MY HAPPYNESS PILL
“But mom, you’re always sick!”
I used to say this to my mom growing up because honestly, it was true.
My mom has lived with depression for as long as I can remember.
There were periods of time when we would go to the mall and on trips often,
and there were times when we didn’t.
As an adult, she tells me now how I always used to say “Mom, you’re always sick!”
and although it was true, she couldn’t quite explain to me why.
Ever since I can remember, she was switching from medication to medication.
Sometimes she was really tired and low and then, for maybe for a year,
she seemed really healthy. I just remember how this cycle would repeat.
Back then, I never understood what it meant to be sick in the way that she was.
I never truly understood it, until I was trying to reach the same high
she spent her entire life chasing.
I was chasing a high I could never reach.
Medications can be intimidating. Initially, I didn’t understand the science behind antidepressants and anxiolytics— psychotropic medications intended to improve mental health.
All I really knew about them came from my experience watching my mom switch
from medication to medication throughout my life.
I wanted to believe that I was happy on my own. It almost seemed like if I did “give in” to taking medication,
I would be giving up. I wanted to believe that I could fix myself.
But I got to a point where I was so hopeless, so insecure, so stuck in the past—
I was living in the past.
I was chasing a high I could never reach.
But the thing is, I had been chasing this high my entire life.
I remember waking up everyday and absolutely never wanting to go to school.
This began when I was around five or six-years-old. I remember crying,
begging my mom to let me sleep the day away.
I didn’t want to go to a place where I felt uncomfortable and judged.
I remember I once told my mom that I felt like something inside of me was missing.
At the time, I didn’t eat much and I was visibly very thin. My mom and teachers assumed what I was going through was an eating disorder. My mom had even taken me to a fashion show intended
for girls who were overcoming eating disorders. But I knew that wasn’t where I needed to be;
there was nothing that made me want to be thinner then,
I just had no confidence or motivation to be happy with who I was entirely.
I had felt this way since kindergarten up until high school. I would skip as many days as I could as I grew older.
I remember my friends teasing me for never going to school,
“Alia, do you ever come to school?”.
I felt interrogated and embarrassed— like I had to explain myself.
So I would prepare excuses in my head, to have explanations on hand for why I didn’t come in.
There was a point at which my friends stopped asking.
I had convinced myself that I was just lazy and incompetent.
But I honestly had zero motivation to get up in the morning or do my school work.
I felt uncomfortable in my own skin, barely getting through each hour of the day until the bell rang,
and only then did I feel like I could breathe again.
There were periods of time when I did feel genuinely happy, and for those times I am grateful.
When I began college, I remember thinking: wow I am finally happy.
But then something would happen and I would be back in the cycle that
I thought was my “normal”.
I became accustomed to looking forward to the next significant event in my life
and telling myself, once this happens,
then I’ll be happy.
But I got to a point where I was so hopeless, so insecure, and so stuck in the past that
I was living in the past.
I finally broke down and told my mom all of the things I had been feeling for the past year, all at once.
The more I broke down and exposed every single thing I had been keeping within me,
the more I realized that I had always felt this way.
The psychiatrist told me that since I have a significant history of mental illness in my family,
how I was feeling was most likely a chemical imbalance that therapy alone couldn’t fix.
She was right.
She initially had me start with Zoloft, which is a pretty standard medication for anxiety and depression.
I was made aware that I might feel nausea, fatigue, and headaches.
I definitely did feel those symptoms and I tried to stick it out, but I then started to have more anxiety and suicidal thoughts than I was before.
I had an adverse reaction— the thing about these medications is that although they have side effects,
the benefit must outweigh the cost.
Once I told my doctor this, she immediately switched me to a different medication on a very low dose to be preventative of the same reaction happening again.
So I tried Lexapro, another standard anxiety and depression medication,
and began on the lowest possible dose.
It worked. After a couple of weeks I tried to go up in dosage but I began to feel the same anxiety
I had felt on Zoloft. So I went back down and since then, my life has changed entirely.
Medication genuinely worked for me, and I was lucky in that it wasn’t that lengthy of a process to find the right one. But it’s definitely a process that, for myself and a multitude of individuals,
makes a world of difference.
I still feel my insecurities, I still have dark thoughts from time to time, but they’re stabilized.
They’re still there, but now I’m able to manage it. What isn’t there anymore is
the hopelessness; the constant chasing of a high.
I don’t feel hopeless anymore, I can wake up and think wow my life is extraordinary.
When I was unhappy, I tried my best to create a life that I loved for myself.
The difference from then to now is that I’m no longer desperate to chase this high,
no longer desperate to hold onto the life I’ve created—
the life that I am able to live now, is the high.
Image by the lovely @by_anusha