My posts are getting more rare, but if anyone is still interested in what I put out into the world), I’ll be over at Medium from now on. You can find me by searching for Emmaline Soken-Huberty. I just posted my first thing, “Two Birds.” It’s a quick 2-minute read.
Hope to see some of you there!
I’ve been off Effexor completely for about a month and taking CBD gummies, and I’m now asking myself a key question: how much loneliness is too much? When do I need to start asking myself: is this new mental health structure working?
I’m feeling a lot more these days. Like, at the drop of a hat, something will make me want to cry. I haven’t really gotten comfortable with letting that just happen yet, because I’m afraid of feelings. I’m afraid that they will overwhelm me, drown me, and I’ll have to do something about it. And what is left to do? I’ve done various stages of medication, and now no medication, and therapy and blah blah blah blah. I’m worried that it’s my environment that makes me sad.
I’m really disconnected from community. I haven’t liked to admit that, because it makes me feel like I’m dismissing or insulting the friends and family I do have, but at the end of the day, I’m very isolated. Sometimes it feels like days go by and I haven’t had a real conversation with anyone except Chris. I certainly haven’t done anything with anyone except Chris, because the friends I do have are not close by. Sometimes it really feels like I’m just standing on the edge of a cliff, shouting into the void. I’ve kind of felt that way my whole life, always trying to hear the echo.
Now, at night, I’ll have trouble sleeping because of an aching hollow in my chest. It’s the feeling of loneliness the medication has numbed for a long time, and I’m really scared that I’m feeling it again, and it’s scary that it’s never really left. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to ask from people. I’m trying to do things differently, create a different social structure for myself. I’m going to church now for god’s sake, but in a lot of ways, it brings up so much anxiety and fear, it makes the ache worse.
I don’t know what I need to make this ache go away, because what if it can’t go away? What if this is just normal for me, and I should just ignore it and focus on the positives? What if this is just what being medication-free is, and it’s the trade I make to not have side effects? How much pain is too much pain?
For most of my life, I’ve struggled with belonging. I distinctively remember being in 1st grade, six years old, on the playground at the international school I went to when we lived in Belgium, and getting hit by a wave of loneliness. I was on the swings, other kids swinging on either side of me, and I felt like I was about to sail off into the sky by myself, detached from the swing chains. I felt very old, like I’d lived a hundred lifetimes already. I felt…isolated.
That feeling has followed me my whole life. I never quite fit in as myself. If I wanted to “belong,” I had to change somehow. I had to listen to certain music, watch certain movies, and keep my mouth shut about the stuff I cared about. When I got older and more independent, I didn’t bend to peer pressure as much, but in order to feel okay with it, I had to take pride in my loneliness. “I feel this way,” I told myself, “Because I’m special.” That’s a dangerous way to live, because in order to feel joy or connection with others, I had to let go of that whole “special” thing.
I’m over that now. I don’t want to be isolated or lonely. I don’t think that’s what makes me special. But I still don’t feel like I really belong anywhere.
Chris and I have been going to a church lately, and for practically the first time ever, I actually don’t hate going to church. I feel safe there. But it isn’t easy. At one of the services, to celebrate the co-pastor getting her Masters of Divinity, one of her professors spoke. He spoke directly to the congregation, offering advice and encouragement and so on, and I got hit by that wave again. Specifically, a talking wave that said, “You don’t belong here.” It felt really strange, like I was looking in a window, spying on the service. He isn’t talking to me, I thought, because I don’t know anyone here. I’m not a part of this community. That sad little voice added, “And you never will be.”
My instinct is to say that voice is the devil, but I don’t think it’s that cut-and-dry. It’s fear, yes, which doesn’t come from God, but I am sick of identifying every negative thought as a demon hissing in my ear. I’ve lived that belief before, and it is exhausting. I think that voice is six-year old me, fearful, who is counting out all the times I’ve been lonely or rejected, and telling me that’s what will always happen. She doesn’t count all the times that hasn’t happened, though.
