ironic because I’m staunchly of the critical-psychiatry-slash-postmodernist school, at least in theory, but the extra boost of serotonin does seem to be doing something. I mean, I did try it once a year ago—there is no reason why I shouldn’t trust it to work a second time. We adopt whatever theory we need to survive.
This might be the first post that I’m writing entirely for myself. My eyes are stinging dry from lack of sleep and whatever other psychosomatic side-effect I’m supposed to be experiencing, but I woke up feeling somewhat hopeful today. I pulled open the curtains to let in what little colour there was on this November morning, then dragged my bare feet slowly to the bathroom. As always I spent too much time detangling and pulling out my hair in the shower. It’s a compulsive-ish habit I should probably try to get rid of. I felt clean, cleansed. Still in my PJs, I threw on a big coat and walked to the bakery just down the road, listened to the owner gush about the supplier of his linseeds and brazil nuts (he is nuts about his nuts!, he said), bought a sausage roll and a financier for breakfast. I’m becoming a regular here, which is vaguely embarrassing but sort of comforting too. I misted the rapidly growing monstera and spiderwort (which, strangely, grows upwards instead of down) in the living room. I gave the flat a quick vacuum, 1989 (Taylor’s Version) blasting in my headphones. I remember listening to Welcome to New York a ridiculous number of times walking around London in my first days there, wired earphones on because I was so socially anxious, but still trying my best to be happy. Full of carbs and caffeinated, even though my body doesn’t really respond to stimulants much these days, I remembered that I hadn’t written in a while—brain fog, panic attacks, sleeping day in and day out to escape the dread hadn’t helped—but suddenly it seemed doable and not so frightening.
It’s only temporary. It doesn’t have to be so bad all the time.