High like a balloon
Monday, November 30 2009
Did you have a good Thanksgiving?
I had a good Thanksgiving. In fact, I had a really good Thanksgiving – maybe my best ever. Saturday afternoon, we were walking around town, doing a little shopping, and I felt so happy. I was giddy – like I was high.
It might have been the weather, and it might have been the family. It might have been the delicious meal prepared by my lovely and talented Executive Nutritionist. It might have been the hiking and the music and getting a good night’s sleep and the happy little puppies wagging their tails at me.
But I have to admit: it might have been the drugs. Specifically, paroxetine: I now take triple the dose I did when I started last summer. I originally took it because I was having trouble concentrating – a sign of depression, though I didn’t feel particularly sad. The drug has helped some with my concentration, but I’ve also noticed that I’m happier, less easily ticked off, and I have more energy. The drug has to play some role in all of this.
So back to Thanksgiving: I might dismiss my happiness as a medicinal mirage. Maybe I really had a crappy Thanksgiving, after all. This is why I resisted taking brain meds for so long: I worried it would make me fake happy, and not really happy.
My past experiences with meds played into this concern. Prednisone, among its many side effects, made me fall in love – hard – with just about any girl I happened to know. Over the course of one prednisone-infused year of college, I fell in love with a dozen girls, one after the other. None of them were the least bit in love with me, of course, and some of them were plainly wrong for me. And that experience – because it felt so real, but was so obviously a product of the chemical – made me deeply skeptical of being in love. If prednisone can do that, how can being in love mean anything?
And, in all candor, almost a decade of anti-drug instruction in school didn’t help. We children were told again and again: what you get from a pill or a needle can never be real – so get high on life! No wonder I balked at pills to make me happy: my internal Nancy Reagan was always there to tell me it was wrong. My anti-drug, it turns out, is depression.
What I have come to accept is that my emotions are no less real or valid for having a clear mechanism. If I have reasons to be happy, my happiness is not fake – even if it comes from a pill. This weekend, everybody around me – medicated or not – agreed that we had a wonderful Thanksgiving; whether or not paroxetine was making me happy, I was happy for good reason.
Same for falling in love: I have every reason to be in love with my wife – and I am, very much, but I don’t have to worry whether it’s paroxetine making me feel this way. The problem with prednisone was that I didn’t have good reason to fall in love with those women – not that falling in love is only legitimate when inexplicable.
And I think that accepting the validity of the explicable is a big step for me. Whether my feelings come from the disease, the pharmacy, or God, I have to deal with them and act on them just the same. The question, “where do my feelings come from?” isn’t nearly as important as, “what am I going to do with them?”
So yes, I really did have a great Thanksgiving. Drugs or not, I hope yours was just as good.
(Photo by Flickr user mortimer by CC License)