So, what do I do? My spiritual director has given me advice for when fear like that comes up, when our past selves try to convince us of something that isn’t true. I reassure six-year old me. I tell her it’s going to be okay. The idea of treating fear with compassion is still new to me. Since I believed every negative thought was a demon, I’m more familiar with going on the attack, like my head is a war zone. The result is always a bloody battlefield, without much peace or hope. I only succeed in traumatizing myself even more. It’ll be different this time.
I’ve been to church since that wave of isolation. I didn’t feel it as strongly this time, because I anticipated it, and I knew how to respond. When the little voice tried telling me, “You don’t belong here,” I knew what to say: “Maybe not yet, but that’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”
Broken glass, pins, nails…these are the items that litter my dreams at night. They start growing from beneath my skin, they fill my ears, eyes, and nose, and they coat me like a suit of armor. When I told my spiritual director that these are the sorts of reoccurring dreams I have frequently, she looked taken aback. She asked if I had ever seen a Jungian therapist, or one who specialized in dream interpretation. Um, nope. That sounds…odd. Her concern did prompt me to start researching dreams, though. They are symbols of the subconscious. If something is bothering a person, it will eventually emerge in their dreams. There’s no escape.
That all makes sense to me. It’s how I know that I’m still not over my fears about witches, demons, and the trauma inflicted by charismatic, evil-obsessed spirituality. In my dreams, I’ll frequently get attacked by a witch or start getting possessed, and the language I learned from the old days comes spilling out, in an attempt to fight. It never works.
I can do work when I’m awake to try and decipher the dreams, to deal with what understanding I can glean from them, but while I’m in the dream, I feel powerless. I started looking into how dreams could be controlled, and “lucid dreaming” came up. It’s when you know you’re in a dream and gain a heightened sense of awareness and control. You can effectively create objects, conjure specific people, and perform actions from thin air, just like you would if you were awake and writing a story. This time, though, you’re living the story within the dream world.
I read “A Field Guide To Lucid Dreaming,” and learned that I mostly dream in the second tier of dreaming: I know I’m dreaming, but I have very limited control. In nearly every dream I have, I know it isn’t real, but I can’t do the things I want to, like fly or make nightmares go away. In order to get more lucid and improve my control, I’ve had to start keeping a dream journal again. It’s an overwhelming process, because I remember my dreams in great detail, and I dream pretty much every time I go to sleep. If I take a nap during the day, I’ll dream, so that’s two dreams per 24-hour period.
I’ve written down about ten dreams since I started my new dream journal, and I have dozens of dreams written down from a few years back. In going through them, there are patterns that emerge. The first one I’m going to take a look at is where the dreams are set. One of the most frequent locales? High school.
High school was really hard. Making friends was like trying to tame a wild animal, when the roles of wild animal and human switch frequently. The strict adherence to conservative evangelicalism and policing of thought ground me down to an angry, throbbing pencil nub that felt like it couldn’t be useful anywhere else. I loved a boy who couldn’t love me back the way I needed, and when he left me, I realized I had poured all my energy into that relationship and I had nothing left for healing. Depression hit hard and the medication trials hit harder, so both my mind and body were exhausted.
It’s been so many years since that time and I tell myself I’m over it, but when I go to sleep, I’m back in those hallways, and things are a little bit stranger. My uniform shrinks and grows, transforming its shape, so I can’t focus on anything else. I get lost and panicked that I’ll be late for class. I try taking a math test, only to suddenly collapse with blurred vision while the teacher remains uninterested and unconcerned in what’s happening. I get into fights with classmates from my past, screaming at them, but their faces are blank and they move like shadows past me.
