Who am I

Who am I? Who have I become? I don’t even know the answer to that question anymore.

For over a year I have been unable to write anything meaningful.  It is yet another thing that depression and anxiety have stolen from me. I lack the energy or will to allow words to pour from my thoughts into my fingers.  There is a wall there. Not only the one I place firmly between me and those around me, but a wall inside me, a dam if you will, attempting to hold back the millions of tiny drops of anguish that seek to pour over the top.

Lately I am adrift on the raging sea with nothing but a flimsy life vest of the herbs and potions designed only to keep my head from falling below the surface into the darkness of the abyss beneath me.

For those of you who don’t know me, and for those who think they do but don’t really know the whole of me, this is not new to my life. It is a path I have long walked, stumbled, crawled the entirety of my adult life and started even in my childhood. I have stood on the top of the mountain, both literally and figuratively, only once in that time.  But it was enough for me to know that the life I am living now is not the one I should be.

I was taking prescription meds by my 16^th birthday for depression and eventually anxiety and the cycle never ended.  I traded one demon unknowingly for another as the increased dosages, changed meds and additional meds never stopped.  In 2009 I was on a total of 8 pharmaceuticals with my psychiatrist pushing to add more.  I had wanted to start the process of getting pregnant and was adamant that I did not want to risk doing so while on so many meds but the Dr persisted.  I went home with yet another prescription on that day.  But when I mentioned this to a friend who had taken the same drug, he waved me away from it saying he had terrible night terrors with it and coming off was difficult.  I decided in that moment that I was done.  But I didn’t know where to go from there.

But fate had other plans for me casting me unknowingly onto a path that would change my life in many ways. Only weeks after that appointment, I found myself in emergency spinal surgery. In the end, the nerve damage was like fire in my spine sending shocks of pain through my entire body endlessly.  I sought the help of an acupuncturist when the pain meds became too much to manage.  In her office amongst the magazines, I found a simple brochure on depression and decided to inquire.  It was the hope I was searching for and didn’t even know existed. 

For weeks I weaned off the meds.  All of them.  It was the most awful detox one can imagine.  I did not imagine I would survive that. But my acupuncturist was gentle and caring and worked with me even outside the bounds of her usual treatment.  She would not give up on me or be deterred.  She would hand mix Chinese herbs for me right in her office and used every possible modality available along with hours of acupuncture.  And soon I would emerge into the light.  But not any light. It was an unimaginable healing, as if a deep breath of life pouring into me filling all the emptiness with a flowing river of hope.

I recall once someone asking me if I felt it was the placebo effect.  That I felt I was better because I believed I would be.  If it worked because I thought it would work. To that I laughed and answered an emphatical NO.  I know that because I never imagined a world where I was anything more than surviving.  A place where I was out of the fog.  I, at best, only hoped I could maintain my basic level survival.  Off all the meds I feared I would succumb to the demons I knew existed hiding inside me under the skin just below the surface where the pharmaceuticals couldn’t touch. The bar that had been set for me with prescription meds was only that of not killing myself.  I believed that if I could merely stay alive then that was good enough.  Because that is the best I ever had.  The best I could ever hope for. I believed what was poured into my head for 30 years. That I was irreparably broken and that the only fix was the weak glue of prescription calm.  It was all I knew. Until the clarity of eastern medicine woke me up to the possibilities.

Over the years that followed I was able to live in a way I never imagined possible.  I lost 100 pounds, summited a mountain and earned a promotion at work.  I was there in the brilliant light of life and I was thriving, not just surviving.  And all with nothing more than an occasional, what I liked to call, booster of acupuncture. I truly felt like I had found a cure.  But it was not to last beyond a few years before I lost my acupuncturist when she moved and I was unable to find anyone to match her skill. And in 2016 I found myself beginning to slip back. I always say it was as if I climbed the mountain and rolled off the back side. 

I am not sure what it was at first.  An unsettling in the world around me.  A restless discontent. I also suffer from empathy and I feel strongly and deeply even the pains of those a world away.  But I felt something in the universe I never had before.  And for a while it was only but a stirring itching the back of my brain. I ignored it at first and hoped it would pass.

2017 was the real start, however, of the uncontrolled backslide into the well of depression.  My father passed away of pancreatic cancer a mere 3 weeks from his diagnosis and the shock and loss followed by the unending grief exacerbated the situation.  Then 2020 came along and shattered my world in ways I could not foresee including the loss of my job of 21 years.  The crushing blows of that year all while living in a pandemic served only to create a social anxiety on a level I have never experienced.  It built over the next 3 years to a fever pitch. 

Then in December of 2022 the weight of the years came crashing in on me.  I was hopeless and helpless. My spirit worn down to a paper thin veil. I was lost in the familiar darkness again unable to navigate my way out.  I found myself suicidal and closed off from most of the people around me.  My finger on the dial for the suicide hotline, I knew I was in too deep again and needed a new way out.  I knew what didn’t work but how would I ever find something that would again?

My family doctor pushed more meds on me and therapy which has had its own challenges.  I tried herbs. So many OTC remedies. It has been a hard few months. 

I have now reached a point where my social anxiety is so bad that I not only avoid actual contact with people but I avoid even virtual contact.  I am having trouble emailing and even texting.  I want to close myself off from all contact with anyone.  I remember this feeling from when I was only 15.  To enjoy the sweet pain of my singularity.  To suffer a self-prescribed loneliness.  It is its own drug giving me a sick injection of pain that I have learned to interpret as pleasure.  I feel the darkness filling me up, finding its way into the empty voids I have created. It is simultaneously in my control and yet completely out of my control. 

But there is a small ray of light that I seek with the small part of me still able to see hope. For quite some time I have followed the psilocybin trials hoping for one to come close to me.  But alas nothing.  I like that the psilocybin in a natural approach and I like the idea of being in a monitored setting with a metered dose rather than attempting to go rouge and just try some raw street product.  It was via that research that I came across Ketamine therapy and eventually a friend told me she knew someone who did it and had success with it. 

After a simple desperate google search I found a clinic about 45 minutes away from me and my finger pressed a different call button from the suicide hotline and here we are.  I want this blog to be my journey as it happens. I recognize there will be ups and downs and there is no guarantee I will even be able to access this treatment but I know I am not alone in my suffering and that someone out there might benefit from the pages of my own story and that my journey may open doors to others who will be able to create their own journeys.  This treatment has a high rate of success, some to and including remission or at least to long term healing.  It is my ultimate hope that I am one of them.  But I am fully able to embrace the possibility I will not be.  Either way, join me, to whatever end this takes.