What it's like being me

You know that get-to-know-you game that you played at birthday parties and summer camp as a kid? The one where you go around the circle as each person says their name and an adjective beginning with the same letter as their name that also happens to describe them? Mine is easy, Sensitive Stacey. That is, hands down, the one word that describes me best. It encompasses the fact that I am attuned to other peoples' needs (external sensitivity), as well as my own internal sensitivity - most of my neuroses can be explained by attributing them to one or another of my sensitivities.

For the last year or so I've had a little bit of a break from myself in this 'sensitive' regard. I was taking Zoloft for depression and anxiety. I had thought I could make it through my pregnancy without it, but by the time February rolled around I was a mess. I can recall the moment on the kitchen floor - when I was having trouble getting up because the emotional energy that required was more than I could muster - that I decided what I really just needed was to be medicated. So I just stayed and cried in the little patch of sun that was shining on my resting place up against the cupboards and reconciled myself to the idea that the risks of taking antidepressants during pregnancy was nothing compared to the stress my little fetus probably felt living inside a cocoon of depression.

I've been on and off anti-depressants since I was 18. The off and on-ness of it is because there've been tougher times and not-as-tough times. And in my mind not being on drugs is a more natural, organic state of being, which is the way I aim to live my life. I sort of always felt like it was a contradiction to my being to live in a medicated state of mind. But this time around I think I finally found a way to rationalize it to myself: In a perfect world no one would need anti-depressants because us humans would be living the way our biological systems intended us to be living. We'd be eating wild game, living off of the land, and we wouldn't be in constant contact with pollutants and all the electrical devices (which I think have effected us on an energetic level).

We're not living in a perfect world, therefore, our brains and bodies are failing us. We have to make adjustments (that, unfortunately, are unnatural) to our lifestyles so we can live optimally. And as long as I understand this, and understand the why's and how's of my biological failings, then I think I can accept being medicated without feeling like a hypocrite. Thanks to on-and-off therapy since I was nine years old, and many friends who like to play therapy with me, I do understand myself.

With that said, I stopped taking Zoloft ten days ago. And the forthcoming reason will be completely random to some of you: I have this crazy desire to donate breastmilk. It was something I wanted to do when Jacob was younger and I was nursing him. There wasn't a place around here that it could be done, so I think I never looked further for information. A few months ago I read about a national milk bank in California that can accept milk from anywhere in the country. I do not know why I want so badly to donate breastmilk, but I very much so want to, and it's enough of a desire that I've been taking six weeks to carefully wean myself off of Zoloft (also going slowly for Sabine's safety, so that she doesn't experience withdrawal).

My plan is to continue to donate breastmilk for as long as I can tolerate not being on Zoloft. I definitely plan to go back on Zoloft (which is safe for breastfeeding mothers, but not safe enough for the milk bank because the human formula that is made from donated milk is very concentrated and is given to tube-fed preemies). And when I am done nursing Sabine I will consider switching back to Paxil - which is what I was taking just before I got pregnant with her.

Anyway, now that it has been almost two weeks without Zoloft, I finally remember the reasons why I was on it to begin with. In my most natural state I am a very scared person. I have a very thin skin. Actually, quite literally - I have sensitive skin; just got a sun burn last week (in March!), my knuckles and finger tips have been all chapped and bloody from the cold winter air, I have eczema, light-sensitive eyes, etc, etc, etc. I cry a lot. I obsess about things.

Basically the difference between un-medicated and medicated me is like this: More vs. Less. When I am not on an anti-depressant I am more emotional, scared, clingy, fearful, more sleepless, compulsive. I had a better analogy that I thought of earlier, which I can't recall at the moment. When I am medicated I just feel so much more comfortable in my own skin.

Coming off of medication is a whole different way of being, but I hope it's temporary. For the first week I was incredibly dizzy, vertigo levels of dizzy, as well as nausea with headaches. Now I'm just incredibly irritable and flustered. My brain is foggy and I don't feel like myself. Up until a couple weeks ago, I can say that I had never left anything on the roof of the car and driven off. Well, since I've stopped the Zoloft, I've done that three times. Three times I've set something on the top of the car (three different places) and told myself not to forget it, knew that would be so cliche to actually forget it, yet all three times I drove away only to watch the dish/glass bottle/cup of coffee slide off the car and shatter in the road. My short-term memory is shot, but of course that could just be from the kids.

