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bironicI was not doing well in the beginning.
I spent February depressed and in secondhand/anticipatory grief, feeling clingy for my parents after my friend's mom of a comparable age died suddenly. Not that I've ever needed help feeling morbid, but it was enough to drive me to visit my mom and my dad&stepmom over President's Day weekend and butt the top of my head into their ribs on the couch like a cat and be even sadder than usual that they (and we) won't be around forever. Not to mention pointing out which of the actors on TV were dead now, etc.
Two sets of local friends had just had or were about to have babies, too, so I was also thinking about how my sister and I have, at least as of our late thirties, not made any moves in the producing-of-grandchildren direction. We're not being pressured, but I know it makes my parents wistful, and it extended the death-thoughts to the likely fading out of our line of the family, which I have complicated feelings about.
I made an appointment with a psychiatrist.
A couple of weeks after the parental visit, I got sick with a weird GI bug that came and went for nearly a month. That didn't help matters.
COVID-19 was coming closer at the time, but we didn't know we had community circulation yet. I may have made different choices if we had. There's a terrible irony in having traveled from MA to NY in despair of eventually losing my parents while unwittingly raising the risk of their premature illness or death. (I took an antibody test over the summer that came back negative, so what I had probably wasn't COVID with a primary gut manifestation, or if it was, any antibodies had gone by then.)
Then March happened, and the depression morphed into, or was joined by, anxiety and irritability. Everything on Twitter made me angry. I couldn't concentrate on work but I couldn't turn away from pandemic news because it's directly related to my job. My mom was super anxious about her health in relation to the school she taught at; my stepmom had to keep going to her close-contact customer service job and come home to my over-70 dad; and my sister, who works in the live music industry, found herself unemployed for the foreseeable future and slid into her own depression. A handful of extended family members got COVID but recovered. The U.S. government failed on all measures as expected.
So that was a fun time.
I am doing better now.
That's down to two things. First, I had that psych consultation and started taking an SSRI after decades of hesitation. What a difference, wow. The constant gut churn and circling thoughts improved, as did my mood and concentration. I make decisions more easily. External circumstances didn't change, but my state of mind did. Whereas before people would ask how I liked my new apartment and I would say, "Meh," now it's become simply pleasant to sit on the couch and gaze out the window at the treetops. I surprised myself by laughing at jokes and humming in the shower. The death obsession ebbed, though it will never disappear. I just… worry less about everything. And as hoped, I have more oomph to do things that need doing instead of lying on the floor. I can take care of chores rather than let dishes and laundry and dust pile up.
It's not magic, but it's such a help. Part of me wishes I hadn't waited 20 years to try meds. The rest of me is glad I at least did it now and can appreciate what the pills are doing for me as compared to how I'd existed since high school. I'm trying to enjoy it while it lasts and not dwell on the possibility of developing tolerance. We already had to raise the dosage once.
My two main concerns with starting an antidepressant/anxiolytic were (1) triggering bipolar disorder, as happened to my cousin, and (2) weight gain. The first didn't happen, although hilariously I'd wondered if I was hypomanic when I started humming and stuff. Any joy felt strange after so long. Plus I produced like crazy at work for a while—the most I've written in any two- or three-month period since I started there. And it turns out the second worry didn't happen either. It doesn't speak well of my internalized fatphobia, but I'd been afraid of gaining even more weight than I already had over the past 5-10 years. I would absolutely choose fatter + happy over thinner + unhappy; I'd just been scared of fatter + unhappy. Instead, I've lost weight. It's unexpected and lucky, but welcome.
It makes sense, though. Working from home full time, aided by the meds-induced energy boost, has meant eating out less and having more time to move around. The weight loss actually started before I went on the meds. I took advantage of the empty roads in the spring to gain confidence riding my bike around the city, learned the locations of several paved trails, and took some of our employer-provided gym classes at home when the team figured out how to move them online. I started volunteering with a local bike group that delivers food pantry boxes to people who can't leave home for health, child care or other reasons. That's been good for exercise and service as well as meeting neighbors. I've taken distanced walks at various nature sites with friends and coworkers: my only in-person interactions these days besides supermarket trips and occasional neighbor encounters.
The second main reason I'm doing better is that I adopted a guinea pig in September. ♥ ♥ ♥ We had a guinea pig growing up, and I'd considered getting another many times over the years, but circumstances never seemed right—not enough space or money, or too depressed to feel confident that I could keep the cage clean. But the nutritionist I see once in a while, who doubles as my unofficial therapist, asked if I'd thought about getting a pet when we talked about ways to avoid fixating on food and the pandemic, and I realized that now was in fact the perfect time.
