Travelogue 43, High Hope Ranch, TX: The Truth Behind the Truest Travelogue I've Ever Written

                                                                               September 4, 2013

I said I would show up. So, here I am, showed up, but I can’t feel my face. And I like totally highjacked some stranger’s shopping cart in Trader Joe’s yesterday.  It’s a bit of a blur, but a sketched out memory of the event would have me standing on the chip isle, absolutely put-out and anxious over NO Pirate’s Bootie on the shelves. I finished off my friend’s bag and despite her saying a zillion times, “Eat whatever you want in the house and don’t worry about getting more!”, I feel like my integrity will disintegrate into dust, if I take without giving. So, I’m scouring the shelves, incredulous that T.J.’s does not carry the best cheese puffs ever…then all goes blank… next thing I know I’m staring at lettuce in the cooler. I feel a little loopy, like everything is in slow motion and electrode patches on my brain are zapping it with a constant buzz of numb. I’m spaced, but I’ve got enough wits about me to know that the pack of tortilini tucked between the leafy greens does not belong there. I think, “I’m going to buy that just to save somebody the trouble of putting it back where it belongs! It’s the right thing to do!” Then all goes fuzzy until a male voice says, “This is my cart!”, in response, apparently, to me tossing items into his and yanking off with it as if it were a trailer hooked behind me.  

I turn around and a professor-looking man is gawking at me. 

I would like to smile, but my face muscles aren’t cooperating. “Oh, right, yeah, sorry,” I say letting go of the front of his cart and walking off.

“Aren’t you going to take your stuff?” he calls after me.

“Stuff? What stuff?” I think, but don’t say. Either my face bore the stupor I was experiencing or I started picking up random items, because he says, “These things are mine…those things are yours,” as if he were correcting a kindergartener raking all of the crayons into her pile.  

“Oh, sorry, I’m kinda out of it,” I admit apologetically and go looking for my cart, which is three aisles over blocking access to the bread stand. 

This incident is a very good sign! It means the meds are kicking in, which means the deep black hole that had sucked me into its bowels is filling up with wet concrete and will set soon. I’ll stop feeling much of anything shortly, except jittery. I don’t like feeling that way, but if I have to choose between that or wanting to stick my head in a bucket of water to drown the thoughts and pain, I pick the jitters.  

Some of my closer friends responded to travelogue #41 with, “Are you taking your meds?” Now that I’ve got my feet back under me, I’ll tell you the truth about what  happened before I wrote the truest travelogue I’ve ever written. 

Back in April, a week before checking into the rehab in Uruguay that I wrote about in # 34, I swore off alcohol for two reasons: 1) as an experiment to see if I would have a depression when not drinking 2) assuming that there is a correlation, to show Whateveritwantstobecalled (with whom I have reconciled, by the way, for telling it to fuck off) that I am doing everything in my power to prevent them. I cruised along so smoothly for two months that in June I decided to try another experiment: go off one of my meds. Before you start pelting me with questions like, “What did you do that for!?!", take the time to read a chapter I wrote over a year ago from the book I kept saying I was going to finish and never did. The book dream has worn me down and I’m letting it go, whatever that may come to mean.

Chapter # ?

“To Med or Not to Med….Is That Your Question, Too?”

            I’d be lying if I said I don’t still dream of getting off meds.  I’d much rather spend that $150 a month on travel, camping equipment or chocolate.  In my case, though, if I didn’t take meds, I wouldn’t have my shit together enough to organize a trip, much less enjoy it. My resistance to taking antidepressants isn’t just the money. It’s the stigma, the side effects and the dependency.

With dependency, if you come from a family where substance abuse is the pink elephant in the living room, and you are the one who steps up to put her on contraceptives, when doctors and psychologists start offering pills as a solution to your pain, a loud “whoooo mule” comes up from the gut. I promised myself early on that I would not follow in my mother’s footsteps and addiction would not be one of my issues, including prescription drugs.

