My Brain on Drugs

My brain doesn't work as it should.

It's not a value judgement but a fact.

I know how receptors and neurons and levels of dopamine and serotonin and how they help regulate the human existence .

I know it is all part of  highly complex system of energy and transfer and chemical reactions.

My wiring is bad.

Over the years I've learned that a lot of what I considered my fate --- depression, inattentiveness, occasional waves of of hopelessness -- was tied to my faulty wiring. I was also constantly vigilant, hyper aware of what was going on around me.

 It was exhausting.

Still, I figured it was just a part of me, like the blue-green color of my eyes or the now white color of my hair.

It was who I was and who I had to come to terms with being.

I have been this way as long as I can remember. My earliest realization of  it was when I was in the second grade. That was the year I wanted to be a nun. I prayed and prayed and prayed to God to help me although I didn't know what, exactly, why I needed help. 

I just knew I didn't seem to be like everyone else. The term alien comes to mind.  

That feeling of otherness stayed with me all these  years.

Although I tried to hide it with considerable effort and energy but it clung to me like a low, gnarly hum, always there.

I have a gift, or maybe a curse, for putting things that are mentally troublesome into a box. Can't get out bed?

Have to talk myself for an hour before going into the kitchen to get something to eat?

Seeing and experiencing things that should give me great happiness and joy, seeing these same things bring great happiness and joy to others and not being able to quite join the party.

It was an invisible veil hanging between me and the best parts of the world.

So I tucked away the sadness or distance and put it in a box. Lid ti. I was good at it. I was voted Friendliest in my senior class in high school and that kind of persona carried through much of my adult life.

There were efforts to cope. In my 20s I was put on Prozac.
At the time Prozac was rolled across the country like a fierce anti-depressant Army.  I was one of the first members of the Prozac Nation, one the 2 million or so people who used it in the first year, 1987.
It was a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor.  Antidepressants of its kind now the third most prescribed type of medicine in the United States, according to the New York Times. 
It never worked for me.  It made things worse. A side effect, I found out years later, was insomnia. I struggled to sleep for years and wondered why I didn't feel better. The doctors never suggested that King Prozac might be the problem.
But eventually I stopped taking it and trudged on. But the experience left me with  deep suspicion about brain drugs.
That is not say that every day has been a soul less chore. I wasn't like Debbie Downer. I tried to keep it mostly to myself.

But it lingered in me, that sadness and pull,
I've tried other things to fix it. Alcohol, food, when I was younger handsome boys who loved me but couldn't quite reach me and didn't know what to do when I would begin crying and not be able to stop
 I have almost always had a counselor which helped keep me steady but I recently had a crisis. Not a life and death kind of crisis but a heartbreaking one. It was mostly of my own making. But I was laid low.
My carefully constructed box was no match for it and everything that had been tightly held at bay come pouring into my life. I went to work but barely got out of bed on the weekends. I told no one. I lied to some. I avoided those who might venture to guess how bad things were.
But I couldn't keep going and sought help. Again, came the suggestions of a drug for my badly wired brain. I'd like to think I was older and wiser but the truth is I was desperate.
So I listened to people who told me, as I had been told time and time before, that I had a brain disease. It wasn't a question of character or willfulness.
So I took the medicine as prescribed.  It was not a miracle cure. Two weeks in my trouble thinking was much much worse. I couldn't find the words I meant to say. I cried a lot. Going to the grocery store? I barely made it through the check out. There were conversations that I might need to go to a hospital if things didn't improve.
But they did.
So my days are brighter. Less fraught with peril. I feel genuine joy and genuine sadness. And genuine excitement. Sometimes it takes me a minute to identify what is what.
I was talking to a friend who is a doctor and he said, "You are smart lady, why did you suffer for so long?"
I don't have a good answer for that. Maybe I thought change was out of reach. Now I can be a crowded place and just be calm. Or, really, most places and just be calm. My blood pressure has gone down.
And my faulty brain, at long last, seems to have found the right path.

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Menopause is Universal!