I’ve been living with a sense of impending doom for as long as I can remember. When did it start? Was it when I went for a check-up at age 13 and my skinny female doctor poked me in the stomach and said, “Getting a little chubby, aren’t we? Have you tried dieting?” Is this what led to coming home after middle school and scowling into a bowl of carefully counted goldfish crackers until I lost ten pounds in less than a month?
Was it growing up wearing Kmart clothes when my neighbors casually splurged on trips to the mall multiple times a year? Was it my parent’s own anxiety and depression issues they tried treating with medication, therapy, being workaholics?
I don’t think it was simply an external event, more a combo of environment, learned behavior and genetics, but I do recall that there was often a sense of dread in the air—always money or thinness. How to get it, where is it, why don’t I have it.
But deeper than that, anxiety recently has been a background hum as a result of choosing not to ever take medication again. Something called “rebound anxiety” lingers as a result of benzos, the medication I took FOR my preexisting anxiety for years. Those pills do a number on the nervous system. In Europe, they prescribe them for one week, max. The guidelines in the medical journals recommend not prescribing them longer than two weeks or so. Yet my doctors prescribed them for me for about eight years on and off.
For many people, benzo withdrawal lingers for years and years. I had what they call an extremely long protracted withdrawal–I couldn’t even feel joy for nine months after getting off those little yellow pills I relied on so much, only pain. I learned all about the little-known word gratitude as I struggled through, insomnia, nerve pain and a thrumming sensation in my body, heightened awareness of almost everything, memory loss, the ubiquitous brain fog. Like being shot with adrenalin day after day after day, but feeling exhausted at the same time.
***
“It is more difficult to withdraw people from benzodiazepines than it is from heroin. It just seems that the dependency is so ingrained and the withdrawal symptoms you get are so intolerable that people have a great deal of problem coming off. The other aspect is that with heroin, usually the withdrawal is over within a week or so. With benzodiazepines, a proportion of patients go on to long term withdrawal and they have very unpleasant symptoms for month after month, and I get letters from people saying you can go on for two years or more. Some of the tranquilliser groups can document people who still have symptoms ten years after stopping.” – Professor Malcolm H Lader, Royal Maudesley Hospital, BBC Radio 4, Face The Facts, March 16, 1999.
***
In spite of this, I stayed off the pills, got freelance work, started writing and doing music again. I wasn’t able to sleep much for almost a year. I had to do something with that time. I remember one day, waking up at 6 or 7am after four or five hours of sleep, thinking, “WTF do I do with the next eighteen hours until I can sleep again?”
These days, it’s the opposite. It’s more like, “How the hell do I work at the library, work on my music, writing, kettlebell/fitness, learning to cook with gluten issues, relationship with my husband, taking care of my allergic paw-eating dog, socializing with all of my new and long-lost friends and find time to read a book with only sixteen hours of the non-sleeping day?”
My how things change. How we adjust.
***
Anxiety isn’t a bad thing, necessarily. When I used to take anti-D’s, I didn’t care about art so much. I was numb—couldn’t cry, didn’t get too down. It was nice, for a while. Until years went by and I hadn’t progressed in the way I wanted to. As my old rehab counselor said last night when we went out to dinner to catch up, “Art and music are a coping mechanism.”
I said that they are basically the foundation of my sobriety. I know if I seek out pills, I will not do my art. As soon as I numb out the anxiety and lingering malaise, I have no desire to make music. I still write, but not as viscerally. And it turns into more journaling than productive non-fiction essay and poetry writing.
To compound matters, my food allergies (wheat, and/or gluten) trigger similar symptoms, such as fatigue, anxiety and nerve pain.
I am constantly grateful that in spite of being damaged by years of taking prescribed benzos and other health issues, I’m functional. I go work every day. I write. I read my writing in public. I work with other musicians on my songs. I do kettlebell.
The only time I have a problem with anxiety being a fact of life for me, mentally and physically, is when I decide I deserve better and that I want something other than what is.
I can’t have something other than what is. I try very hard to control things—to the point that my friends are like, “Dude, chill. Stop obsessing.” Then I back off, and everything kind of falls away. Then I go back to obsessing.
And sometimes, late at night, when I’ve got nerve pain so bad I have to sleep in a sweater to keep the air and sheets from feeling like they’re bruising my skin, I wish there was a pill to fix me. But there is no pill that will fix me long-term. They all have rebound effects after a time. I don’t want to take that risk. And the pills is likely what caused most of this damage in the first place.
