Day: 72

after ten weeks of Sertraline, I can see three distinct phases:

phase 1:

lasting about three weeks--heavy sense of medication--side-effects strong--emotional blunting--lack of creative thought--music and poetry of no interest--voracious reading--darkness absent--irritability all but gone--everything seen on a logical level--mind is clear--body is oddly detached


phase 2:

the second three weeks--side-effects abate, mostly--emotional blunting still in place--music returns somewhat but not poetry--creativity returns somewhat--darkness absent but an odd sense of logical despair (circumstances) emerges--this period is dominated by the sense of stability of mood, a sense of normalcy, which in hindsight was noticeable by the contrast of the preceding three weeks--sense of being drugged fading--there is a sense that I am healing--that the meds are working and as one reader put it so well, better to be numb than dead--still, this phase is marked by hope, by progress, a sense that the cycle is broken--and a certain elation that the side-effects (esp sexual) have faded--this period is also marked by the emerging difficulty to distinguish what is med based and what is circumstance based--a subtle fear emerges that I am losing who I was--that the meds are changing me and I am not sure I prefer this non-emotional me


phase 3:

the last three to four weeks--an odd and artificial sense of giddiness has emerged--my body wants to dance but the desire seems med induced and not natural--a childlike playfulness has emerged, which again seems artificially induced--emotion still blunted and my frustration at a lack of an emotional life is growing--the sense, subtle but reemerging, of living behind a med induced mask is strong--I am fully aware that I am not the person on meds that I was before--I miss crying, music, poetry, (I've stopped reading in this phase and I miss it too)--the greatest concern is a complete lack of drive, the way one feels when taking cold medicine and all you want to do is vegetate--despair comes and goes but it does so without any emotional energy--I wish I could explain what that feels like and perhaps in time I will find a way to explain it--suffice it to say, the feeling is bizarre--wave-like mood states have returned on a much lower level--I am contemplating on lowering the dosage from 100mg a day to 50--my doctor has given me to green light to do so if I wanted--my greatest fear, which has emerged with force in this phase, is that nothing has been fixed, nothing healed, nothing changed--the sense is strong that all that has occurred is a drugged induced masking, a bandaid--like cutting weeds with a lawnmower that leaves the roots in place