Withdrawal, Withdraw, Draw
Recalibrating After SSRIs: Derealisation, Rushes, Tears
I’m preoccupied with my own madness at the moment. Two weeks clean from sertraline, and my nervous system is pushing me face down in the mud while offering a hand up like a manic bully.
Imagine being in a blindfolded bubble and stepping off a rooftop. The rushes, without the wind, are intense and disturbing. Your heart races, and it feels as though your spirit is falling at a different rate to your body. All the while you sit perfectly still, wondering if you’re about to faint. These rushes are par for the course, and as curious as I am about sensations, I can’t say they’re enjoyable at their peak. It’s more like a relentless ride you can’t get off. I’ve spent whole days ruthlessly continuing my routine while feeling as though my inner self is staggering and falling all over the place.
I was driving the other day when suddenly all sense of perspective contracted into a flat Dali painting, as if the magic that perceives distance had short-circuited and collapsed reality. Derealisation, apparently, and it can distort both time and space, not an ideal dreamlike state to be in when operating a vehicle. Fortunately, it went as quickly as it came.
I had a nice evening ahead: music on, food about to be served, oil paints laid out to play, away from screens and content.
I couldn’t point to a single thought that triggered it, but the floodgates of my pre-medicated self opened. I was transported to the helplessness of the past, grieving what felt like a return to instability and depression. And then I got up, got on, no problem. My emotional range was returning. Without context, transient sadness visited a few nights running, like an unwelcome door knock trying to convert me.
My nervous system is recalibrating, and it’s a little bumpy. I’m paying for eighteen months of a chemically manufactured baseline my brain has forgotten how to maintain. It’s like someone who has been catered for too long forgetting how to use the oven, puzzled when the pizza remains frozen as the alarm goes off.
Only you can’t just turn the dial to the correct setting. I may remain lukewarm for some time.
A few hours later, I’d finished a painting. It was only meant to get my eye in and allow myself the luxury, but apparently, it’s my best yet.
Days on, I was unreasonably irritable. I’d left something somewhere, now I was running late to recover it. I couldn’t shake the minor inconvenience and felt disproportionately aggravated, like before my collapse.
As emotional regulation normalises, I have to let these feelings wash through me without grasping at the white water. They’re simply small releases of internal pressure as the brain finds its feet without the use of a cane. Stumbles are to be expected.