In those dreams, I feel a handful of emotions depending on what’s going on, plot-wise, but there are trends: abandoned, voiceless, trapped, neglected, alone. These are all feelings I had in high school, and they all came to a peak when I was so depressed, I wasn’t going to school. I don’t even know how many days I missed. During that time, I don’t recall maybe more than one person reaching out and asking if I was okay. Some would ask my brother if I was coming to school when he showed up alone in the morning, but eventually, after getting the same answer every time, they just stopped asking. If I had gotten mono or something other longer physical illness, I might have gotten get-well cards, or flowers, or a visitor or two. For depression, dead silence.
On the rare occasion when I was in at school, I was so lifeless, I just fell asleep during class. I couldn’t fight it; I had no energy for fighting. Someone trying to keep me awake wouldn’t have been helpful, but I can’t even imagine what a pat on the back or squeeze of the hand from a girl sitting next to me would have done for my motivation to keep trying to live. It felt like people were just watching me slowly die. I have no idea what they thought of it. Pity, probably.
The dreams I keep having tell me I’m not fully-healed from the feelings of abandonment and neglect high school spawned. Those emotions are a refrain in a song that will play in my head whenever my soul aligns a current experience with the past, and they send me right back in time. All the years of learning and maturity and recovery crumble, and it’s like I never left that building.
I’m not quite sure what to do about it. Well, that’s not true. My spiritual director recommends writing letters to myself as if I was back in the moment of trauma. I would be sending my own get-well cards into the past. That sounds like a good enough plan as any, especially since I’m a writer, it’s my strongest love language, but it’s also kind of scary. It seems so emotionally overwhelming and painful, like tearing the scab off a wound that never really healed. This is the year of wild emotions, though, so I have to start somewhere.
I’m usually pretty tight-lipped about stuff like this, (my family reads this blog after all, this may be one to skip, Mom), but I think it’s really important to talk about considering how much mental illness/antidepressants affects it, and how silent the Christian community usually is about sex in general. I was never forced into purity culture or wearing a purity ring or anything, but the book “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” had a huge impact on my worldview from a young age, and I’ve definitely dealt with some shame issues. This post isn’t so much about that; just wanted to put that out there so you know where I’m coming from.
LET’S GET INTO IT.
I wish I had more of a libido.
There, I said it. If I had break down my feelings about sex into percentages, 90% of the time I’m completely uninterested, and 10% I’m basically on board, but I don’t have a strong feeling one way or the other. It wasn’t always this way, so that makes things even more frustrating. I used to think it could be related to my bisexuality, that maybe I went through phases where sex with a guy just wasn’t my cup of tea, but in the last year, the whole concept of sex has become just uninteresting.
Why has my sex drive shut down? I’ve been blaming most of it on my antidepressants, but as I’ve reduced my dose to nearly zilch, it’s clearly not why. That was a pretty major disappointment, to be honest. I really hoped, despite the fact that Effexor isn’t supposed to be affect libido, that I would be one of the few cases where did. Since I don’t have any depression symptoms either, I can’t even blame my old nemesis. I’m mostly medication and depression-free, and still totally frozen sexually.
Could it be my birth control? That’s very possible, and I’m kind of leaning towards that as at least part of the reason, but what should I do with that information? I don’t want to stop taking it. I actually lost a month’s supply and stopped for a week or so before calling in another prescription, because the cramping and bleeding was so bad. Seems like going off birth control would be another exercise in gradual reduction, and I’m not interested in doing that.
Maybe this is just the way I am? I’m generally fine with that, but I’m not the only person in this equation. I’ve read a lot of advice online, some of it good, some of it really bad, and I’ve talked to a few of my girlfriends, but nothing has really clicked. This really confirms to me how much sex and sexuality is an individual thing, and Christian culture discourages and oppresses pretty much all and any exploration or discussion of it. If it is talked about, it’s all male-focused and doesn’t get into how girls and women are feeling. There is no masturbation talk for girls or talks about different levels of libido and normality, and I don’t believe that’s limited to Christian culture. Culture as a whole is not a fan of healthy female sexuality.
