Healing girl summer

Reporting from the front lines of being on the lowest dose of SSRIs in 12 years

I’m weaning myself off my antidepressants. I’ve cut down to a quarter of my dose to ten milligrams, and if everything continues to go well, I will be off them completely in a week.

This is a sentence I never thought I’d write. I was prepared to take SSRIs for the rest of my life, grateful for the improvements they made. I started taking Citalopram after my official diagnosis of depression at age 33, when I confessed to my doctor that I went through regular phases of explosive rage and a grey fog that wouldn’t lift for days. He told me that I had a serotonin-deficieny in my brain that could easily be fixed by taking a Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI) that prevented the reabsorption of serotonin, thus increasing its level in the brain. I happily accepted this easy explanation, took the prescription, and changed nothing else about my life.

Years went by. I faithfully swallowed my pill every morning, but continued to ignore the rest of my body’s needs. I only gave it rest if it suited my busy schedule, feeding it caffeine if it didn’t. I denied it food if I’d decided I had eaten enough that day, no matter if I was hungry or not. If I didn’t want to feel unpleasant emotions such as sadness or grief (and I never did, wanting to feel happy all the time), I’d drown them in wine to give myself the short-lived dopamine hit I craved. I spent time with people that were bad for me, I carried around unprocessed guilt and shame from my childhood, and I swallowed the large and small injustices all women experience because I didn’t want to “make a fuss” or be called “difficult” or “emotional”.

I resented (but still carried out) the immense workload I was expected to perform: two jobs (x-ray and playing the church organ), running a household all by myself, cooking all the meals, stepmothering, looking after a multitude of pets, and doing all the invisible labour almost all women do: remembering birthdays, buying gifts and writing cards, making and remembering doctor’s appointments for myself and my husband, hosting dinners and get-togethers, providing emotional support to family, friends, or co-workers, remembering to pay bills and renew insurances, waking up my family members if they needed to wake up at a certain time, buying ingredients for dinner, making dinner, remembering the ever-changing food likes and dislikes of various family members, reminding my husband to get his hair cut, cutting his hair, filling prescriptions, descaling the toilet, doing taxes… I could go on (and on, and on. That shit is never-ending).

All while also worrying about eating healthy, getting enough exercise, sleeping eight hours a night, walking 10,000 steps every day, making sure I look pretty, being nice and easy-going and pleasant, bleeding and cramping once a month, and making it all look effortless.

I ask you: was I depressed, or was it all just too much?
And if I was depressed—was it any wonder?

Part of my depression was anger. I would get hit by white-hot rage that swallowed me whole, transforming me into a snarling, spitting, incandescent-with-rage ball of fury. It also left me deeply ashamed.

Anger is not something women are supposed to feel, let alone express. Anger is unladylike and selfish. Angry women are labelled difficult, ungrateful, unlovable. We are taught to bite our tongues, swallow our anger, choke on our rage. Men fear angry women, because our anger is a compass. It shows us where we’ve been silenced and dismissed.
But we’re not taught how to express our anger in a healthy way. The fire of rage can light the way, or burn our world down. Mine was firmly in the second category. I yelled, slammed doors, aimed to hurt. My anger wasn’t illuminating my way—it was burning me alive.

Instead of figuring out why I felt so angry, I suppressed it as much as I could, drowning it in wine. All that alcohol revved up my depression, leaving me catatonic and hopeless.

Of course, this wasn’t happening constantly. For much of the time I was what I considered the real me: a person who loved her life, who had a great marriage, hobbies, passions, friends. A funny, optimistic, exuberant, excitable woman who was fun to be around. But the other, ugly version of myself regularly made an appearance. And there was only one option for me: she needed to be hidden away at any cost. Because if people knew about her, nobody would love me anymore.

Hiding parts of yourself and keeping secrets is an incredibly stressful way to live. Secrets thrive in darkness, where they take on a life of their own and take over your life. The more you try to hide them from the world, the heavier they get. This can go on for years, but at some point, you will collapse under their weight.

My breaking point came in 2021. It was my Bad Year, the one where seemingly everything went wrong: work was incredibly stressful due to the controversy about Covid vaccines and severe staffing shortages; devastating forest fires raged all summer until we were ordered to evacuate; we were harrassed at home; my dog Lily died; I drank more than ever. I didn’t feel safe anywhere: not at home, not at work, not in my own body.
(If you want to hear more, my book Everything is Broken and Completely Fine has all the dirt.)

While going through my Bad Year was incredibly hard, it was the starting point of my healing journey.
I quit drinking. I went to therapy regularly. I walked a lot. I returned to yoga. I also read a great deal: about our society, the patriarchy, feminism. I started to heal my relationship with women. And I took stock of my life: what I wanted to keep, and what I wanted to change.

All this work helped me accept both versions of myself: the sunny one, and the dark one. Because despite what I had previously believed, they both added up to the Real Me. For the first time in my life I realized that I was whole and complete, and had been all along.