Left: gray and white guinea pig on my shoulder with an emoji over my face and a spider plant in the background. Right: guinea pig with white stripe on her nose peeking out from within a rainbow towel. Click for bigger.
Her name is Pepper and she's a rescue. We tried matching her with other pigs at the shelter, since they're social animals, but she kept biting them on the face. Apparently she'd lost her sister and hasn't wanted company since then. But she's super cuddly and chatty with me. She sits in my lap and climbs on my shoulder and chirps and takes naps and headbutts me when I'm in her way and licks my fingers and generally provides warm, silky soft, happy companionship. She is 100% what I needed. Cage upkeep and feeding have been fine. I've also learned lots of things about guinea pig care that either we weren't aware of back in the '90s or that have evolved since then. So her cage is much bigger than our childhood pig's and she gets "floor time" every day in which she explores the guinea pig-proofed dining room. She's in piggo adolescence at a year and a half, young enough to get the zoomies sometimes like a dog and run full out in circles on the carpet. I love her.
I dunno, what else. I haven't posted at all this year except for 2019 roundups and some Festivids recs. I need to tell you about the vidsisabet made me for a charity commission and post the fics and vids I managed to make. Writing fiction and editing video with less anxiety is fascinating.
As for the world…. My immediate family is still healthy. My mom retired. My stepmom still has to go to work. My sister took a temp gig and quarantined with me for two weeks before returning home. She climbed out of the worst of her depression after she fell in love with and adopted the second guinea pig I took home and failed to bond with Pepper. My grandfather, now 99, survived the initial wave(s) in Florida and a bout of shingles and is now in the queue for the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. My job is fairly secure; we've only had to deal with a pay freeze so far. I have trouble retrieving words in conversation and my media consumption has plummeted and my long-distance vision is shot and my heating bill is outrageous, but I somehow adapted to ~these unprecedented times~. Being an introverted homebody helps, although backyard gatherings and nature walks and online socializing have been invaluable after I lost my baseline of human interaction at the office. I just can't think too hard about failures of leadership and bureaucracy and capitalism and common sense or else all is fury and despair.
Happy new year, friends. Are you all right?
I spent February depressed and in secondhand/anticipatory grief, feeling clingy for my parents after my friend's mom of a comparable age died suddenly. Not that I've ever needed help feeling morbid, but it was enough to drive me to visit my mom and my dad&stepmom over President's Day weekend and butt the top of my head into their ribs on the couch like a cat and be even sadder than usual that they (and we) won't be around forever. Not to mention pointing out which of the actors on TV were dead now, etc.
Two sets of local friends had just had or were about to have babies, too, so I was also thinking about how my sister and I have, at least as of our late thirties, not made any moves in the producing-of-grandchildren direction. We're not being pressured, but I know it makes my parents wistful, and it extended the death-thoughts to the likely fading out of our line of the family, which I have complicated feelings about.
I made an appointment with a psychiatrist.
A couple of weeks after the parental visit, I got sick with a weird GI bug that came and went for nearly a month. That didn't help matters.
COVID-19 was coming closer at the time, but we didn't know we had community circulation yet. I may have made different choices if we had. There's a terrible irony in having traveled from MA to NY in despair of eventually losing my parents while unwittingly raising the risk of their premature illness or death. (I took an antibody test over the summer that came back negative, so what I had probably wasn't COVID with a primary gut manifestation, or if it was, any antibodies had gone by then.)
Then March happened, and the depression morphed into, or was joined by, anxiety and irritability. Everything on Twitter made me angry. I couldn't concentrate on work but I couldn't turn away from pandemic news because it's directly related to my job. My mom was super anxious about her health in relation to the school she taught at; my stepmom had to keep going to her close-contact customer service job and come home to my over-70 dad; and my sister, who works in the live music industry, found herself unemployed for the foreseeable future and slid into her own depression. A handful of extended family members got COVID but recovered. The U.S. government failed on all measures as expected.
So that was a fun time.
I am doing better now.
That's down to two things. First, I had that psych consultation and started taking an SSRI after decades of hesitation. What a difference, wow. The constant gut churn and circling thoughts improved, as did my mood and concentration. I make decisions more easily. External circumstances didn't change, but my state of mind did. Whereas before people would ask how I liked my new apartment and I would say, "Meh," now it's become simply pleasant to sit on the couch and gaze out the window at the treetops. I surprised myself by laughing at jokes and humming in the shower. The death obsession ebbed, though it will never disappear. I just… worry less about everything. And as hoped, I have more oomph to do things that need doing instead of lying on the floor. I can take care of chores rather than let dishes and laundry and dust pile up.