So, is this my normal? Maybe. But how do I change it? Should I want to change it? Can I change it? There are a lot of questions. I don’t really want to think about them. My plan is to address the possible physical reasons, like the birth control. I ordered powdered maca, which has been used in Peru for libido with limited side effects. This is big for me, because I am very skeptical of supplements and herbs and what not, especially when they’re labeled as “super foods.” Not expecting miracles, but the bag cost less than $10, and just maybe it’ll help counter the effects of the birth control, if that is indeed part of the problem. I’ll let ya’ll know after I’ve tried it for a while.
If you made it this far in the post, congrats. Maybe this is all way too much information, but this has been a big part of my relationship stress and questions about my identity, so it would be weird to never talk about it. Thank you for bearing with me.
My time on Effexor is drawing to a close, slowly, but surely. This week, I tried to stop completely. I was on half a pill all last week and experienced very few symptoms. Monday was a bit rough, but I was optimistic. Then Tuesday came. I woke up feeling like a can of soda pop that’s been violently shaken. The pressure in my head was so bad I felt like I might go blind. It got a little better after I had breakfast, but it was very hard to focus still. Luckily, I had a good excuse to not write very much: my computer’s keyboard broke. I used Chris’ computer for a while, but I hate it because it feels like the keys weight a million pounds and I’m always accidentally opening tabs, so I just worked on one project for a little while.
A nap will help, I thought. The pressure got worse when I lay down. It was like it all flooded into my brain when I went horizontal, so that was a no. I took a shower in the dark and felt a little better, but I knew that wouldn’t last very long. Showers are just temporary relief. Since lying down wasn’t an option, I decided to just read. I ended up reading like 300 pages of Tana French’s “In the Woods,” finishing it, and writing notes for my own mystery novel. The good news: I definitely have enough plot points. I’ve always been worried that my novel’s story was too simple, but “In the Woods” oddly mirrored mine in that it had plot threads going on in the main character’s past and present. I also figured out how to structure the law enforcement/police department, so it feels more real. That will mean going through my pages and changing every incidence of “Sheriff” to “Chief” and the deputy is now a detective.
It’s a really weird feeling to be starving, but then when you eat, you throw up. That happened twice yesterday; weirdly, the only thing I did eat that I kept down was Ben & Jerry’s Half-Baked Ice Cream. I spent the evening reading and propped up at a weird angle, and eventually my head felt so close to exploding that I took a quarter of the Effexor. I almost immediately felt better, though falling asleep was still rough and I started getting sharp chest pain.
Didn’t set an alarm for this morning and ended up full-on sleeping till 11:30 am. I took a quarter pill again, because I did not want to be completely debilitated. It’s been much better today. The usual neck and shoulder stiffness, some head pressure, but no throwing up and I’ve been able to catch up on my writing projects and clean. For dinner, it’ll be zucchini bread pancakes, bacon, and eggs, and I should probably stretch really well, since the last 30+ hours have consisted of moving as little as possible.
The plan is to stick to a quarter pill for a week. Who knew that 18 mg could make such a big difference? I’m happy to push off the withdrawal for another couple days, at least, because I have a fun weekend coming up with baking on Saturday at a friend’s, and then MST3K-ing on Sunday with another friend. I’d rather not be on the verge of head implosion.
If I wrote this yesterday like I planned, it would have been a more cheerful blog. Today, however, has been unexpectedly rough. I think my first mistake was eating a breakfast with too much sugar and caffeine. I had leftover nectarine crumble and a chai latte with my new blend. I was careful to not add too much sugar, but within ten minutes or so, my head felt like it might explode. At the same time, I was struggling with an article’s images and trying to get pics in a high enough resolution, and that made me really angry for some reason. So I was frustrated, in a lot of pain, and walking the clock, because I was supposed to have a doctor appointment.
