Coming up for air

I don't know what happened to my mental state in the last couple of weeks. I don't know if it was a delayed Effexor crash or some crazy combination of sickness, exhaustion, stress and PMS. Or maybe it was an aggregate of all of those things plus the Effexor crash. It started out as many depressions before it had: slow, heavy, and murky. But I was also feeling so much older and less healthy than I had ever been during previous depressions. I had just received news of my last living grandmother's passing, which did nothing to remove sickness and mortality from my thoughts.

By Thursday of that week my mood had devolved to complete despair and confusion and I considered suicide as an option for the first time ever. That was indeed very scary and finally prompted me to reach out to Jessie, Mike, Sunny, Martha, and on Jessie's urging, Charles. Acknowledging the acuteness of the pain was helpful in getting it under control, and then accepting that restarting Effexor might be the only good choice was the beginning of the recovery trajectory. In the end -- and I'm not sure that it is in fact over -- a small dose of Effexor seemed to help to stabilize me, although I started taking it last Monday, and my mood didn't really right itself until Thursday night when I went out drinking with people from work.

That night deciding to go out in itself was of some controversy with Sunny, who warned that alcohol would only aggravate my depression. But I knew from previous experiences that alcohol is uniquely useful for breaking a thought logjam and figured it might do the same for a mood rut. It worked. I was so glad of it in fact, that I wasn't even upset after I passed out and hit a metal door with my cheek, giving myself a shiner I'm still nursing. If I've learned -- or rather, been reminded of -- anything it's that where depression is concerned you have to take the good moments wherever you can get them. Hunkering down is a total fallacy of depressed thinking. You don't get used to depression; it imprisons you.

Friday saw my mood much improved, but it was also when I got my period, hence the causal tossup between Effexor, alcohol and hormones. It wasn't an aggressive or manic correction, but the needle had definitely made it onto the positive side of the dial despite occasional wobbles. Over the long weekend I made an effort to keep busy even when it meant ignoring the feelings of confusion and tiredness, and maintaining that momentum may be another key to staving off depression.

So I still don't know what happened to me in early February. I was like a teenager swinging from suicidal ideation to passing out drunk to ho-hum totally fine -- which would support the PMS hypothesis, except I can't recall ever having PMS so severe in my life.

Now if I can just get rid of this confusion I'll be satisfied that I'm out of it completely. But again, it could be akathisia from being back on Effexor. My knee's shaking again...