***
I don’t know many people who struggle with anxiety at this level, aside from my husband, who channels it into work, and my dad. It’s something I’ve learned to live with. It’s better than it used to be after first stopping the benzos, but it’s still there and I don’t know if it will ever go away. Sometimes, after getting off of pills or drugs, people’s nervous systems don’t heal for five years or more. Sometimes, they don’t heal at all.
I could be mad that the substance abuse specialists and psychiatrists who were supposed to be helping me after I stopped drinking alcohol at age 21 prescribed me things that made me worse, but it was my choice to put the pills in my body, to trust that a pill could fix me.
It used to be that I would preach the ills of benzos and opiate replacement therapy like suboxone (which I was on for about a year and a half and had a horrible time with as well) to anyone who would listen. These days, I realize they are all tools, and as much as I think those two particular medications are poison and am scared shitless of them based on what happened to me, I don’t care if you take them. All I have is my own reality. All you have is yours. This isn’t about your pills or my pills or anyone’s pills. Take your pills, if they help you.
Mine helped for a while and then they didn’t, so I got off them. But not without taking extreme actions. My psychiatrist wanted me on them, even though they were hurting me. The suboxone made me sleep 16 hours a night, so he put me on Ritalin. The benzos stopped working so he upped the dose. I tried to taper them myself, but finally, I just went to a rehab and asked them to help me. And suffered protracted withdrawal. And now the lingering anxiety worse than the anxiety I started with, compounded by food and environmental allergies (yay).
I get sucked into these spirals of everyone else is better than me and more successful and has more money and doesn’t struggle with anxiety and body dysmorphia and money issues, and I don’t think it’s true. I think a lot of people are struggling with these things or something similar. And it’s made me who I am today, I can’t change that. I’m more sober than I’ve ever been.
Boy, do I wish I had the money to afford a fancy nutritionist and supplements and a spa therapy every weekend, but doesn’t everyone?
Like most people, I trudge along, have good days and bad.
Like fewer and fewer people these days, I don’t use pills to make modern life more bearable, but I know why people do. I’ve been there. I wanted that to be my answer. It wasn’t. Life to me is, believe it or not, more manageable without them.
“…Writers do not thrive on drugs like Klonopin and Prozac. It takes your soul; it takes your creativity; it takes your love of running home at night and getting out a typewriter or getting out your paper and pencil and writing something that you love. It takes that away. You don’t care anymore. So Street Angel was all about just not caring. And that’s horrible to me. One of the few things that I’ve never not done in my life is not care. And I didn’t care for a long time. The lows for me were probably the last years of cocaine in the 1980s, and the last four years of the Klonopin. - Stevie Nicks
I’m pretty sure the anxiety is a family thing. I deal with it. Mom deals with it, we all get so used to it that when it goes away (no one notices the absence of anxiety) we’re startled by it when it comes back again.
“What is this feeling! I can’t handle anything! What’s wrong with me?” Sometimes I get anxiety about having anxiety.
I can honestly say I took up smoking as a habit to keep me from worse anxiety driven habits. It’s not good I know, and I try to keep it to less than a pack a week (some weeks, I succeed). Everything in life kills you a little, some things more than others.
I take St. John’s Wort some days to take the edge off of my anxiety. It works decently well most days. I’m a little less terrified of medications than I used to be growing up (I wouldn’t even touch aspirin if I had a headache, I can never figure out my childhood dislike of such things, my grandmother was a nurse) but I still prefer to avoid medicating persistent problems with a persistent dose of chemicals.
I hate anxiety because it makes you go crazy. You may think you’re making logical decisions about things, but all your choices become emotional, unless you can identify before it gets bad that you’re having anxiety.
I had a multi-year period of not being myself because I was having such problems with anxiety that I didn’t stop and look at myself for long enough to realize what I was doing. Giving people the impression that I’m emotional, illogical or any other number of things leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
I’m only glad a lot of the people I associated with already knew better than to define me in such a way, and the people I didn’t know well were either ones I could care less about, or people smart enough to measure a person by the sum of their actions and not just a few.
I have my own eating problems. When I get depressed I just don’t eat. I’m better about it than I used to be, but when things I used to love to eat make me sick it’s not so great. It’s a good thing that I only get depressed for about a meal of time nowadays.