It's not magic, but it's such a help. Part of me wishes I hadn't waited 20 years to try meds. The rest of me is glad I at least did it now and can appreciate what the pills are doing for me as compared to how I'd existed since high school. I'm trying to enjoy it while it lasts and not dwell on the possibility of developing tolerance. We already had to raise the dosage once.
My two main concerns with starting an antidepressant/anxiolytic were (1) triggering bipolar disorder, as happened to my cousin, and (2) weight gain. The first didn't happen, although hilariously I'd wondered if I was hypomanic when I started humming and stuff. Any joy felt strange after so long. Plus I produced like crazy at work for a while—the most I've written in any two- or three-month period since I started there. And it turns out the second worry didn't happen either. It doesn't speak well of my internalized fatphobia, but I'd been afraid of gaining even more weight than I already had over the past 5-10 years. I would absolutely choose fatter + happy over thinner + unhappy; I'd just been scared of fatter + unhappy. Instead, I've lost weight. It's unexpected and lucky, but welcome.
It makes sense, though. Working from home full time, aided by the meds-induced energy boost, has meant eating out less and having more time to move around. The weight loss actually started before I went on the meds. I took advantage of the empty roads in the spring to gain confidence riding my bike around the city, learned the locations of several paved trails, and took some of our employer-provided gym classes at home when the team figured out how to move them online. I started volunteering with a local bike group that delivers food pantry boxes to people who can't leave home for health, child care or other reasons. That's been good for exercise and service as well as meeting neighbors. I've taken distanced walks at various nature sites with friends and coworkers: my only in-person interactions these days besides supermarket trips and occasional neighbor encounters.
The second main reason I'm doing better is that I adopted a guinea pig in September. ♥ ♥ ♥ We had a guinea pig growing up, and I'd considered getting another many times over the years, but circumstances never seemed right—not enough space or money, or too depressed to feel confident that I could keep the cage clean. But the nutritionist I see once in a while, who doubles as my unofficial therapist, asked if I'd thought about getting a pet when we talked about ways to avoid fixating on food and the pandemic, and I realized that now was in fact the perfect time.
Left: gray and white guinea pig on my shoulder with an emoji over my face and a spider plant in the background. Right: guinea pig with white stripe on her nose peeking out from within a rainbow towel. Click for bigger.
Her name is Pepper and she's a rescue. We tried matching her with other pigs at the shelter, since they're social animals, but she kept biting them on the face. Apparently she'd lost her sister and hasn't wanted company since then. But she's super cuddly and chatty with me. She sits in my lap and climbs on my shoulder and chirps and takes naps and headbutts me when I'm in her way and licks my fingers and generally provides warm, silky soft, happy companionship. She is 100% what I needed. Cage upkeep and feeding have been fine. I've also learned lots of things about guinea pig care that either we weren't aware of back in the '90s or that have evolved since then. So her cage is much bigger than our childhood pig's and she gets "floor time" every day in which she explores the guinea pig-proofed dining room. She's in piggo adolescence at a year and a half, young enough to get the zoomies sometimes like a dog and run full out in circles on the carpet. I love her.
I dunno, what else. I haven't posted at all this year except for 2019 roundups and some Festivids recs. I need to tell you about the vid
sisabet made me for a charity commission and post the fics and vids I managed to make. Writing fiction and editing video with less anxiety is fascinating.As for the world…. My immediate family is still healthy. My mom retired. My stepmom still has to go to work. My sister took a temp gig and quarantined with me for two weeks before returning home. She climbed out of the worst of her depression after she fell in love with and adopted the second guinea pig I took home and failed to bond with Pepper. My grandfather, now 99, survived the initial wave(s) in Florida and a bout of shingles and is now in the queue for the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. My job is fairly secure; we've only had to deal with a pay freeze so far. I have trouble retrieving words in conversation and my media consumption has plummeted and my long-distance vision is shot and my heating bill is outrageous, but I somehow adapted to ~these unprecedented times~. Being an introverted homebody helps, although backyard gatherings and nature walks and online socializing have been invaluable after I lost my baseline of human interaction at the office. I just can't think too hard about failures of leadership and bureaucracy and capitalism and common sense or else all is fury and despair.
Happy new year, friends. Are you all right?
no subject
Date: Jan. 1st, 2021 08:17 pm (UTC)Pepper is adorable and I am completely enchanted with her and her dining room zoomies. <3
I'm also really glad to hear about your family being okay; we've reached the point in the pandemic where I'm hesitant to ask, because jesus, who knows.
On which note, I'm also doing well, as are my roommates and family.