Emotionally speaking, that is.

See, my therapist and I both agreed last Thursday that it was time to take the next step and lower my daily dose of Paxil from 35 mg to 30 mg.

So today is my second day on the lowered dose, and I think I am maybe starting to feel it, because tonight I felt a great and terrible sadness settle into my soul from seemingly nowhere and I am thinking perhaps that is my body and brain missing that extra serotonin boost.

Or not. To be honest, I have no idea what causes my emotional flux. A lot of it could just be from the deep inner processing of emotion and ideas that is constantly going on way back in the background of my psyche.

It would be nice, I suppose, if this deep thought could proceed in some locked off chamber of the mind that only speaks when spoken to, but that is simply not how human beings are wired.

Instead, it is more like my consciousness is always adrift on a deep and mysterious sea which rolls and pitches due to forces far beneath the surface, forces I myself put into place but that I have long since lost the ability to control or predict.

But I cannot entirely discount the chemical changes I will be going through over the next few weeks. I have taken Paxil for over a decade for a reason, and reducing the dosage on it is not something to take lightly. I am wise to be wary of the changes I will go through in the next few weeks. Depression and social anxiety are serious illnesses and not mere phantoms of the mind, easily dismissed.

So why the reduction of dose? Depends on who you ask, in a way. My therapist wants me off Paxil eventually because there are new drugs available now which are superior. Fewer side effects, more effect with smaller dosages, and so forth and so on. And I am down with that. I agree that switching to a better drug sounds like an idea worth pursuing.

But to me, the real reason is that I want better access to my emotions. I think I am ready to reduce the dose and face more of my personal demons. This might be pretty unpleasant some of the time, but judging from the long term effects of my last reduction of dosage, I think it will be worth it.

By letting my inner demons out of their cages, it forces me to deal with them and thus rid myself of them. Paxil and other SSRI’s act as a kind of emotional anesthetic, and when I was deep in the depths of social anxiety and depression, scared of the world and feeling like I was not even real, I needed that kind painkiller in a big big way.

But past a certain point, the swelling is gone, the bones have healed, and it is time for the patient to throw the crutches away and learn to walk on their own again. Those crutches, so necessary during the first part of the patient’s convalescence, become a barrier to it in time, and you cannot learn to be a healthy person unless you put them away.

Luckily, in the case of these chemical crutches of mine, I can throw them away a little at a time. I am reducing my dosage by 1/7th, or around 14.3 percent, and that is not such a big thing in the grand scheme of things, or so it seems.

But I am wary wise of the true nature of brain chemistry altering substances. They do not operate as simple vectors, X amount of drug getting you Y amount of effect.

Biology is rarely that simple, and that goes triple for brain chemistry. Instead, it operates on thresholds. Above a certain threshold, and you get effect Y, period. Below the threshold, you get jack shit, or if you are lucky, maybe a quarter of the previous effect.

I am exaggerating a bit to illustrate the principle, but you get the idea. Each reduction of dosage of a complex drug like an SSRI could have a much larger effect than the mere proportion of dosage would suggest. My mental landscape might change by a lot more than 14.3 percent.

So I will be wary, but on the other hand, I will try not to obsess over it, because that never leads to anything good. An overactive and overpowered brain like mine can easily pick itself apart if not held in check, as I learned in my early twenties when I had severe IBS, hypochondria, depression, anxiety, and a host of other problems.

So the key is to integrate things into your consciousness in a natural and easy way, without either letting the new thing dominate or burying it under a crossroads at midnight.

Just let things unfold in their own time without trying to control the outcome. That is one of the deep and difficult lessons I am learning at this point in my life’s path.

No more micromanaging myself. It clearly is toxic to the desire outcomes, no matter how the false feeling of control lies to you and tells you that only via controlling things can you get good outcomes.

That notion rests on the false assumption that exerting control over something has no cost. But it does have cost, and the more control you exert, the greater than cost, until you are squeezing the very life out of yourself in a vain and misguided attempt at self-control.

True self-control must also include control over the desire for control. It involves leaving things alone which are best left alone, and exerting control only where it is most effective, and then, only as much control as is needed, no more.

As hard as it is for many of us who have a very deep mistrust of the universe, some things truly are better off left alone, and work just great on their own with no interference from management.

And that goes triple for all the little things that go to make up a mind.

Just let go. You will be amazed at how better things will be.

This, I hope to learn. Amen.