Zero Day

For the better part of a year, I've been tapering down my SSRI dosage. Today is my first day at zero.

After each downward step I gave my body plenty of time and space to adjust—a full two months. Especially the first couple times, it took work. I feel grateful that I can now identify primal fear and the subtle ways it pervades and influences my cognitive system. With effort I can compartmentalize it and take care of myself through it. Eventually my body recalibrated and the condition subsided. Sometimes new feelings came up, ones I hadn't experienced in a long time. (I'm especially noting a bout of righteous anger.) Repeat, and repeat.

The overall lesson that feelings will course through me and I will survive and even heal is a powerful one. Indeed, to have faith in my ability to heal, in my plasticity even at this age, is one of the aces in my pocket as I go about the rest of my life.

If shit happens in the future, I can always go back on the meds. I respect them as a tool and I consider them as scaffolding or a cast around me while I heal. Sometimes some people will heal on their own with just that structure, but some problems will not go away so easily. For too long in my life I simply continued using them for support without knowing how to address the underlying problems. I think that there is a problem in society's treating them as a cure rather than as a tool with its scope of effect.

Another possibility is that I find in a few months that my biology inexplicably shifts again into a state where I need them. Maybe I'll need them on-and-off throughout my life? TBD. I'm open to it.

In any case, this morning, deleting the daily reminder from my phone to take my fucking pill was the quietest great victory I can remember celebrating. Here's to progress.