Eight days a week. Day five. Or seven.

I Don't Even Know If I Mean That . . . And I'm Massively Confused, And You're Ambivalent.*

-:- -:- -:-

It's time to come out. And I've abandoned Bruce Springsteen.

About a month and a half ago, after finishing Richard Whitaker's Anatomy of an Epidemic, I made the decision to stop taking Cymbalta.

It's scary.

I also made the decision not to tell anyone. I just didn't want anyone telling me I shouldn't do it.

I changed my mind about that and told a select few people: my mother, my boss, one of my best friends. I did this because I didn't want to be alone in this, and because I wanted other people keeping tabs on my behavior. And I emailed another friend about it, and I joined an online support group for people withdrawing from psychotropics.

The first thing you really need to know is that back when my psychiatrist upped my dose from 30mg to 60mg, I only went with that dose for a very short time, then started taking the 60s every other day, and that's what I've been doing ever since. My first step in my withdrawal was to stop doing that. Instead, I started taking 30mg a day. Well, a little less because it didn't divide quite evenly.

At that point I was counting the little granules in the capsules, and I discovered there weren't the same amount in each one. Also, my mother kept bringing up the subject when we talked, and she asked me to tell Patrick because he sees me pretty often, and we talk. So I did that, and I went online and bought myself a scale so I could weigh the milligrams. I showed it to my mother the other day, and she was very impressed. And I think she's less worried.

So far I've made one cut; I've gone down from 114mg to 111mg. "One hundred and fourteen? How did 114 get into it?" I hear you cry. Well, with the inactive ingredients (which include a time-release coating), 30 becomes 114, more or less, don't you see?

(I tried to do the math to figure that out, so I'd know just how much I was cutting, but I don't know what the equation would be. There's only so much math you can learn from watching Numb3rs.)

So far I don't see any difference, and no-one has said anything. I'm mostly feeling pretty good. I'm mostly--

I feel like there's two of me: the one who mostly feels pretty good, and the one that feels strange and stressed and worried. It's like I'm Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, split in two. I don't know which one is the real me. I don't know if I'm changing because of things, or changing Pat died, or I'm changing because changing I'm not dead and change is what everything living thing does. Or D, all of the above.

Anyway, I've made a pro/con list of going off Cymbalta.

pros

01) I'm concerned about long-term effects.
02) Except for the Lorazepam, I've never had problems stopping a drug.
03) I don't trust the people who are pushing the drugs.
04) It's followed the same pattern of all the other anti-depressants I've used--it helped at first, but I don't see any difference overall.
05) I'm being extremely careful.
06) They're expensive.
07) I don't feel like writing anymore.
08) I don't feel like doing much of anything anymore.

cons

01) I don't know what the long-term effects are. (It's a newish drug.)
02) I'm terrified of withdrawal effects, and I've never been on a drug this long before.
03) Am I being unduly swayed by Richard Whitaker's book?
04) I'm feeling relatively good right now and I don't want to mess with that.
05) Except for the support group I've found, I feel like everyone I know disapproves or is fearful of this.
06) Being part of this support group, I feel pressured to continue.
07) I don't know if anything I'm experiencing has anything to do with the drugs.
08) I don't know anything.

I don't know who I am anymore, and I live in a vacuum, and I was never good at decisions but now--

I'm a bat in an open field, with nothing to bounce my sounds off of.


*Amita Ramanujan