I'm not the kind of depressed that requires medication to ensure your own safety or the safety of those under your care, I'm the kind that gets so scared driving over a bridge for fear of it collapsing under me that I might possibly drive over the edge because I'm clutching the steering wheel so tightly, thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. And this is what I saw, in my mind, happening coming home from gymnastics two weeks ago.

It started when I saw one of those big trucks, like a delivery truck, with all white panels and a beautiful picture on the side as that company's logo. It was a picture of the Earth from space, with a beautiful pink, orange and yellow sunrise coming up over the side of the Earth. My eyes shifted to the front of the truck to read the company's name. I can't remember what the name was (so I'll guess), it was what was underneath that which made me shudder. Haskell Brothers: Casket Division. I passed the truck as I was turning onto the entrance ramp for the highway.

Not more than half a mile down the road I had to swerve to avoid an object laying in the middle of my lane. Just as I was about to pass the object the words on it came into focus. Funeral. It was one of those little signs that goes on the lead car in a funeral procession. It had fallen off and was laying directly in my path. I'm the kind of person who believes in signs, as in signs from the universe, so what the hell did that mean?! I wanted to get on the phone and at least tell someone, speak the words aloud so it didn't feel so much like I'd just drawn the death card. I thought better of it because I decided that would be just my luck to get on the phone for moral support, only to cause a car crash by being on the phone. Which would that be, a self-fulfilling or self-defeating prophecy? (Kevin, you will tell me, right?)

But there's more to the story: This past week, coming home from gymnastics, on that very same stretch of road, I came up to a car going slowly with its flashers on. I passed it. And don't you know there was a car in front of that one doing the very same thing (flashers on, driving slowly), and then another, and another, until there were 25 of them stretched in a row with a big black car in front, two little purple flags atop it. Um...

Maybe the hearse was back on that same road looking for the funeral sign it dropped last week? Either that or someone is trying to tell me something. What is going on? I don't know, but I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since. I'm kind of nervous to go back to gymnastics next week. Frankly, I'm kind of nervous all the time now. And this is the thing I can't let go of.

I dropped Jacob off with Jamie this morning so that I could finish packing for the weekend (we are going to visit Danielle and Co. - woohoo!). I was in a hurry so I quickly said goodbye and I ushered him inside then I jetted back out to the car where Sabine was waiting. As I was backing out, Jacob was back at the door to say goodbye again. I rolled down my window, blew him a kiss, said I love you. I rolled Sabine's window down so he could yell goodbye to her. And all the while I'm looking at him, taking it all in as if it might be the last time I see him. I'm giving him the perfect goodbye, incase that's the last one he ever gets from me. I want a smile to be on my face in that last image of me he carries around with him for the rest of his life. Because where he is standing is the very spot where I last saw my father alive; I watched him from the house, saw him going down the steps though blurred shades and that was it.

Life changes that quickly and I walk through my days anticipating, almost expecting, something bad to happen. I'm sure of it. The part I'm not sure about it when or how it's going to happen. And so what does an overactive imagination have to do with that knowledge but constantly make up death scenarios?

I continued to drive home with our perfect goodbye in my mind and tears in my eyes - but then thought, wouldn't it be ironic if the thing I'm fearing is the exact opposite. Like the book we just read for book club, My Sister's Keeper (spoiler alert). The whole book is a battle to save one sister from dying because she needs a kidney. Everyone is afraid of that certainty, but don't you know, in the very end, it's the other sister, the healthy one, who's killed in a car accident. So should I really be worrying about Jacob losing me, or me losing Jacob? How cryptic it is to have those thoughts at the forefront of your mind all day long.

And that's what the drugs do - they push back the fear so it's a more normal, rational kind of fear. The fear is still there protecting me from feeling immortal. I'm still me with all the same thoughts as before. The thoughts just don't take over. I have the same feelings, they just aren't as crippling. And my skin gets the benefit of one more layer of protection. I'm me, but a little less.