Maybe This Time?

Over the last *counts on fingers* fourteen-ish years(!!) on CFHW I have shared all sorts of ups and downs and U-turns and roundabouts in terms of my journey with my mental health and relationship with medication to help it.

You could call this oversharing, and maybe it is, but it’s also a bit like therapy for me and also if any of it makes even one person out there feel a bit better/hopeful/less alone regarding any of it, then it is worth it.

Which means that as I took my tablet this morning I realised you guys needed an update on where I’m at, because it’s somewhere a bit new.

About four or five months ago, I decided that I wanted to try coming off the Sertraline and going it alone. It had been a few years, and I felt like I’d hit a more stable stage in life that I might just be able to manage. Not only that, but I was becoming increasingly tired of feeling meh.

It was all consuming. And don’t get me wrong, for a long while meh was a vast improvement on what I had without the Sertraline. Without it, I was so anxious that I had broken. I just couldn’t deal with anything, going outside to the shop took a whole lot of effort and sometimes it was too overwhelming and I just couldn’t even do that. I was not coping, just existing felt like too much – I was permanently in fight-or-flight mode and I was exhausted and it was not sustainable at all.

The Sertraline reduced the panic, settled the overwhelm, and calmed the crippling anxiety. It was what I needed to be able to get back into being a functioning member of reality. I was on a reasonably low dose for a while, but after the weird bubble that was 2020-2021 I needed more help and my dosage was slowly increased to the maximum you could have. (Seriously, I know I’m in a minority here, but the lockdowns and stuff were SO GOOD for my mental health and I actually miss it a little bit. Can’t we just make Lockdowns a sort of National Holiday every couple of years or so? No? Ugh, fine.)

On this higher dose, I managed to find my feet again and everything was good until it started to be, well, not so good.

It became slowly clearer and clearer that I was now stuck in a medically induced state of meh. Okay, so when Big Things happened I wasn’t reduced to a panicky anxious mess, however this was because I just didn’t particularly care either way, not because I was able to stay calm/process my emotions better. There just… were no emotions there.

Previously I struggled with keeping on top of housework or life admin because I got overwhelmed and debilitated by anxiety, now I was struggling because if things didn’t get done? Meh. And if they did get done? Also Meh.

Piles of laundry everywhere getting ignored? Meh.

Kitchen sparkling clean and immaculate? Meh.

Achieved something I’d worked hard on for weeks? Meh.

Failed at something I’d been excited about? Meh.

Something got cancelled? Meh.

Finished a project? Meh.

I simply did not really care. The numbing help of the medication had stopped being so helpful over time and started being an issue of its own – it was super frustrating for people near me, but took me longer to see (because meh).

I was doing things I knew I liked/loved doing not because I was getting any joy or fulfilment from them, but because I knew they were a thing I enjoyed. I actually didn’t really care either way. I could stay home and stare at the carpet instead, but a little voice in my head insisted that the two things weren’t equivalents.

More than a few blunt discussions and tears were required to figure out that maybe something needed to change, and after various things were tried and changed, the idea of coming off/reducing the Sertraline seemed like the obvious next step.

So I eventually got an appointment with my GP (over the phone because face-to-face appointments are rarer than polka dot unipigs) and put forward the notion that I would like to start coming off my tablets. I could have gone it alone, using the internet to guide me, but I’ve done that before, and also the few times I’ve forgotten to order my prescription and had to either do without or have half doses for a few days etc were literal physical and mental hell, so I decided that I needed professional guidance.

My GP is lovely, and he listened to my explanations of why I wanted to do it, and he agreed that it sounded like the Sertraline had run its useful course, at least at the current dosage level.

So a plan was laid for me to start reducing the dose by 25mg at a time, every three weeks, meaning I should be down to zero in about three months. However this was not a set in stone timeframe, I was told to listen to my body/brain and if I needed a little longer at any stage then to do that instead of rigidly sticking to a schedule.

It has now been more than three months, I found some of the transitions entirely painless but others less so. I made active choices not to drop a dose ‘on time’ so that I would avoid the changeover wobbles whilst I was on holiday/away from home/already in the middle of my period because that’s already bad enough thanks.

That being said, I am now down to the final stage. I’m taking just 25mg a day (a dosage they don’t make tablets for, this whole process has involved a lot of carefully slicing teeny tiny tablets in half!) and I’m into week two of it. So I’m almost there, wherever there is.

It has not been a smooth ride. There was a horrible bit in the middle where even basic emotions were entirely shocking and overwhelming. I cared whether or not I did things. I finished something simple like hoovering and felt satisfaction at a job well done, I got frustrated by something I couldn’t do, it was… a lot. I went from total and utter meh about everything from housework to mortal peril situations, to actually having feelings. I had sort of forgotten what those were and how I was supposed to deal with them.

But I’ve settled, I’m working it out. I no longer get entirely floored and exhausted by unexpected emotions, and I’m also feeling capable of keeping on top of them as well.

Maybe I am on my way to being one of those ‘fully functioning adults’ I’ve heard about in story books???? Although that might be getting a little ahead of myself, let’s be honest.

We’ll see where this goes, but now you’re up to date on where I’m at in terms of getting myself back again.