After my divorce I was pretty depressed. I went up to Alaska and barely ate anything for a month or two. I lived off hot chocolate (I was really picky about getting good chocolate.) and tea spiked with fruit juice. The air was so cold up there that the drinks were cold five minutes after I took them out of the microwave. I kind of miss that part because I have to wait five to fifteen minutes just to drink a coffee I order from starbucks. I order them at 140 degrees now. At least catering to snobby crowds affords some benefit to me.
I once ate an entire block of Swiss cheese. Never again. Ugh.
I was frustrated with my depression because I didn’t even like being married. I saw the divorce as an inevitable, and part of me was really relieved that I was through with that part of my life. But we don’t handle change very well in our family and I was cast adrift on the currents of uncertainty. I was without a place to live, and my parents encouraged me to go stay with my friend in Alaska because they didn’t have any room for me at the time.
I was afraid of my own shadow and pretty much stayed in the room used for my friend’s storage with a bunch of boxes, and occasionally the company of a cat. I didn’t eat. My friends wife was psychotic, 18 and pregnant. She accused me of stealing her peanut butter. I don’t even like peanut butter. She constantly wanted me to verify that she could trust her husband, and then accused me of being at fault whenever they fought. It was awful.
She was once like a sister to me.
Anyhow. I remember the feeling of hunger passing after the first few days of not eating. You stop feeling hungry because it takes too much energy. You’re too hungry to be hungry. I enjoyed the side effects of not eating because I could sleep all the time and my brain just didn’t work anymore. I didn’t have to wonder what to do between waking and sleeping because I was always there, between the two. I ate a little only because if I didn’t, it would get noticed. I hate being the center of attention. I don’t like people asking me how I’m doing or if I’m okay.
Sure there are times when I’m not okay, but why the hell do you care, and what the fuck are you going to do about it that makes a difference? Snarl! My sister is pretty in touch with my eye-rolling habits.
I did enjoy going out in the snow though, and walking to the park across the street to take pictures. I had no snow shoes or gloves, and a thin scarf that worked just to keep the air in my lungs warm enough not to burn. Holding my magnesium camera body was colder than the air outside and I’d come back in with frozen fingers to enjoy a hot chocolate. When you’re depressed, you still have moments, but they are brief, and usually washed out in the static of the overwhelming miasma of chemicals that are weighing your brain down.
I’ve had depression issues all my life, and at a young age I learned that I could often just wait them out. I learned that even when I feel like my brain is out of my control, I won’t really do anything that I don’t want to as long as I’m firm enough about it before I sink.
Depression can be kind of comfortable as long as it’s not so extreme you can’t do anything. I don’t like that feeling so much, being the daughter of generations of workaholics.
I’m not really a workaholic myself, I see what that stuff does to people, but I can’t sit still without some progress being made around me on a regular basis.
I left because I was afraid a pregnant woman would get violent on me and I wouldn’t be able to defend myself. (The final argument was something to do with me disagreeing with the way she was disciplining her cat. I’ve never been brought up to condone animal abuse even in the slightest sense, and I couldn’t stand the poor critter yowling in the bathroom for hours just because it wanted affection at an inopportune time.) I arranged a plane flight the same day and packed my one briefcase I’d been living out of and left.
My depression in Alaska followed me back to the US. It was receding to some degree, but I probably had some PTSD or some other psychological issues going on with the messiness that had ended that arc in my life.
It’s probably the most numb I ever felt in my life. It was a strange depression, there was no sense of self loathing or violence involved like some depressions bring. It’s just like my sense of self and purpose took a vacation along with my apatite and reasoning.
Man, this makes my history sound a lot more colorful than it really is.
Some people would say such issues should be medicated or treated with psychiatric evaluation, but honestly, getting your mentals checked makes for the possibility of a blot on your horizon for the foreseeable future. I had my husband call the police on me and have me checked in to mental ward against my will. The event ended up being written off as a domestic dispute (which it was) but they only let me go because I had no medical history.
It’s frightening for me to consider that, regardless of patient/doctor privilege, if you have certain labels attributed to you, someone could just send you off to a mental ward with some lie about your state of mind and they can keep you. Maybe I have my facts wrong.
