It’s tough to admit to myself that all or most of my feeling of being cold and isolated for the last 20 years was actually the Paxil.
It makes sense in retrospect. Paxil works on my social anxiety because it acts as something like an emotional anesthetic and numbs the amygdala so that it’s less likely to activate the FFF (fight, flight, or freeze) system prematurely and it’s that system that creates the symptoms of an anxiety disorder.
And that’s fine at the right dosage. But, as I have now learned, if the dosage is too high, that numbness cuts straight to the bone and creates a broken frozen inner hellscape that denies the patient access to really any motive power from the id at all.
No wonder I’ve been like Good Kirk, unable to make decisions, for so long.
And all because I was unable to recognize that my Paxil was the problem. Indeed, I have clung to my Paxil as my lifeline to sanity since I was first prescribed it more than twenty years ago because back then, Paxil was what enabled me to exit the maelstrom of insanity that was my extreme depression and social anxiety.
Paxil created a vitally necessary space between me and my insanity, and that space let me catch my breath and actually think.
So that made me label Paxil as not just good but my saviour. And seeing as it had been a long time since I had tasted sanity – there’s a really good chance that I have been crazy for my whole life – I had no way of knowing when the Paxil went too far.
I blamed all the coldness in my soul on the depression, when it turns out the real problem was my antidepressant.
Doesn’t that just figure.
Imagine that, all my talk of Midnight Tundra and feeling numb and cold and isolated all the time was really coming from the Paxil.
I might actually have healed from my illness a long time ago without even knowing.
Thank God I am thawing out now. The barriers keeping me in an emotional deep freeze are falling due to the decreased Paxil dose and I can feel myself coming out of the cold sleep I have been unknowingly trapped in and now I can be decanted from my strangely womblike hibernation chamber only to discover that the rest the crew is dead after a corpse falls out of a locker in a highly improbable way.
Like, what, they died leaning on the door at the exact right angle?
I am deliberately letting this revelation about Paxil and me circulate in my mind because I know that it’s something I am going to have to work through before I can truly grok it and accept the truth of it.
Part of me is super angry, of course. All these nonfunctional years – most of my adult life – robbed from me by my inability to realize what was actually wrong.
And there’s nobody to blame or even get mad at. Not even myself. I had no idea what was wrong, how could I?
It seems obvious in retrospect, but that’s hindsight.
And Doctor Costin had no way of knowing what my true problem was either. I never described the issue as a symptom of anything. I didn’t know what all that coldness was about so neither did he.
It’s just another way – maybe the biggest one yet – life fucks me over in ways I can’t see coming and that require major mental upgrade to understand.
Or even recognize.
All I can do now is continue with the plan to lower the dose over time and hopefully that will thaw me out enough for me to feel truly alive.
More after the break.
The bad moments
I’ve always had them but now I want to dig a little deeper on them.
These are the moments when the sadness and depression and despair overwhelm my defenses and I feel ice cold hand clutch my heart and what I can only describe as a soul chill goes through me and I have to fight to regain my equilibrium.
Or do I? Like I’ve said before, maybe I would be better if I leaned into that feeling instead of squashing all those emotions back into the box and probably doing myself some harm in the process.
That might be better in the long run. Just let myself freak out and lose my mind and fall apart for a little while so that I can reap the benefits of a whole lot of the bad emotions getting expressed all at once.
But I don’t know if I have the courage to gamble with my marbles like that. And the instinct to instantly get back up and keep going is very strong in me.
Like I’ve said many times before, when there’s nobody there to catch you, you don’t dare risk falling. And if you do fall, you get right the fuck back up before the predators sense your vulnerability and swarm you.
Or something like that. We’re talking primal reasoning here.
Which brings up hypervigilance. On the surface, I might seem like a strange candidate for hypervigilance seeing as I am a lifelong space cadet who barely seems to know what planet he’s on most of the time.
That’s because my hypervigilance is mental, not sensory. I’m always trying to concentrate, anticipate, circumnavigate, and compensate for whatever life decides to throw at me.
But past a certain point, that’s impossible…. unless you live such a limit and proscribed life that you life finally becomes sufficiently predictable because you never DO anything.
Welcome to my world.
I have definitely spent most of my life in FFF mode, and that’s very bad. I can’t recall many times when I felt completely relaxed and safe. Part of me is always on the lookout for threats and dangers in all directions.
And that means constant biological stress.
And the thing is, I know that I am safe.
But deep down, I’m too scared to believe it.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.