I've been travelling the past few weeks; on the way out, I inadvertently mixed up two bottles of medication, and by doing so forcibly withdrew myself from taking sertraline. My doctor was trying to get me to consider getting off of it anyway; I was on the minimum dose; I felt like, overall, I could try to do so.
What I remembered of my pre-medicated self was that I was more prone to emotional exhaustion, more *generally anxious*, more self-conscious, constantly asking people if things were okay between us, constantly making mountains out of molehills, and actually being rather prone to shutting down completely if I got exhausted enough. I wasn't able to really read or focus on myself because I was so worried all the time; I would instead self-soothe, I would put on streams or some YouTube video and repeatedly, say, do some vanquishing tasks in Guild Wars because it was dumb, repetitive, and solitary.
Once I got on medication it felt strange at first — like I was being altered against my will. Hormones, oddly, do not feel like that. Even if I took testosterone or progesterone, things felt like they were naturally moving in a specific direction. It didn't feel like an intervention so much as a spirit was being called and attuning itself to me. But antidepressants felt, out the gate, like I was being blunted a little. Over time I came to understand it as having a sort of emotional airbag; nothing hits as hard, everything has a baseline feeling of "okay", so there's no need for reassurance. In general, I greatly preferred this, but I feel like it did probably get in the way of some essential things:
- Of course, sexual functioning. I was still able to do what I did before, but I didn't really want it that much, and I couldn't easily get excited for it.
- My intuition was shot. I felt like I questioned my gut more.
- Without my emotional highs I could not perform. As I started to experiment with the arts, I felt like the ability to channel myself—to remember the most intense moments of my life, and to use it in conveying that emotion for a purpose—was shut off, because nothing felt that intense. Instead, what I produced was *made* intellectual, systematic, or otherwise unemotional to compensate. In music I was weak willed in response. In writing I felt inhuman.
As a result, I did get the ability to maintain a stressor load I had never maintained in my life. It wasn't just an airbag around my emotions; it was also a new metaphor, a mixed metaphor, a sort of set of crutches I could use to walk those paths and develop the ability to do it again after.
Now that I've actually been off them again, the obvious has occurred; I am a more sexual being, I am a more emotional being, I am less stable and more nervous. But I've also noticed that the issue is that conflicts now *linger*.
You don't just get in a fight and go do something else — in fact, doing this makes people think you are less human anyway — it's more like a fight isn't just a fight, it's a mental breach that needs to be woven over because your interpretation of the world has shifted in some way.
I find as a result I avoid conflict altogether, instead of facing it head on when necessary: if I do, what I end up doing is muttering to myself about why this or that thing was justified. Ego defense goes into overdrive. And this is what really gets to me.
Ego defense, like a therapy session, is all about shaping self-narrative so that you can go on living with a sense of the world (and of yourself). Self-narrative is powerful. It can certainly change your life — and this is why symbolic rituals are so helpful — but it also can consume your life. What I became afraid of was that this after-conflict soothing session was ultimately corrosive.
> The question is whether she is a grumbler, or only a grumble. If there is a real woman—even the trace of one—still there inside the grumbling, it can be brought to life again. If there’s one wee spark under all those ashes, we’ll blow it till the whole pile is red and clear. But if there’s nothing but ashes we’ll not go on blowing them in our own eyes forever. They must be swept up.
C.S. Lewis, *The Great Divorce* (pg. 77, Harper 2001).
I think of this quote all the time; I think it is ultimately part of why I am Christian. Forgiveness doesn't just relieve others, it relieves ourselves. It is a psychological remedy. You can so easily get swept up in a grudge that requires you to talk yourself into a hole the rest of your life that it wouldn't take that many grudges to kill your soul outright.
Likewise, I think things like narcissistic personality disorder are self-narratives becoming too powerful. That is to say, the disorder mark of a personality disorder is essentially when it breaches into requiring other people to maintain yourself. We live in a very narcissistic time; the mark of an individualist society is the mandate of a strong self-narrative to succeed. But I wonder if overall we find a new way to lose ourselves by doing so. Is there more of a Self in a community than in an individual? What were the models of mind of those ancient communities, anyway...? When did they make a soul? A group soul? A personal soul? Could they have functioned alone?
