This is the first post from my NaNoWriMo Life Story Crafting project . In the “12 Questions to Help Us Realize Our Potential,” it answers question one: “Ordinary Life” What was your life like before your transformation? The “transformation” I chose to write about was how I came up with the Well-Being Toolbox.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” – Thomas Jefferson
I have no conscious memory of how my pursuit of happiness began, but here’s how it ended.
It had been three days since I’d taken the last antidepressant from my non-refillable prescription bottle. I hadn’t slept in days, which wasn’t unusual, but instead of being exhausted, I was agitated. Weird because I’d never experienced agitation and flu-like muscle pain together before.
When I turned my head, the visible world was on delay. Not a problem when I’d been comfortably numb during my early twenties drinking days. But I’d sworn off that kind of blind-drunkenness because the hangovers weren’t worth it. Now I was nauseated, my head throbbed, and I had given up on the eating and purging trick two days ago. There were no alcohol toxins for my body to reject. The poisonous neurotransmitters were all in my head.
And there was another difference. Though time doesn’t pass when I have a hangover, I believe I’ll be over it if I can make it through the day. Now, the thought of a trip to the emergency room flashed through my head. But based on what I’d read, apart from confining me to a room where I wouldn’t hurt myself, at a cost that would throw me into crippling debt, there wasn’t much to be done. A day of wishing I was dead was something I could live with. I wasn’t sure whether weeks of it were. I needed to keep my options open.
How did I get here? These were the days before the Affordable Care Act, when going from employer-based health insurance to individual insurance routinely excluded pre-existing conditions. Mine included allergies, asthma, and depression. No longer able to both afford insurance and treat the excluded conditions that had sent my rate sky high, I had opted to live with the allergies, get an over-the-counter rescue inhaler, and do my best to taper the antidepressants.
I shouldn’t have needed them, right? It was the pointless job at the dying Fortune 100 retail giant that had depressed me, right? On any sunny day, I would drive in, maybe with a smile on my face as I walked from the parking lot by the Chicago River to the office complex. The security guard checked my ID, and I was greeted by all the stressed-out, unhappy faces around me. I’d read in Bloomberg News that someone had once cracked a joke in a senior executive meeting. The Chief Executive Officer left the meeting and sent his Chief Operating Officer back to tell his minions “frivolity will not be tolerated.”
But I’d left that job to strike out on my own. So all that was behind me now, right? Maybe I just got the tapering wrong. Maybe I could just eat through all my savings as I tapered the drug more slowly instead of immediately plunging into massive debt with a hospital visit.
That’s the thought I clung to as I tried to transfer the seven digits of my doctor’s phone number on the pill bottle into the touch-tone phone. I say “clung to” because that’s what it felt like. Clinging to the memory of a visual stimulus (a digit in a phone number) long enough to link it to the motor activity of punching the corresponding digit on the phone was big-league stuff. And I had to nail it seven times in a row.
The phone rang on the other end. A woman’s voice said, “hello,” a crying baby super close: a little informal for a receptionist, but the crying baby wasn’t that unusual at a clinic.
“Dr. George–––––?” I asked.
Pissed off sigh. “Wrong number,” she said and hung up.
Must have dialed wrong. I tightened my facial muscles, like that would do any good, and repeated the seven-digit ordeal.
Same woman, same baby, “Who’s calling!?”
“FUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCK!”
“Who is this? Stop calling me. I mean it!”
This time I slammed the phone down. It rang instantly. Caller ID said it was the number I had just dialed. I couldn’t handle this woman’s rage right now. I picked up and hung up again and unplugged the phone.
I had chosen a doctor to write my prescription based on proximity to my old apartment. It didn’t bother me that his waiting room was filled with people who were truly down and out. I had chosen my neighborhood because it was close to the job that had driven me to depression. The fact that my doctor had been well past retirement age hadn’t entered into it.
I laid down on the sofa wondering how I might end this. If I’d watched the local news as much as my brother did, fear might have driven me to buy a handgun. I might have used it.
I walked out onto the third-floor balcony and looked down. If a relative of mine hadn’t survived a fall from such a height, drinking the rest of his life away in a wheelchair, I might have jumped.
Instead, I went back into the living room and started banging my head against the wall. We lived in an old, well-constructed building. Maybe my skull would give out before the wall did.
Nope.
Obviously, I’m no Thomas Jefferson, so this will have to do for my moment of truth.
My declaration of independence from psychopharmacology would lead me to uproot the causes and conditions of my depression. I would discover that in one way or another they were all bound up in my pursuit of happiness. I would uncover a path to lasting well-being based on a search term that mental health professionals never think to Google.
But at the time, trust me, none of these truths were remotely self-evident. This was going to be a very bumpy ride.
