Summer 2020: my mind fell apart. The simplest way to explain it is that my psychiatrist, health care provider and I slowly and carefully weaned me off Effexor for a year, and my first day without it at all was July 4th. Within 24 hours I stopped being able to fall sleep easily, and spent the month of July flooded with anxiety, insomnia and night terrors. With a team of professionals I got a little better in August and significantly better in September. Today is the first day I’ve felt confident enough to write since June. (July was so horrible, I now refer to it as Juldemort. That’s a light-hearted, humorous name, but it belies how awful things got for me.)
Throughout July 2020 I was in a long, narrow tunnel with no light for weeks: nights spent watching TV shows and mini-series instead of sleeping, days with anxiety crawling through my gut, and way too much time physically trembling with fear and terrified I’d never sleep well or find any peace again.
I learned that clinical anxiety isn’t just worrying a lot: it has physical symptoms. I experienced anxiety that caused physical trembling throughout my body that I could not stop. For weeks I was constantly sleepy, but anxiety made me need to move whether walking, rocking or even jumping. Sometimes I managed to get it down to just a shaking leg, but it kept me awake when all I wanted was sleep.
Too many days I blearily noticed it was 5:30 a.m. and I’d spent another night sitting in my living room, staring at the TV, waiting for sleep that hadn’t come. A few mornings like that I left my apartment and rode the Chicago el train for an hour, just so I could drift off and get some semblance of rest. That hour of dozing on the train then had to get me through another full work day of performing badly.
I dreaded nighttime and being alone in my apartment terrified of never sleeping again. I hated being alone.
Yes, I could have returned to my psychiatrist and asked for another prescription, whether an anti-depressant or a sleeping pill, but I was determined to clear all unnecessary prescriptions out of my system. Under the care of my NRT practitioner, my depression has dwindled over the past couple of years and by last summer I knew I could live without Effexor (which is a horrible drug no one should ever take). I’ve also realized drugs mask underlying problems and I’d rather fix the problems.
It’s different from how I used to approach my depression. I knew prescription drugs were necessary for many people with emotional disorders, including me, and I defended our right to them. I still know they’re necessary, but I felt ready to heal my pain on a deeper level, if possible.
IF is the critical word in that sentence. Many people know healing a problem is better than long-term treatment of symptoms, but most people with emotional disorders don’t have access to professionals that can truly access and heal the original trauma. At best we see psychiatrists and therapists who use techniques like talk therapy. Those techniques can take a lifetime for real progress.
This summer/autumn I’m extremely (extremely) grateful to have found professionals with decades of experience approaching pain and suffering in a spiritual way. That’s what helped me. That’s what got me through the worst of what I call my healing crisis. I had no idea what the sources were of my original trauma, but they were able to detect those sources and now I believe I will eventually reach the end of my daily anxiety. I believe I will one day feel mostly good, most of the time, at least in terms of mood disorder symptoms.
But that leaves the effects of life with the coronavirus. As I’ve emerged from my private ordeal and raised my head to look around, I notice that American society is in tatters. Sure, you can call that a dramatic way to put it, but as Indi Samarajiva says in his piece “I Lived Through Collapse. America Is Already There” this is what it feels like to live in a country whose infrastructure has been overwhelmed with crises and where the death count due to a preventable cause is ongoing. Having lived through the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war, he writes:
As someone who’s already experienced societal breakdown, here’s the truth: America has already collapsed. What you’re feeling is exactly how it feels. It’s Saturday and you’re thinking about food while the world is on fire. This is normal. This is life during collapse.
Collapse does not mean you’re personally dying right now. It means y’all are dying right now. Death is sometimes close, sometimes far away, but always there. I used to judge those herds of gazelle when the lion eats one of them alive and everyone keeps going — but no, humans are just the same. That’s the real meaning of herd immunity. We’re fundamentally immune to giving a shit.
He describes societal collapse as “a pileup of outrages and atrocities in between friendships and weddings and perhaps an unusual amount of alcohol.” His description is extremely familiar. My peers and I have experienced a pile-up of outrages and atrocities from all directions and it’s been going on for decades, but we keep thinking it’ll end if we vote for the right people and live right ourselves and “stay positive” (I hate that fucking phrase).
But none of that has worked and it’s not going to because, Samarajiva’s words again, “Collapse is just a series of ordinary days in between extraordinary bullshit, most of it happening to someone else.”
Unfortunately, my summer was anything but ordinary for me, but I still feel like I’m coming out of with new eyes for how horrible everything is. It’s not just the coronavirus, but how unlikely it is that Americans will end physical and economic violence towards Blacks and members of the underclass, or take real action against having an increasingly authoritarian federal government. Other non-Western economists, sociologists, and analysts, such as Umair Haque doubt we’ll resist (much) a Trump takeover. That’s actually easy to imagine even for me, a 54-year-old Generation X woman who assumed from childhood that the U.S. would always be a democracy because we’re not capable of being anything else.
A fourth-generation Mexican-American, I grew up privileged enough to believe the U.S. would always be a democracy because we’re not capable of being anything else. I was wrong.
So maybe the anxiety that I still live with every day isn’t all mine. Maybe it’s not just the lingering effects of weaning off Effexor (getting off Effexor is nasty. So is being on it. That drug should never have been approved). Maybe I’m wading daily through the dread of everyone who sees how wrong everything is, but feels helpless to do anything about it besides vote. I believe getting off my prescription and healing spiritually left me more sensitive to things that didn’t used to bother me. Maybe medicated I was better able to accept the pile-up of outrages and atrocities. Now that I’m off drugs and feel more awake, I don’t know what I’m going to do. Damn I wish my body were capable of metabolizing alcohol comfortably because this would be the time to develop a drinking habit.
13 October 2020
More on the fallout from my summer 2020: I Have Seen the Light and It Is Awful
Interesting read. I wonder what is worse, feeling the full effects of what is happening, or not feeling them at all? Nice that you have quotes from the non-American point of view too. It’s hard for us to see what’s happening because we are drowning in it! I turned off my news notifications because it was a ping of detrimental news every 5 minutes. Too much unprecedented negativity and too much connectivity was really grinding me down.
It’s a good idea to turn off all notifications on everything.
Great to see your new blog look and its nice to hear about spiritual healing.
Thanks, Steve!