Laughs and Lobotomies

I spent nearly 2 years tapering psych meds.

This post isn’t a how-to.

Had I known what it would’ve been like….I would’ve killed myself.

But I was so heavy and my blood pressure so high that attempting to come off seemed more reasonable than weight loss surgery.

Which I didn’t have insurance coverage for or finances or help to get anyway.

I wanted to live.

I didn’t have help. I needed my job to keep my insurance. So I worked through it as long as I could. While I awoke to how toxic and cruel my family really was. How alone I really was. Without being numbed.

I stopped working and had cut everything.

Everything.

And the horrors of doing that persisted indefinitely.

I think I cycled through every diagnosis in the dsm in the 5 months I spent unmedicated.

I remember the searing pain that started in my head and my boyfriend called 911.

But they said if they took me I’d be taken to psych.

So I bore it.

I remember the hallucinations within my body. Feeling the blood move through my veins. Feeling every organ. Smelling my own breath.

I remember losing 40 lbs because I could not eat.

Passing out in the bathroom and hitting my head.

My hair falling out and my nails cracking.

I cut it short because it was falling out and there were so many days I couldn’t shower.

I remember feeling like I was drowning and couldn’t breathe.

Like my lungs were filled with the oceans of the world.

I remember crying until I couldn’t cry.

I remember sleeping all day and then not sleeping for 5 days.

I remember not remembering…anything.

At one point I barely knew my own name. I struggled to remember to eat and drink and find my keys or my phone or the cup I’d had in my hand a moment before.

I remember feeling frozen. I couldn’t get warm.

Scared.

terrified.

And so angry.

And alone.

And I had my partner but where the fuck was anybody else.

I remember when the pain in my head turned to pain in my whole body. Pain that refused to stop.

Pain that I had never known.

I remember the panic attacks.

I remember finally going to the ER. After 5 months. Because the pain and the panic attacks felt like a heart attack.

Because after 5 months waiting for it to get better.

It didn’t

So when I read about the opiate epidemic.

and that withdrawal lasts 14 days at most.

and it doesn’t kill you.

but we have treatments to ease THAT.

and I wanted nothing more than to be on…..nothing. For the first time in so many years. and I suffered through 5 months of so much worse. And these people can’t take 2 weeks?

If I could have recovery in 2 weeks I would take it in a heartbeat.

I’m not a saint.

and after what I’ve been through.

part of me wants to say

“So let them die…..”