I remember the first time a doctor suggested I take an antidepressant. I was 28-years-old and just returned to the States after living in Ecuador for two years, where I had my first affair with a married woman (the first of three).  I fell in love with my host “mother,” a stay-at-home mom with three young kids and a husband who worked on the opposite end of the country and visited every third weekend. Between those visits she snuck into my bedroom every night after the kids went to bed. I say I fell in love, but what I actually fell into was addiction. Woops, didn’t I just say in the previous paragraph that I vowed not to have any addictions?  Sure fooled myself with that one. We tend to think of addictions as limited to substances or behaviors like sex, shopping and gambling, but there are other, intangible ones too, like the pursuit of rejection and an attachment to suffering. Neibe was just one of a long list of women whose affection was never enough to placate the endless ache for someone to make me feel approved of and loved.

I was on the market for a mom, as I had fired my own for drinking on the job and absenteeism. Had she been as worried about excelling as a primary caregiver as she was about excelling in her career, I’d be living the retired life in a cabaña on a beach somewhere with all the money I would have saved on therapy. Woops again, I am living in a cabaña on the beach and am my own boss, despite (or probably thanks to) the thousands I’ve spent on therapy. I suppose there we have a lesson in no excuses, moving past the blame and taking responsibly for your own happiness. I’ll take credit for that. Anyway, that’s another chapter. On with the story of the first time I took meds and what lead me to it.

After a year of clandestine passion in a doomed relationship, I returned to the States promising to lay the groundwork to bring to fruition the fantasy my Mommy/ Lover and I had concocted. She was going to leave the husband, bundle up the kids and come to the good ‘ole U.S. of A to live in a treehouse in my backyard. (I’m not kidding!) More proximate accommodations might lead the neighbors to suspect we were in a gay relationship. That half-baked fruitcake of a plan fell through, and feeling abandoned, I plunged into a deep, deep depression.

       In addition to that ailment, Ecuadorian amoebas had sneaked into my digestive tract, breezed through customs and then multiplied like rabbits in my guts.  I went to the doctor to get the diarrhea under control and he asked a lot of unrelated questions, and somehow I ended up confessing that I felt depressed and was having flashes of scenes where I was being dismembered by machinery.  He was concerned and asked if I had any suicidal thoughts. I answered yes, that I’ve had them since I was a teenager. He sent me home with a recommendation to see a psychiatrist, and with two prescriptions, one for the amoebas and another for Zoloft.  From the doctor’s office I went straight to the pharmacy to fill the script for a diarrhea stopper. The one for the depression, on the other hand, was stuck in a drawer with the excuse that I didn’t have enough money for it. It stayed tucked away for almost a year until my cousin, who was the only one I told about the dark periods, sent me $20 and a letter saying love yourself enough to at least try meds.

I took them for a month, felt better and decided I didn’t need them. It didn’t occur to me that the reason I felt better was because I was taking them. It seems like you’d have to be a little dense to miss the connection, but ask around and see how many people have done the same thing, especially bipolars.  So, for the next 10 years I cycled through depression after depression, and each time they grew in intensity.

In 2000 the longest relationship I had ever had (a whopping year and a half) ended and I had a total breakdown. I remember making a fire in the little chimenea we had in the pagoda in the backyard, staring into the flames and drinking wine until I couldn’t walk. The girlfriend and I were still living together and she found me after dark trying to cat crawl back to the house. She put me in bed and slept beside me all night to make sure I didn’t stop breathing or take the bottle of sleeping pills my PCP had given me for insomnia. A few days later when I got home from work, she was in the driveway with the car running.  I knew where we were going and didn’t resist. I got in and sobbed all the way to the psych ward emergency room. I had made the same trip with my mother thirteen years before, but in the back of a police car, because she had tried to shoot herself and we had her arrested.

My ex had set up an appointment with a psychiatrist for the next week, but knew I needed professional help ASAP. She had battled with depression herself for many years, was taking meds and knew they could help pull me out of this.  She was right. The attending doctor gave me some samples and released me since I wouldn’t be at home alone. By the next week I was clearly climbing out of the hole and eventually leveled off.

 Between then and now, I’ve been on meds more than off. Early on, however, I would get cocky, go through all the rationalizations for why I didn’t need them and stop taking them. Every time I ended up back in my therapist’s office with my face buried in my hands. She would suspect and ask upfront if I had stopped taking them. I didn’t lie. About five or six years ago I signed a pact with her that I would not go off my meds, unless under the supervision of a doctor. I have been true to my word. That’s not to say, that I haven’t split pills, or  nibbled off an edge and called it close enough to try to get the dosage down to near nothing without breaking my promise. Never worked.

