Becoming A LexaPro

Sometimes you can't grit your teeth through it.

I have not wanted to kill myself for two weeks now. 

This is actually a big deal; there was not a day since June of 2023 where I did not strongly consider ending my own life. I have the means to do it, sitting in a drawer right next to me as I type this, and many dark nights I thought about getting up and opening that drawer and finishing it all up. 

Of course that would have required me doing something. Good luck with that. I spent entire days laying in bed (the kids these days call it bedrotting), barely able to get up to take a piss. It stopped being days between showers and became weeks. The good news is that I still ate. And ate and ate and ate. I grunted out of bed to meet my DoorDasher and returned to the bed to eat my Chinese or Taco Bell or pizza or whatever garbage I wanted to shove in my face, hoping it might give me a momentary flash of joy. 

I had good days, days where I could leave the house. I had responsibilities, some of which I was able to maintain. But the eight months following June of 2023 were like a horrific black haze swallowing me. The haze could lift for a moment - when I had the energy to see friends, do errands, take a trip - but it would come back with a vengeance. A day out with friends would result in two or three days of absolute invalid behavior, just becoming a carcass that couldn’t even make it to the couch. I would have a good day and recognize it and rush to get dishes done because I knew this window would close quickly. 

One thing that kept frustrating me was that I had the tools to deal with this. When I got sober seven and a half years ago I learned so many ways to handle negative mental states, and I knew that I had so many support systems in place. But what I was experiencing was kind of like being stuck in a pit, with my tool bag outside the pit and just out of reach. I knew that if I could use them, if I could get out of the pit just enough to grab a hold of them, I could make real progress. 

All this time I was doing talk therapy. It’s good, I like my therapist, but it wasn’t getting me out of the pit. I was getting angrier and angrier at myself - you know how to fix this, I’d rage in my own head, why are you too stupid to make it happen?

There’s a thing you have to understand about me - I’m Gen X. I am part of a generation that grew up with a healthy distrust of big pharma. I believe that this nation is wildly overmedicated, and I believe that many personality traits have become pathologized. This means I have been, all my life, reluctant to take medication. I would take drugs but that was different, somehow. Sure, I’ll snort coke but Prozac? What are you trying to do, hook me on pills?

The first blow to this reluctance about medication came when I was diagnosed with clinical inattention. I try to be specific about this, because I do not have a full ADHD diagnosis - that requires a lot more testing and early life information. The thing is that you can develop clinical inattention from stress or trauma, but ADHD is something more ingrained. I’m pretty sure I have ADHD but the way so many people have self-diagnosed and turned it into a personality makes me wary of claiming it without a medical diagnosis. 

At any rate, clinical inattention was hard enough for me to swallow. But swallow it I did, and I began taking meds that were supposed to help with some of the more severe symptoms. As an alcoholic I am wary of abusable drugs - and I did do Adderall recreationally in the late 90s and early 00s - so I took Wellbutrin, which is an antidepressant but is used off-label for ADHD. It helped some. 

But it wasn’t helping after Brittany died. I ended up quitting it, having the sense it wasn’t doing anything for me anymore. There wasn’t much of a change, to be honest - I was useless and depressed and barely functional while on it and off it. 

Eventually the depression was too much, and the frustration was too intense. I was tired of feeling this way, and the daily weight of being so sad, so low, was crushing me. It was adding to the problem, a horrible loop of feeling like shit about feeling like shit which made me feel like shit. I needed something more. I needed to just accept my fate and get on a pill that could help me. 

Enter Lexapro. I talked to a psychiatrist and was pretty quickly prescribed the antidepressant, one I knew a few of my friends were on. I started with a low dose and slowly increased it; there were some side effects - slight nausea early on, a pretty intense sleepiness, night sweats - but I evened out quickly. And yet nothing was happening. 

Weeks passed. I was feeling like shit, just ruined, and I began to think I was wasting my time. I decided to do one more week, to make it like five or six weeks in, and then get in touch with the psych if it still wasn’t working. I figured I’d have to find something else. 

And then, just like that, I woke up one day and the black haze was… not gone but not all-encompassing. A couple of days passed and I realized I was regular lazy, not depressed lazy. The difference is striking - depressed lazy is like being encased in concrete, the effort to move your limbs seems impossible to muster. You’re just entombed, trapped, helpless. Regular lazy? You just don’t want to get up. You can, but you’d rather not. 

How good to be just lazy again. 

I am still sad. All the time. All day. Maybe I always will be. But the sadness is just a part of my experience, not the whole of it. My mood is remarkably better; I am once again doing stupid little dances while I make breakfast, just like I did when Brittany was alive. I am laughing and sometimes even enjoying myself, which is a miracle (one of the things that most made me want to die was the fact that nothing made me happy. It was all gray wasteland in my skull, an expanse of dust and despair, and I saw the wasteland as my entire future). I would say that I go out and do stuff but, again, I’m lazy. But just regular lazy. 

Will this last? I don’t know. I’m only a few weeks into feeling ok, and I am not even sure I would say I’m good but holy shit am I better. I’m hesitant to write this because I worry that I will plateau or that the black haze will roll back in, but it’s now been long enough that it feels like some kind of a change has happened. This isn’t just one of those days or two where I feel good, I’ve felt pretty good for weeks in a row now. 

I’ve been depressed my whole life. I have had the black haze and the concrete tomb before, but never as long as this. Never months and months. But now I wonder what it might have looked like if I had gotten past my preconceptions earlier and begun taking meds years and years ago. What does everything look like in my life if I simply had the guts to admit I needed a hand? That I couldn’t grit my teeth through it?

Who knows. Maybe I wouldn’t have met Brittany, so that means it wouldn’t have been worth it. The important thing is that I’m taking the meds now, which means now is the time I was supposed to take the meds. Everything happens when it’s supposed to happen, otherwise it wouldn’t happen then. The logic is unassailable. 

Today I feel good. Today I did errands, did some writing, made breakfast and dinner for myself. I cleaned. These are not big deals, but they’re things I was having a hard time doing two months ago. A very, very hard time - and I could really have only done one of those things in a single day, never all of them. 

Most of all, I don’t want to kill myself. The voice telling me that it was hopeless, that my future was barren and that I could save myself a whole lot of suffering, has shut up. I’m still anxious and sad and concerned about the future - I’m a 50 year old man who has been widowed and who does not make very much money, a shitty trifecta indeed - but it’s not overwhelming. It’s not all doom. I have the sense that maybe there’s something that could be done about it, that maybe things can still work out. Again, I haven’t felt that way since Brittany was alive. 

The bummer is that now I have no excuse to not pick up the tools. Like I said, I’m lazy, and doing “the work” is kinda unappealing when I could just be hanging around playing Marvel Snap and watching It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Now I have no excuse, no all-encompassing lethargy to blame. Now I have to just pick the tools up again and simply get back to work. And yeah, it’s fun to moan about it but boy am I glad to be lifted out of that pit and once again have the possibility to move forward.