Prozac

 

I wasn’t having so good of a time when I was on this strange stand up bike thing going down a mountain in Switzerland. The sky was clear, the mountains were the most gorgeous I’ve seen in my lifetime, I had a belly full of food, a fresh vape, I was hydrated. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was not right. I was having intrusive thoughts of taking off my helmet and guiding that bike right into a tree. I would lay crumpled at the base of it with a broken neck and let myself die there. Unfortunately, one traumatic incident after another combined with mental illness means thoughts like this pop up sometimes without warning. It’s part of the deal that you don’t ever remember making. I deal with these unpleasant thoughts in stride. Just another bad moment in an otherwise perfect day. 

I do a lot of therapy and take a variety of meds to help with these thoughts. Prozac, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, a sleep med to knock me out at night. None of these prevent suicidal thoughts from creeping in, but they do help me handle them better. I no longer find my tendency to lean towards the morbid troubling. It only irritates me. Like literally why is my brain thinking like that. Usually I’ll laugh about my dumb mind with my friend who is a paranoid schizophrenic, but she was not with me on that mountain. She wasn’t even awake given the fact that I was in a different time zone. 

No way in hell was I going to share these thoughts with the nice people I was with who invited me on the adventure. They were all neurotypical. I could easily tell. They all would have thought I was a positively deranged person. I would have kept my distance from myself if I could have. Unfortunately science hasn’t come up with a med that makes you completely leave behind who you are as a person when you’re feeling low. Luckily, a bipolar brain will do that on its own when the depersonalization hits, but I wasn’t that deep in a downward spiral for that to happen. No choice but to keep that helmet on and continue down that mountain path with a smile on my face. I’m not quite ready to die, I quickly decided. I’ll write about this later and that will banish these evil thoughts. Besides, there’s a lot more stories to find while on this earth. 

The real issue, which is a good thing, is not that I’m mentally ill to the point of being untreatable. I simply had forgotten my big bottle of Prozac when I left for Europe. This was the issue. I had accidentally thrown it away as I cleaned out my old apartment. Whoops! I didn’t experience any physical withdrawals, so I thought that meant I was going to be okay without the med. In fact I am okay without the med. Just a little more anxious and prone to crying. Nothing to see here, just a girl trying to heal from a tortured past in a foreign country. This is not so easy, even with the Prozac I would probably have felt a little unhinged. It’s just part of dealing with a life lived on the fringe of society. 

Of course, that no good suicidal moment faded away quickly and quietly. I had a nice rest of the day. I watched a gorgeous sunset at a lake with some of my new friends. I even ate a good meal that was full of nutrition instead of some garbage I picked up for cheap at the store. I ate the most delicious gelato I’ve ever had for dessert. I called my therapist and we talked about my failed sexual encounters. My sex life is of the utmost importance for me to discuss in relation to my mental health, given the amount of times I was raped by people who I thought cared about me. Whenever I process the rape in therapy and how it’s influenced my current state of mind I feel better. I’m not crazy, I’m just a little broken right now. I’m in the process of fixing myself up with a little gold like they do in Japan when someone breaks a plate they don’t want to throw away. The Prozac sure would help with my mood, but I’m still able to go on my healing journey without it. It’s not a cure all med, afterall. 10 measly milligrams of Prozac isn’t going to make me forget about my past. 

With the med, however, I’m a little more confident in my abilities to handle my past. Lately it’s been feeling like it’s too much to bear. I look forward to my conversations with my therapist for that reason. She’s a really funny woman. I relate to her because I can tell she’s had quite hellish days, too. Maybe she’s even contemplated suicide, but I’m not so sure that she lives with a mental illness. She’s just a woman who knows what hell looks like, knows the different forms it can take. I trust that together we can tackle these intrusive thoughts and turn them into stories I can tell later. Maybe I can even have a good laugh about thinking about hurting myself while on a stand up scooter bike thing. I’m already having a giggle about it. It’s good to keep the vibes light when dealing with really heavy shit. A tiny little breakdown is no big deal when I talk to her about it. We really do get shit done together. 

I’ve continued to have bad days on my world travels. Sometimes I can’t wait to go back and be reunited with my Prozac. I’d feel a little less astray with it in my system. But I am gaining some wisdom without it. Wherever I am in the world I’m always going to be LizzyfuckingWiegers. There’s not a lot of girls like me wandering about, and that’s a fact, so it’s important I get out there and show all these newbies without mental illness what it looks like to be the coolest, chillest bipolar person someone has ever met. It’s also important to keep seeing new parts of the world since we’re sinking into the sea and all that. I also like meeting new people who have no idea what it’s like to reach the end of forever and keep smiling anyways. They may not know about heaven or hell but they sure do know how to have fun. I can see life for what it is now: just a big fun never ending nightmare. I also know that I’m stressed out more than I normally am, Prozac or not, because I have no idea what I’m doing with my life. I don’t have any sort of career. I don’t even have a home right now. I really am lost at sea. 

While it’s a fact that I’m certainly not a threat to myself without the Prozac, maybe I do need even the smallest dose. It might make me a little less teary. A little more comfortable. Life doesn’t come with any guarantees, but if you have a good psychiatrist you can be damn sure you’ll never be out of meds forever. That’s definitely a blessing. 

I’m an old soul. Some kid said to me in the smoking room of the hostel we were staying at. I’m so wise. I wonder what I’m going to be like when I’m 40, he said. Well, if he’s really all that wise he’ll probably be on Prozac. All the people who know things about life are. We’ve seen too much fucked up shit go down, lived a little too fast, grew up too quickly, and now we’re all having flashes of suicidal thoughts while on a mountain in Switzerland. Or maybe that’s just me.