I know God loves me so because he gave me Lexapro

I don’t take Lexapro, but I think that line is so funny. I listen to Glennon Doyle’s podcast quite a bit and read her books. It’s a theme that comes up a lot. 

I haven’t written a blog post in a long time. The thought of it gives me anxiety most of the time and I have huge avoidance behavior when it comes to things that make me anxious. I hate proofreading. It’s annoying. Hence the anxiety it gives me. I had someone write a text message for me to send a couple weeks ago that I was seriously putting off. It took him three minutes… and don’t even get me started on my car. Anything that is car related, you can count me out. He actually helped me put air in my tires yesterday because… well I’m a avoidant. I drove around with a nail in my tire for 6 weeks until he made a really good point of the fact I need to just fucking do it and my mom made the point that if I fuck up my rim, she was going to be so pissed because she’d been telling me the entire time it was in there to get it fixed. I didn’t even need to replace the tire. It was patched in 20 minutes and cost me $30. So that was cool…

I changed my meds a couple months ago. I was in a long spell of depression and I couldn’t function. I was spending days in bed and when I wasn’t eating, I was just crying. It was great. I realized that it got worse around my period. Makes sense with all the hormone changes and the fact that I already have a chemical imbalance in my brain. I talked to my doctor and she put me on anti depressants, Prozac, not Lexapro. After diagnosing me with PMDD she said that I could take the Prozac just around my period to help raise my serotonin levels when my hormones were all fucked up. The depression spells when I was PMSing started to get better but the depression at all other times wasn’t when just on the mood stabilizers. So with my doctors approval, I started taking the antidepressants all the time. 

At first, I felt like absolute shit. It takes my body a while to adjust to medication, but if I wanted to all around feel better, I had to push through it and suck it up. Something I say to myself all the time is “if nothing changes, nothing changes” and this was no exception.

When my body was finally adjusted to the meds, I was a brand new person. I told my parents that I thought it was the best I had ever felt. My dad said he could tell how much happier I was and my mom said she could see how much more patience I had. I noticed it too. My friends even made points about how much better I seemed.

I went to AZ right around Thanksgiving. I hadn’t been back since I left and I was super nervous, for a lot of reasons. I had a friend pick me up from the airport and when we got back to their house, which was like 2 in the morning, because my flight was delayed, I realized I forgot my meds in FL. I got lucky because I had a refill called into CVS, so I would just have to transfer them to the CVS in Chandler and be good to go, but not before my body started having side effects from the withdrawals and I was crying every five seconds. I spent the majority of that trip with someone who is near and dear to me and he knows me well enough to know and love me for exactly who I am, but my meds were working pretty well before that and I had some need to prove to him that I was doing better - when in all reality, he didn’t care too much about my progress, just more of that I was happier, in any capacity. 

About a month after that, I had a really bad episode, but that’s a story for another day. Side note, my friend Taylor had mentioned to me how she’d never seen me have an episode so it was hard for her to give me certain advice, in all honesty, I save those for my mom or my best friend, because I know no matter what I do or say, they’re going to love me anyway. Not the healthiest mindset. I know my BPD effects the people I love and love me, so I have been super, super good about communicating better and I haven’t had an episode since, which says a lot because I was having them quite frequently. 

Over the last two weeks, I haven’t been great about taking my antidepressants. I’m not even sure why. A few people asked me, and I couldn’t even really come up with an answer. I just wasn’t taking them. It fucked me up. Not as bad as the side effects of the mood stabilizers, but it fucked with me. I woke up every day of the week with such debilitating anxiety, like what I imagine someone feels like when they have to tell their partner they cheated on them. I don’t know why that was the first example that came to mind. I was going to say what I imagine I felt like before taking the SAT, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t care about that, at all. Also, when my body is under stress, I experience the spotlight effect which is maybe something that gives me the most anxiety.

The spotlight effect is paranoia that everyone is hyper-focused on you and you’re convinced that they know how you feel and what you think. I’m self aware to know that that’s not true, but when I’m in the paranoia spells, it feels so real. It’s weird and it’s the absolute worse.

One day I woke up having an anxiety attack, full of sweat and crying. It was nice.

I got back to taking the anti depressants the way I’m supposed to and my body is starting to regulate and get used to the medication again. I feel like a whole new, and normal person. I love that for me because now I can go back to drinking my favorite caramel frappe and not go into a spiral… and that’s nice because I’m tired… all the time.

As I said if nothing changes, nothing changes and if I stay or keep going back to the issue of not correctly taking my meds, I’m going to feel like absolute shit and be crying all the time and to be quite frank, I’m fucking over that.

So take your meds. Cry. Take time for yourself. (I have 100 text messages I haven’t opened that have piled up since Friday, and if you know me that’s super rare.) I live by the statement “if you’re in a situation where you have to disappoint yourself or someone else, you always pick the someone else.” So I picked myself and not the 100 unread messages I have.

And as I said earlier… I hate proofreading, so when you find tons of mistakes in here, well I warned you.