As for the side effects, it’s a relief to have no libido when you are not in a relationship, but a major issue when you are. Prozac and Zoloft suppressed my desire so much, that it took a village (meaning porn, vibrators, toys and phallic produce from the fridge all performing in unison) to bring me to an orgasm, and even then it was such a blip on the screen that it wasn’t worth the effort. Sex was one of the rationalizations I gave for stopping meds. I remember one day in my therapist’s office when I could barely keep my head up, she said, “It’s a simple choice, G. Don’t take meds, have a sex drive and keep feeling like this, or take meds, learn to deal with a diminished libido and feel normal. Sex isn’t limited to orgasms. You can enjoy fulfilling physical intimacy without them.”  I don’t know that I ever came to totally agree, but when Wellbutrin showed up on the market, it wasn’t an issue anymore, and so, there went that excuse.

This same therapist helped me through the stigma issue as well. I have this expectation of myself that I shouldn’t need meds and if I could just fix my messed up head I could get off them. Bottom line is needing them makes me feel weak, but even worse than that is the fear that if others find out I take them, they will think I’m crazy. Or, they will say it’s a question of willpower. I’m just feeling sorry for myself and looking for excuses; if I wanted to, I could snap out of it and wham!--be happy.  It ain’t that easy…not even close. 

During one of my I-want-off-these-meds!!! tantrums, Jodi G. (my former therapist) asked:  If you had diabetes, would you take insulin? If someone you love had high blood pressure, would you think less of them for taking medicine to treat it?   You’d probably be angry with them if they didn’t. So what’s the difference?

“I’ll tell you what the difference is, sister,” my little spunky self thought back, “Blood sugar test strips and B.P. cuffs. That’s the difference.” Those illnesses have measurable symptoms. Physical evidence can prove their existence and severity. With depression all you’ve got is a long face and someone’s word.  You can’t send a vial of “I feel like shit” off to the lab and get back results

determining that either A) the patient is suffering from a hell of a hangover and needs two aspirin, a plate of huevos rancheros and a big glass of water, or B) that the person is understating signs of suicidal ideation and needs immediate assistance.

I’ve noticed that I have the habit in therapy of automatically rejecting new ideas and possibilities. Perhaps it’s the need to be right, or subconsciously wanting to stay stuck in suffering. Either way, I hear what the therapist says and store it in my memory, but at that moment I deconstruct it to smithereens, or I acknowledge its validity but say it doesn’t apply to me. And then days, weeks, months and sometimes years later something clicks and I remember it and recognize it as dead on. Such was the case of Jodi’s analogy.

 For now, I’ve resigned myself to forking out the money to keep the one-week-at-a-time pillbox stocked, and to continuing the arduous journey toward not giving a rat’s ass about what other people think. That achievement, really, would take care of most of my problems. I should add before closing that my surrender to meds is not etched in stone.

That brings us back to this June when I consulted with a P.A. in VA to get help with a taper plan. (As promised!) I followed it to a T and took the last dose of Lamictal on August 12. On August 24 I wrote in my diary, "For the sake of my medical records, I document that I am having depression symptoms--lack of self-confidence, feeling of purposelessness, and most tellingly, a black, lead hood waiting for me on the bedside when I open my eyes." 

Before it's declared that the med reduction is to blame, I've some more confessing to do...next time. 

I’ve had a sack full of people emailing me that they composed a lengthy comment only for it to disappear when they hit submit. Here’s what you have to do:

First, if you are on your phone, there is an extra step. Go all the way to the bottom, past where it gives you the option to comment and click on “view web version”. That makes it as if you are on a regular computer. Hit “post a comment.” Write what you want in the box, if you want people to know who you are, put your name at the end of the comment. THEN when it says, “choose an identity” pick "anonymous" and click “publish your comment.” BIG FAT PAIN IN THE ASS,I know, but that’s the only way I can get it to work. I do hope you will put forth the effort, because the ONLY reason I didn’t crawl in a hole and die after #41 is your responses back to me. They are also the ONLY reason I keep showing up to tell more truth. Several people said, “you’ve made me feel understood,” and that, sisters and brothers, makes the torture of vulnerability worth the while. 

Much love,