The most important part of my healing has been the return to my feminine roots. For too long, I thought the only way to make it in the world was to act like a man: hide my sensitivity, be tough, low-maintenance, and never say no to extra work because I can do it all. I believed I needed to appear effortlessly strong while I was silently exhausted, and I unquestioningly exchanged community for individualism, regarded other women as competition instead of support, and mistook suppressing my feminine nature for empowerment.

I believed that equality had been achieved because on the outside women were smashing the patriarchy—but at the same time I was upholding it at home by being my husband’s housekeeper, manager, calendar, and therapist.

And then perimenopause arrived, and with it: The Awakening.

My perimenopause came with all the bells and whistles: a flood of blood. Bloating that blew up my belly to the size of a hot air balloon. Cramping that made me whimper and curl up in pain. Weight gain. Back pain, joint pain, brain fog, forgetfulness, worsening eye sight, occasional incontinence, and, worst of all: the mood changes. Everything I had been dealing with intensified: the rage worsened, the hopelessness worsened, the irritability really worsened. I started to get suicidal ideation, which scared me enough that I started on what would become a continuing merry-go-round of doctor’s visits. Over the span of approximately five years I went to see my old family doctor, my new family doctor, and a variety of emergency doctors I dropped in on while I was at work. They were all male, and the interactions were all depressingly predictable:

Me (sobbing uncontrollably): “I-I-I’m r-really having a hard time with perimenopause.”
Male doctors (visibly uncomfortable to varying degrees): “Oh? Are you experiencing hot flashes?”
Me (at first patiently, but with each visit losing patience): “Actually no, not much. But my periods have become irregular, I’m bleeding heavily, I have severe cramping and pelvic pain, and my mental health is pretty bad. I, I—” I hesitated, because this part never got any easier. “I’m having suicidal ideation,” I’d whisper, before hastily adding that I didn’t want to kill myself, that the thoughts popped unbidden into my brain as if dropped there by someone else, and that I was pretty sure that they were caused by my chaotic hormones.

The response was the same every.fucking.time:
Increase dose of antidepressants. Don’t worry too much, it’s normal. Make sure you eat right and exercise. Thanks, next please.

I was frustrated. I felt invalidated, and strangely alone. This was, as the doctors kept reminding me, a normal process all women went through. Why was there no support?

I knew what I needed: a female healthcare professional. It took me months, considerable persistence, and personal contacts to find one, but eventually I did. I managed to talk to a gynecologist on the phone who was the first doctor who took my symptoms seriously. Not only did she offer me a treatment option ( with the promise to try something else in case it didn’t work), but more importantly, she listened. She understood. And she didn’t minimize what I was going through.

While the IUD helped considerably with the physical symptoms, my mental health was still in turmoil. Not even bothering with my male GP, I talked my way into seeing a female nurse practitioner. Again, the visit was completely different from my previous experiences. She understood. She had just been to a seminar on female reproductive health with the focus on perimenopause. She held out her hands two feet apart to indicate the length of the list of symptoms that came with perimenopause. In short: she got it. And she got me.

“How do you feel about hormone therapy?” she asked me.
“I’ll try anything,” I replied, wiping the tears off my face. (I couldn’t get through those appointments without crying, dammit.)

She prescribed me estrogen patches, and I’ve been taking them for three months now. And friends: they.are.it. They are the missing puzzle piece. My mental health has never, not in all my life, been better than now. I’m calmer, more regulated, more at peace.
And I can say that with some authority, because we’re currently in an extremely stressful period of our lives: moving to a piece of land that started out with no power, no water, no cell service, and no road leading up to it is turning out to be much more difficult (and pricey) than anticipated. We never expected it to be easy, but holy moly—the problems never end, and neither do the bills. If there ever was a time to lose my shit it’s now, especially with weaning myself off a dozen years of SSRIs, but you know what? I’m not. I get overwhelmed and overtired, and I had a fight with my husband last night, but it’s because there is plenty of reason to be overwhelmed and overtired and prickly with one’s husband.

When I cried last Saturday because I dropped off my nieces at the airport after an amazing two weeks spent together, my husband was worried that it was because my dose of antidepressants was too low. I explained to him that no, I was sad because I was going to miss them, and I was expressing my sadness through my tears. It was an entirely appropriate reaction to entirely normal emotions.

This morning we discussed our fight from the previous night, and again he brought up that it was due to my low dose of pills. No, I explained patiently, there were reasons for our fight. It was completely normal to feel stressed in a stressful situation, and we talked through how we felt and what we needed from each other.

That’s how I know that I’m healing: I’m not afraid of my emotions anymore. They are not holding me hostage like they used to. I feel them all, without judgment, and let them happen. Because I know: everything is fleeting. Happiness, sadness, excitement, despair, light, darkness—it all comes and goes. It’s all valid.

And I am whole.