That didn’t happen. Chris ended up having to cancel it while I lay in bed, clutching my head, praying for death. It hurt to think, but thoughts still pounded through. These last few days I’ve been getting increasingly angry with the Brett Kavanaugh situation as more allegations emerge along with revelations about how Republicans knew and have been trying to rush the nomination process anyway. A lot of Christians (like Franklin Graham) have been trying to shrug off what Kavanaugh did or just say outright that the women are lying. It’s been making me feel physically ill.
These extreme emotions are new to me and I don’t really know what to do with them. Writing them down in my journal helped, but it doesn’t feel like enough.
Aaaand now I’m feeling nauseated, so let’s end there.
Tomorrow, I will have just ended two weeks on a lower dose of Effexor, and my patience is thinning. Looking at the positives is important – I only have to take Tylenol about once a day and I haven’t been throwing up in the mornings anymore. This weekend, I was at a social event for 4 1/2 hours and didn’t pass out or feel the need to bite anyone’s head off. Progress!
This week is also significantly cooler, I can actually feel some lacy edges of autumn in the breeze, and that really improves my mood. I’m still sleeping a lot and don’t have much of an appetite. Whenever I feel the tiniest bit of motivation for work, I try to churn out as much as possible, because after an hour, I want nothing to do with writing or thinking of any kind. Today, I have done some very half-hearted research for a new cookbook introduction and then fell asleep on the couch for two hours.
As for daily chores like cleaning and cooking, don’t even. I’ve made exactly two dishes these past two weeks – nectarine shortcakes and a salsa, which I’ve turned into nachos for my breakfast and dinner the past two days. I’m also very into this new peach tea I got from Plum Deluxe, an Oregon-based loose tea company. They have a vanilla latte black tea I want to get once it gets colder.
The withdrawal could be much worse. From reading online, some people experience horrendous symptoms after going down 75 milligrams. I am a little frustrated with my doctor for not talking about the withdrawal. If I hadn’t known about it and done my own research, I would have had no idea what to expect and been a lot more emotional. That seems to be the experience of a lot of people wanting to taper down.
My goals this week are to eat more vegetables, continue eating very little sugar, and get more exercise.
I just finished my first week on 150 grams of Effexor instead of 225 grams. How did it go? It was a mixed bag.
Day 1
To ease myself in, I took half a pill in the afternoon and the other half at night. Withdrawal symptoms included lightheadedness and irritability. I couldn’t sleep that night and experienced surges of anxiety about nothing. I felt really twitchy and when I did get to sleep, I kept walking up.
Day 2
Despite a rough night, I woke up feeling pretty good. Ate leftover pasta for breakfast, took my pill, and wrote. I started to feel more tired than usual, so I took a nap. I usually try to nap about two hours after waking up. If I can’t fall asleep, I just don’t take a nap that day. Today, I fell asleep pretty much right away. Had some fatigue the rest of the day and found it difficult to focus on anything.
Day 3
SO MUCH FATIGUE. Felt like a zombie all day, took forever to write just a few hundred words. I’m supposed to exercise to combat the withdrawal, so I managed to clomp about a mile with the dog. That night I had a lot of muscle and joint pain, especially in my head and neck.
Day 4
Nausea strikes! I threw up in the morning and lay on the couch. I drank a lot of water. Couldn’t figure out what to eat. Didn’t feel like eating at all the rest of the day, but I made myself.
Day 5
Saturday! Beach day! Yoshi was super obnoxious on the drive and I felt my patience wearing thinner than usual. Started getting headache and experiencing nausea. Couldn’t really focus, so I just sat on the beach and didn’t think about anything. Took a short nap and walked with Yoshi for a little bit.
Day 6
That’s today. I threw up again and I can feel a headache coming on just above my right eye, like a spreading sunspot. Thinking about going back to bed after I finish this blog. I wrote two work things already, so it wasn’t an unproductive morning. Going to see a movie this afternoon.