As for medication. I have no problem with it really. What I don’t like is the lack of information provided about the drugs (and the side effects) they want to give you, the bad dosing methods (like my sister said, Europe has much more sane practices with medications) and the fact that if you end up relying on such things, the supply could be cut off on the call of someone else and you’d just have to deal with it on your own anyway.
Did you know they add acetaminophen to Vicodin to change it to a schedule III drug instead of a schedule II? This relates to “potential for abuse”
The acetaminophen will make your liver fail before the hydrocodone with this method, and is actually more dangerous physically, even if they actually think adding the the Tylenol will make it less likely for drug addicts to take it.
I have my beefs with “alternative” medicines too, I could rant for hours about it, so I’ll spare your ears.
I’d rather make as informed decisions as I possibly can about anything that goes in my body. (Never mind the junk food. I already know whats in that stuff, and I don’t like hotdogs anyway.)
Don’t let anyone make you think that you don’t want to take medications just because you’re scared. There are plenty of reasons not to fall into the mold.
Sometimes I wonder if maybe our ancestors shouldn’t have bred…
Ever thought of writing a book/blog/essays? Or do I have to start compiling your comments…
(Genetic pessimism).
I don’t think I’m so great at keeping a solid train of thought. If you want to write my book for me, I won’t complain.
I’ve been working on the same piece of fiction for 4 years and I’ve only got 29 pages.
well, I’ve been working on my first two non-fiction books for 10 and 15 years, but have only a few chapters. I don’t think I want to write them.
I find that just because you don’t do something right away doesn’t mean you don’t want to.
Sometimes you don’t know how to do it. Other times it’s because it’s not convenient enough to be worth the price (I don’t like learning things if I have to work hard at it. Give me easy consumption methods any day, as long as they aren’t lies)
If you really don’t want to do something, it’s easy to put out of your mind. If it keeps coming back, you’re probably stuck with it. I’ve had writing fiction on my mind forever. The face of the fiction has changed numerous times. I think I just have to learn how my narrative feels before I can be happy with it.
Like with drawing. I draw faster and easier the closer I get to “my style” which I haven’t reached yet. Everything before that is just learning or practice. It’s okay to have unfinished work.
There’s an Outsider Art Museum in Baltimore. It’s terrific, the stuff is the most unique I’ve seen. It’s all made by people who just couldn’t fit into the mainstream. Some of them were given medication and/or shock treatments to make them normal. Those people never made art again, and just walked around for the rest of their lives like zombies.
That sounds like a lovely place (and so disturbing all the greats struggle with these anxiety and depression issues. is it pre-existing or modern life?)
It is lovely. I think it’s pre-existing and modern life. A sense of angst has always been present in the human condition, I’m sure.
It’s My Birthday | Thestifledartist's Blog
So much to agree with here. I’m working beyond a 7-day life-saving stint in detox roughly three months ago. Walked in, asked for help and got it. Even though I was rejected by 3 other hospitals as too big a risk, having ingested about 12 that day. Last hurrah. Right.
It took every fiber I owned to grab the bar and hold on. Weaned on phenylbarbitol. Nightmares don’t even come close to this. Everything in flat-patterns. Nothing three-D. All a technicolor mind- fuck.
Fear, I mean white-knuckle sweat-it-out fear, was my only reason for staying clean. So glad my ego saved my sorry ass. I just couldn’t ever see going back to that mind numbing life. It made me sick to think I was an ‘addict’. What?! Me?! Great career, wonderful kids, fantastic husband, loyal friends and family. Gee-fucking-whiz, I had it all. Just had to lose my mind to throw a wrench in those works.
So here I go. Tired, sick, dragging and clear-eyed for the first time in five years. I won’t EVER go back. Only forward. Even when it seems to kick me from behind at the top of the stairs. I will make it. I no longer need to know how.
Thank you for your comment! Hang in there…it’s a hell of a ride, but so worth it to not have to worry about
where those pills are anymore. And it makes you tougher than nails, that much I can attest to. Three years off, my
life is so much better and I do feel joy and happiness often.
Thank you! For the first time in my life, I finally feel free enough to get back to my original passions. All emotions flow so seamlessly and smooth through my hands to clay, canvas and paper. I can channel it all. So powerful. With such delicate results.
My mind skips over the difficult bits of disoriented mess to soothe itself in art. My hands no longer work for my conscious self. They create a new world view for me that refuses to yield to the outside. So grateful to finally arrive.