Back in March I posted part of my journal from February 1996 that describes seeing Dr. Brunette to ask about anti-depressant medication. She prescribed Paxil, since I felt very untrusting of Prozac. I had a terrible experience. The notes I made during that experience leave out a lot and don’t match my memory of what it was like. There is actually some interesting material in those notes, so I’m including it here.
February 19 I’ve taken 10 mg of Paxil.
February 20 Another bad night. Woke at 5:30. Wave after wave of fear.
February 21 I don’t feel like myself. How do I know what is me?
[in body work with Robin] I began to fill up with the most appalling fear. Nothing I did made it change, so finally I said something to Robin. She went and held my feet and suggested I send the fear to ground through her, but I couldn’t do it. Then she asked me to dialogue with fear, and Fear said “You must change your life” which infuriated me since I have done goddam everything I could to change my life — but I saw that that was the same bind, always feeling I had to be the one to do it — and the words amended themselves to “You must let your life change you.” This brought some relief, but only a very little.
O god there’s still this morning to write about — another round of Hell, waking and fearing I had lost myself. I have to quit for the moment, I’ll write about it later.
8PM. At my desk.
So. This morning’s Hell. I woke at 3AM, feeling very weird. Got up to pee, felt faint, not like myself. Then panicked, how would I know if I wasn’t myself? How do I know myself? I thought about Hart saying that I was too much in the mind needed to be in my feelings. But the only feelings I have are this fear, this frozen, buzzing, burning fear. I managed to sleep, but woke again and again. I got up to pee but felt so sick and strange and dizzy. I went back to bed and waited until Dana got up. When he came out of the bathroom, I called him in, and babbled almost incoherently about how scared I was and how I felt I have lost myself and how did I know that I was myself, etc. He was very good, he just listened and patted me. He said “You’re scared, of course, I don’t want to trivialize that. But you phrase things like you usually do, it’s the way you think, the core of you seems just the same as ever.” That was a relief to hear.
… [I did finally stop feeling the fear.]
I see that I still haven’t managed to describe the fear. I can’t even call it back by thinking about it, it’s like menstrual cramps, you remember that they were awful, but you can’t remember how they felt. But that same hard grip, cold and burning at the same time. At the time I didn’t understand how a person could be in that much fear for that long and still live. Now that the feeling is gone, it’s tempting to trivialize it. Having said all that, I still haven’t described it. Like a high-pitched, screaming noise that goes on and on, my body strung up tight with electricity, barbed wire around my heart, cold and hot at the same time, and frozen, nothing moves or changes, expect perhaps to get more intense. I feel like it’s still there, in my aura, it feels like there’s a cloud of tingling electricity around me, about 3 inches out from my skin.
What I find really interesting about this description of fear is it’s a description of frozen fear, the kind that happens when you can’t fight and you can’t flee. It’s traumatized fear. Whether I’m being traumatized by the experience of the Paxil, or just my own early trauma re-stimulated, I don’t know. I suppose it could even be a combination of both.
February 22 [Just scraps of information]
February 23 I’m at Sybil’s, spent the night here. Leah drove me to therapy because I was too incapacitated by fear. I was even too incapacitated to write as can be seen by the fragmentary entries for yesterday.
What works is setting up support so I won’t be so alone with it. I talked to Susan Brown, who said I could call her and gave me the number of the WMMH [White Mountain Mental Health] crisis line, and I have the Support Center number as well.
What I didn’t see at the time, can see now because I know I was traumatized by being left alone, is that being with Sybil & Leah made a big difference, as did checking with other people for support.
Because I don’t say anywhere that I had stopped taking the Paxil, I can only deduce from other evidence that I must have stopped taking it about this time. That would explain why the fear feels different in this next paragraph.
When I woke up at 2:30, the fear was there as strong as ever, but somehow it felt different. I was clearly myself, I felt more grounded, it felt more like a physical sensation, waves of heat and electricity. I felt that something major had shifted in the night, that I had “gotten through” something, that I was going to make it now. I thanked god for it, because it certainly wasn’t any of my doing. I had an odd feeling of being able to open myself to the process, to be there in each moment, and the amazing unexpected newness of each moment. “What have I got to lose.” That was fleeting, now I’m back with the fear, but the other still seems possible.
I’m feeling really wired, probably to be expected from so little sleep and so little food. Two lots of two hours sleep. A can of peaches, a bowl of turkey soup that I wasn’t able to finish, and yogurt and applesauce. I’ve just felt too nauseous to eat.
This struggle is causing difficulties with my husband.
February 26 I’m now uncertain about what’s OK and what’s not OK to ask Dana for. When I ask for reassurance, I’m not able to take it in. I’m afraid of being too needy. So then I’m scared of him and he gets angry because I’m scared. Actually not angry at me, but an edge comes into his voice and I lose it.
I think about trying to write about the events of the last few days, and can’t do it. I can’t make narrative out of it. Words seem to clothe the events wrongly and then they get distorted. I’m breaking down to a new level of experiencing? I’m beginning to live out of a new center? ?
February 28 I’m going to make an icon with the pills — put it in the little brandy box — call it drug mother. I put the pills in a glass jar and put it outside because it made me too anxious to have it in the house.
Reading what I wrote on the 28 suggested to me that I had stopped taking Paxil on the 27. But later I write, that same day, that Dr. Brunette said it would take 5 days for the drug to work its way out of my body, so that’s by this evening. Therefore I must have stopped taking it on the 23 or 24.
I feel like I’m just babbling, and I haven’t written at all about the important things that have happened. But that’s OK (too bad, reader) I’m writing to myself and for myself. I’m writing to comfort myself. I’ve given up the assignment of trying to make my experience intelligible to someone else — gosh, on that thought there’s an enormous relaxation.
I’ve been thinking of trying to write the story of what’s happened over the last 10 days as fiction: a shamanic initiation by drug, the “induced insanity of the seventh level.” I can’t try to write “the truth” because I don’t know what that is any more, certainly not in terms of material fact, of what happened on which day.
I heard a plane, felt the old feelings of fear and despair. I tried to tune into my inner wisdom voice, the one that said “Be gentle with yourself” and it reminded me that the world/universe is much bigger than this small planet at the end of the twentieth century which humans have made a hell of with their noise. “There is ancient silence, and old old spaciousness, there is enormous time free of machine noise, and vast reaches of space where sounds cannot be heard. There is no air on the moon, no sound of machines..”
March 3 I slept late this morning and now — of course! — am feeling the old slow ache of depression in my middle. So it’s back to learning what I can from depression. I try to convince myself that this is something I’m moving through.
But in fact, it wasn’t over. What followed was the Summer from Hell. I had trouble sleeping, woke up terrified every hour and a half, lost weight. Because I had such a bad experience on Paxil, I decided that Dr. Brunette was wrong when she diagnosed post-traumatic stress. But in fact she was right.