OVERALL THOUGHTS: Withdrawal wasn’t too bad this week. I don’t like the fatigue part, because that makes working out SO DIFFICULT. Even just walking feels like my limbs are full of sandbags. Nausea is my least favorite symptom. I haven’t had any weird emotional symptoms yet besides some anxiety, racing thoughts, etc, at night. No weeping spells, which is good. This next week I’m sticking to my current 150g; I don’t want to taper down more until the withdrawal symptoms are completely gone.
What I’ll do differently: I’ve noticed that I’m really sensitive to sugar right now. As in, I’ll have one sugary thing and immediately start getting a headache. Will be avoiding sugar this week. Also making it a goal to get more exercise. Luckily it looks like it will be a cooler week.
So, I’m finally going to do it. I’m going to talk to my doctor about tapering down my medication. I’ve been on one antidepressant or another for 11 years. For the last five or so, I’ve been on 225 grams of Effexor. It’s time to taper them down.
Why? For one, I’m just tired of having to take a pill three times a day. 225 grams is also a really high dose, and I don’t need it. I’m not in a stressful environment, I have a strong support system, and I’m an expert at self-care. Also, while Effexor doesn’t have obvious side effects like headaches or brain zaps, I do believe it has a numbing effect on my emotions and sexual drive. I’m trying to connect to my emotions more since I’ve been seeing my spiritual director, and I just feel like the medication is blocking some channels.
I’ve been reading Lost Connections by Johann Hari and it’s blowing my mind. I had no idea how relatively ineffective antidepressants are when it comes to treating depression and anxiety. I’m not saying they’re worthless, they’re just not as effective as Big Pharma would have us believe, and there are other treatments that could be as effective or more effective that aren’t getting researched. It was also really troubling to learn that pharmaceutical companies aren’t required to release all the information they have on their pills, so they only release the most positive. The studies are also known to frequently be biased and funded by the company itself. I feel like I shouldn’t be so surprised. Money drives everything and pharmaceutical companies stand to make billions by hawking their drugs.
It’s time for me to taper down or stop the medication completely. I’m much less worried than I was before, because now I’m not sure how much the drug by itself is responsible for my better mental health. I think back to the worst depression relapses and they all happened in really chaotic times : being in, then ending an emotionally-draining relationship/feeling isolated at a high school where I didn’t fit in/being at a college where I didn’t fit in with very few friends/engaging in a really destructive spiritual environment/switching to a radically-different college/unearthing childhood trauma. Of course I reacted the way I did and a pill wasn’t going to fix everything, even as my doctor raised the dose. Now, I don’t anticipate having the kind of relapses I did before because my environment is so different. My worst fear was going off medication and just completely shattering. That’s not going to happen, because that’s just not how my mind works. The withdrawal won’t be fun, those symptoms usually resemble depression relapses, but once those are over, I don’t see myself emotionally-teleporting back to my 19-year old self.
I’m not saying that I wish I had never started taking antidepressants or that they’re always bad in every case. However, I’m starting to grasp more fully just how little we actually know about depression and anxiety. We’ve been fed this line about how it’s a brain imbalance and if we get the balance of chemicals right, we’ll be fine, but if that was the case, so many people wouldn’t still be depressed. Focusing so much on the biological aspect of depression and anxiety ignores the effect of our environment, social lives, family, work, etc. It’s been weird to read Lost Connections and experience so many “duh” moments simultaneously with “whaaat” moments.
I see my doctor next week. I have no idea what she’s going to say (this is also my first time seeing her, so she might not be as gung-ho about tapering down as I am), but I’m going to stand my ground. I know me better than anyone, I know that it’s time. I’m basically just asking her to write a new prescription if necessary and what kind of reduction schedule I need to follow to prevent withdrawal as much as possible. It will be really nice to not have to set so many alarms and always carry pill supplies around everywhere.
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