Pills

Dear Reader,

I never intended to publish this piece. I wrote it when I was very angry, at the world and at myself and everything around me. I’ve since calmed down, but here’s a peek into my head when I first started taking medication a year ago.

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I stare wistfully into the palm of my hand. Heart pounding, I crack open the bottle on the desk in front of me and glare at the contents inside. I can feel the bile rising in my throat. I struggle to swallow. I’m panicking so much I’m freaking out. This is my first time trying this. If I do this, will it make me weak? What if someone finds out? Why am I doing this?

I pause. I know why I’m doing this. I know why I tried one last time. Because if I don’t, I don’t think I’ll have any more reasons left. This is the last chance I can find to hold onto. Because I’ve been having these hallucinations lately. I’ve been having these visions lately. And I think I’ve been close to dying lately. And frankly, I don’t think that’d be the worst thing in the world anymore.

See, I have these attacks sometimes. I’ll just lie in my bed. Or I’ll be out walking, and they’ll hit me like a truck. Sometimes, I won’t even see it coming. But I’ll be overcome by this tidal wave and I’ll have to stand still and catch my breath and my thoughts. My thoughts are running away but my legs are glued to the ground. I don’t have anywhere to go.  When I’m in bed, I imagine myself falling through the edges and the walls curving to catch me. But instead of letting me land safely onto the ground, they push me down this dark, dark tunnel. And I can’t see anything but I know I’m going somewhere painful. 

Somewhere I don’t like to go in my head but I do anyway because I can’t help it. God, I need help. I know.

I decided I needed to try something new when I started thinking I was dying during my panic attacks. No one could help me. Not my closest friends. Not my boyfriend. Not my mentors. Not my therapist. So I turned to the easiest form of prescribed therapy. I started seeing a licensed professional and told her that I was going damned near crazy. Could she help me? She said she’d try her best.

It’s been a pretty crazy ride. Eight crazy rides to be specific. I found out that I was resistant to some of these pills and I thought that was more insane than my brain was making me. But the late nights, the terrors, the heightened terrors, the sleepiness, the lack of sleep, everything spiraled again and again. These stupid pills weren’t doing shit to help me. What’s the fucking point?

Sertraline. Escitalopram. Citalopram. Buproprion. Trazadone. Aripriprazole. Duloxetine. Lamictal. The most drugged I’d been in my life was that one time I was sick with the flu for two weeks. But this was a next level. I was euphoric one day and crashing into the pits of hell the next. And everything would come to a screaming halt when I decided to self-medicate with the blades I had hidden inside the pockets of my backpack. Or with the bottle that hid in the back of the kitchen counter.

You can count them. Every single scar on my arm. Every bottle in the recycling bin at the end of the week. For every time I almost didn’t make it but decided I could pull myself out of the suffocating claustrophobia with fire red cuts on my arms or deep alcoholic sleep. I was ashamed. But sometimes, I am even more ashamed that I let myself become this way rather than what I do to help the hurt. Was this all my fault?

But even then, I’m trying to find a light. There are times I feel like I’m progressing. Like the one time I didn’t shed a tear when he told me we were through. Or the time I didn’t have a meltdown when they told me I wasn’t performing well enough in school. The voice in the back of my brain shuts up for just a second. It’s not very long but now I can see that even though I have these deep-rooted flaws and problems, there’s maybe another side to the complexity.

When she first told me to try an antipsychotic, I was not only hesitant but in shock. How abhorrent were my symptoms that I would need such a heavy medication to soothe my symptoms? Maybe it’s only 2 milligrams, but still; feels like a fuck ton when I didn’t even think I needed to change to a class outside the more common antidepressants. But hey, at least I can focus past three words of a sentence when someone is trying to have a conversation with me. And I can slowly start to articulate the heart on my sleeve that I’ve been wearing for such a long time. And instead of just talking to myself all the time, I have something more to share to someone outside of my own head.

So yeah, maybe my body tremors a little bit here and there and I can’t remember everything I was trying to say. So maybe my appetite’s a bit fucked and I don’t eat regular meals anymore because food makes me want to hurl. So maybe I still haven’t quite figured out how to channel the intensity of my feelings. So maybe I break down still at the thought of what could’ve been and the home I grew up in and what I missed out on growing up. So maybe I’m still broken and this won’t fix everything.

But I’m trying. I really promise I am. And these stupid damned shapes inside the bottle are enough to make me wake up in the morning and pop one in my mouth before heading to campus. They’re hardly the reason I’m functional. I’m the fucking reason why I’m functional. But they threw me a lifeline. At least enough anger and hope to want to keep fighting and trying. And I think that’s what I needed to keep navigating this fucked landscape for just a little bit longer.