a saturnalian miracle - writing from hibernation
on expanded braindomes and DIY serotonin systems
This is a post about coming off my meds. If you’re like me and tend to read someone else doing something as a Sign that you too should do it, this is your Sign to not do that! Don’t come off your meds unless it’s right for you! Seek professional advice! Don’t copy me, I’m just some guy!
It’s been the pattern for the three years I’ve kept this newsletter that I start writing in about April, really ramp up in May and June, and tail off again in the autumn, not to be seen all winter.
Something about the winter has always made it feel difficult for me to write. Depression has always felt like it shrunk my horizons - not quite literally, but not completely metaphorically, either. If you saw The Simpsons Movie (2007), where Springfield gets put inside a giant forcefield dome, it feels like that - but for my imagination, creativity, and sense of possibility in the world. In the summer, my dome expands, so that I barely notice it, and can more or less roam freely. But in the winter, it contracts, so I bump up against it all the time. And certain things, like writing, end up left outside it.
Something is different this year, though. I had thought that the Dome was an effect of the depression itself, but it turns out it probably had something to do with being on antidepressants. This year I’ve finally reached the end of a very slow process of reducing my dose, and my body is finally operating its own serotonin reuptake system without any chemical assistance. For the first time in twelve years.
I’ll say right up top that this is not an anti-antidepressants establishment. If you’re on antidepressants for your whole life, that is fine and good. SSRIs are miraculous, lifesaving technology. I always thought I would be on them for the rest of my life. But in 2022, I had EMDR therapy (a luxury!). Things that had felt fixed in my brain suddenly shook loose. I wondered if being on the maximum dose of SSRIs was necessary. I started to reduce them. I’ve been reducing slowly ever since, seeing how far I could go. The benefits of being off them, as I saw it, would be freeing myself from the acid reflux they exacerbate in me, and saving myself a prescription charge each month.
I didn’t realise that another benefit of stopping them would be an increased sense of what is possible in the world, a wider Dome. It seems like they were capping off all of my emotions in all directions, which is absolutely necessary when the worst of your emotions might kill you, but also has an effect on the positive emotions you can feel. More feels possible now, in the abstract, even if I might sometimes be too depressed to do it - I can see it. I’m also feeling a richer variety of emotions. It seems like the SSRIs were neutralising my emotions by making them less varied and distinct: I more or less had three feelings (plus a Neutral mode) - Happy, Sad, Anxious. Everything else was thoughts superimposed on those, to add detail. But since I’ve been DIYing my serotonin system, I’ve felt distinct emotions beyond those three. Insecurity. Frustration. Calm. Satisfaction. I hadn’t actually realised these were things you could just feel as feelings, all by themselves. It’s been a little bit like being the person on the internet every other week who discovers other people can actually visualise things in their brains.
Of course, this means I actually have to feel negative emotions to their full extent too. Thanks to EMDR I have more tools and resilience to do this, but it’s still hard. At the moment it feels worth it, especially since some of the tools I might use - like writing through my feelings to some strangers and friends in a Substack post - are now more accessible to me than they were.
It’s strange to think back to the last time I was without SSRIs - December 2013. Who was that person? A lost, confused 22 year old I don’t feel much kinship with. I don’t feel like that person has much to teach me, because I wasn’t really feeling emotions then either - I was frozen in trauma and panic and the general terror of being 22. It’s not like SSRIs shut down my emotions or took them away. It’s just that for the last couple of years they’ve been in there, growing, for me to feel them when I’m ready.
Anyway, what’s cool about all this is that I can write, even though it’s January! So here I am, writing. As I write my brain occasionally feels a little zap, as if someone’s gently prodded it with a taser, which is a side effect of SSRI withdrawal nobody really understands. It’s been going on a couple of weeks, but I’m told it’ll get easier with time.
A feeling just passed through me, and now I will have to actually deal with it, and it might not be fun, but at least I can see it.