The mini epiphany
Not only have I been under the weather lately but my internet’s been all ridiculous. It’s driving me nuts because I kinda had a mini epiphany and want to write about it. In my last post, I said I’ve been sick lately. I have something called discontinuation syndrome, which is what you can get when coming off certain meds, even if they’re non-addictive. And the reason I was on that medication is something I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned. I was on Effexor, a type of anti-depressant called an SNRI, which stands for serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor. At one point over the last year and a half I was on it, I was at the maximum recommended dose. (All of this – the dosage, the discontinuation – was with the supervision of a psychiatrist, by the way.) I have Major Depressive Disorder, which is about as bad as depression can get from what I understand, though they’re all hell to deal with. If untreated, it can end in suicide, psychosis or dementia.
Because of my depression, and because this was not my first “major depressive episode,” I needed to be on the meds at a much higher dose than I had before, which is why my discontinuation is so awful this time but barely noticeable last time. I believe they helped me, if only to stave off my suicide and keep me functional enough to eat and sleep until I could really work on what was happening.
Anyway, I’m going on tangents, and I really wanted to keep this short. The first incarnation of this post was over 2000 words long.
The mini epiphany was that I realised that I can really benefit from writing about my journey with depression and what got me there in the first place. Maybe it could help someone else, too – or maybe I’m just being narcissistic. Since I don’t feel that something that heavy (depression so serious I can’t get out of bed, self-mutilation, hardcore medication, psych hospitalizations and dealing with abuse) is in the tone of this blog, I’ve decided to start another blog called The Eff Parade. I came up with the name when I was thinking of my old tagline for this blog, which was “Fun, Fact and Fiction.” Then I thought of all the other awesome things that start with eff, like feeling, funny, fuck, frittata and so on. So… a parade of effs. I know it isn’t for everyone, but maybe some of you who regularly read the blog or come across it in your internet journeys will be curious. At the time you read this, there may be nothing up there, since I’m about to go to bed. And, who knows, I may find something better and change my mind about the url and title later, in which case I’ll edit this post accordingly.
Jeez. I’m writing this in notepad since the internet’s down and after selecting all the text to paste it into Word (will it will undoubtedly be safer thanks to auto-save), I hit ctrl + x instead of ctrl + c, so I cut the text instead of copied it. Thank god for ctrl + z.
