Bits. Pieces.

What happens now?

I couldn't fall asleep last night for anything.

After tossing and turning for hours, I finally managed to fall asleep around three a.m. I woke up at six to feed Lewie. I couldn't get back to sleep, so I had two enormous cups of coffee and some edamame. That was my breakfast. After awhile, I got in the shower. I had to meet Judi at ten. I drove around for forty minutes before, listening to music. I was tired.

We had coffee. I don't remember much of what we talked about except the part at the very end when we talked about Ellen's memorial service. Judi thought it was alright, but I didn't like it. I've been feeling really down since Ellen died. I think I've just hit the age when people around me are going to start to die off. That sounds ugly, yes, doesn't it? I don't want to go through that part. That part's ugly and painful. I'd rather work on my sad little fantasy that no one I love is going to die ever.

If anyone were to later ask Judi what my state of mind was when we met, she might've said that I seemed a little distracted.

I came home and tried to take a nap. It didn't work, so I lay there under a comforter, wanting to sleep. Dave got up after a while and we went to lunch and to the grocery store so that he could buy some snacks to take to his Saturday drinking club.

I came home and finally, around three p.m., managed to fall asleep. I set my alarm for five-thirty so that I could get up and feed Lewie.

I still feel tired and out of it.

Here's A Story

Here's a story: Several years ago, maybe ten, I started taking an antidepressant called Zoloft. Zoloft was pretty old school as far as antidepressants go. It was rough stuff, kind of, but it worked on many people.

It was my first experience with an antidepressant. It wasn't my first experience with a prescription for an antidepressant. My original prescription came from a psychiatrist who charged $115 per hour. He saw me once, for an hour, and wrote me a prescription for Zoloft. I didn't fill it and I didn't go back to that psychiatrist. A few years later, after a routine physical exam, I asked the doctor for a prescription for Zoloft. I said I had been prescribed Zoloft before (true) and that I was in the process of looking for another therapist (also true). She was accommodating.

I didn't ever find another therapist, but I filled the prescription and started taking Zoloft. I took it for a year then I decided that it wasn't doing much for me, so I stopped taking it. As I came back to myself through the process of tapering off the drug, I realized that I had just spent a year not feeling anything. It was the other side of the coin from depression, where I also felt nothing, but with depression at least I was aware of not feeling anything. No, that's not exactly true. When I am depressed, I feel a lot of...I don't know what. Dread maybe. An intense and irrational fear of life and living. The Zoloft did take that away, but what was left when that was gone wasn't me exactly. I gave it a year (maybe I should've given it ten), and then I decided to stop.

I stopped partly because while I was taking Zoloft, I felt like I was going around wrapped in an enormous, thick quilt. (Sounds pleasant, no? But you try wrapping yourself in an enormous, thick quilt and going on about your day. You'll get a lot of funny looks, yes, but you'll find that it also hampers you in some unpredictable ways. It sounds pleasant, but the reality of it is not pleasant at all.) On Zoloft, my emotions flat-lined. I had no desire, for anything. I didn't recognize myself once the Zoloft took hold, so I stopped taking Zoloft.

After several months of being off the drug, the dread came back so I decided to start taking Zoloft again. Just as you have to taper off the drug, you also have to slowly ramp up the drug to a therapeutic dosage. When I quit taking Zoloft, I was taking 75 milligrams a day. The new doctor who wrote me a new prescription was skeptical about my claim that a 75 milligram dose had had any effect on me at all. She told me that 75 milligrams was considered the starting point and that double that amount was usually where people were most responsive to Zoloft. I took her prescription and her advice to heart and I went home and took 75 milligrams of Zoloft. A couple of hours later, I came to. I hadn't passed out exactly, but all that time was memoryless. I found myself sitting in the bathtub mutely watching the water run through my fingers. How long have I been in the bathtub, I wondered.

I'm stoned, I thought.

Yes, I was high on 75 milligrams of Zoloft. From that, I realized that the entire year I was taking Zoloft that I was constantly stoned. An entire year.

This Has Nothing To Do With That:

Listen, I'm thirty-seven. Double that and you get seventy-four, right? I don't expect to live much past seventy-four--if I make it that far even. That makes me middle aged then, doesn't it?