Cold turkey: the re-heat

Let me tell you about the time I took an anti depressant 7 days into cold turkey withdrawal. 

Or, as I call it, "Being Human". 

(Without the vampires, werewolves or ghosts, but with the sofa) 

7 days into withdrawal, and I was facing my birthday as a zombie. 

As an itchy, tearful, spaced out zombie.

1 pill to rule them all. 

I'm not a fan of birthdays but that didn't mean I wanted a shit day. I wanted to have a clear head, and be able to walk to the station without stopping twice for a breather. 

So I took the Citalopram. I have a months supply in my drawer and I haven't touched it.

I wake up transformed. 

I wake up before my alarm. 

I wake up with a smile in my heart and on my face. 

I have 5 hours straight sleep and get to sleep with little trouble in the first place.

All of sudden, I'm human again. I still have pain in my stomach, but I eat pre-9am for the first time in weeks. 

I talk. It's like my mouth has been unchained. 

I read without feeing every word drag past my eyes. I drink and eat like I ordinarily would. 

My heart sang yesterday. Yes it was my birthday and yes I met a sloth. 

But my heart sang to the peaceful melody of medication. 

Oh Citalopram, why do we have to part? 

Is it true? Are you really damaging my insides?

There's only one way to find out. Coming off them.

Only I've found out why people don't go cold turkey off anti depressants and I've decided I'm not going to keep trying. 

Instead, I'll be going more baby learning to crawl speed. One laborious shuffle at a time. 

Cold Turkey

This is not a blog about Christmas leftovers.
About sandwiches with cranberry sauce.
Or about dead poultry.

This is a blog about withdrawal.

I have been off my anti depressants for 7 days. 
I was on them for 18 months and in less than 18 minutes I had made the decision to stop them. Dead.

It is not advisable to come off anti depressants suddenly, to go cold turkey with them.

I am learning why.

I itch.
My legs, at 1am.
My shoulders and armpits at 3am
My palms, at 5am.
My feet, right now. My head, all the damn time.

I am dizzy. I could look down at the ground and then up at the sky and lose my balance.
I am light-headed. I feel like my legs are jelly and I am going to topple over at any minute.
I put this down to the lack of food. Because I can count the number of full meals I have had in the last 10 days on two hands. Most of them were this past weekend. 

I can count the days I haven't thrown up this month on one hand.

I cannot sleep. I did not understand why I am so, so tired all the time and yet now I get into bed at night and sleep does not come. And when it comes, it does not stay. When it comes the dreams are just...weird.

I did not expect to itch, to not sleep or have even weirder dreams than usual when I do sleep (seriously: Ice cream. Crow people. Packing. Crime. My weird dreams just got weirder).

I did not research or ask about withdrawal before I stopped my Citalopram. Google says all of the above are expected withdrawal symptoms.
That the half-life of Citalopram is 36 hours, so the speed of it took me by surprise but if I'd done some research it wouldn't have surprised me at all. 

I am an itching, dizzy insomniac. All within a week.
And I am crying. This is the only symptom I expected. Naively, I thought that the only side effect of coming off anti depressants would be the depression making a comeback. Because that's what they're for, keeping the depression (or the worst of it) at bay.
I expected the suicidal thoughts, the tears.
I cry at adverts, at the news. I cried about the snap general election. I cried at Guardians of the Galaxy last night.
I'm crying now!
I am a crier; I sobbed down the phone to Oxfam once. But this is kind of ridiculous.

Except One Directioners, who cries at Harry Styles music?! Me, the wet-faced dizzy insomniac who can't stop scratching, that's who.

I should also expect headaches (got that down, 11 years in the making), anxiety (wait, why was I on this drug again? oh yes...) and nausea. Wait, nausea? You mean, the very thing I'm trying to eliminate by coming off the Citalopram?

I am desperate to stop throwing up. I am desperate to be well again, to stop feeling nauseous, to stop getting stomach pains. And that is why I have gone cold turkey from my Citalopram because if it is the cause behind my mysterious sickness, then I will work to find other ways of managing my depression. Another anti depressant, CBT, Mindfulness; the list of possibilities is endless. 

There is also the possibility that it is not the Citalopram causing my sickness.
But by the time my body has worked that out, I will probably be withdrawn from it anyway. 

NOW I'M CRYING AT GREEN DAY!

One person

You can't help but feel small when you fly above the world.
Seeing lights, landscapes and life stretch out as far as the eye can see.
Is the fog rolling in over the hills, or over your beliefs of existence?

How small are we really? One person, among billions. 
Living on one planet in one solar system among billions.

The smallest action requires a lot of work. 
The hands writing this are using one combination of muscles, different to the set that I could use to play piano or pick up a paintbrush.
Another set of muscles make my eyes blink as I look into the night.
Yet another load of muscles enables me to cross my legs to get comfortable.

One muscle quickens as I consider the vast expanse of the universe and how insignificant I am. How insignificant you are. In the grand scheme of things.

Surely we're all here for a reason. Whether to be the villain, the hero, the sidekick.
We are all heroes in our own stories, and villains or sidekicks in the stories of others.

I stare into the night sky, the hero of my own story. I don't feel small; I feel just the right size.