Thursday, December 16, 2010

medicated me

It's been 7 plus months since I started taking Lexapro. I actually had to wait to complete that sentence so I could check my calendar - I wasn't quite sure. Yesterday, after writing about being frozen and stuck, complacent and ambivalent, I realized it could be the meds.

When I first started in them a friend, a successful writer, said she'd known plenty of creative types who lost their creativity to meds.

I'm thinking I could be one.

Which leads me to this:

anxiety = productivity

+ chemicals = stability - creativity

Anxiety has always been my fuel, my drive, my gasoline. Even while frozen by anorexia for all those years I knew, as just about the deepest truth there is, that should I be able to channel all that energy into something constructive, I could accomplish great things. It took years to thaw but, that thought came true. I have accomplished some truly great things.

But it got to be too much.

My soul needed a time out. Maybe, and here's a thought, this particular respite is the first chance in I can't think of how long for me to get to know me. Not driven me, frenetic me, accomplishing me, busy me. The me that's underneath all that.

Now I have to figure out if I want to leave here and plunge back into freneticism. I could stop taking meds and see what happens. It all could be fine - I'm taking a very low dose. But, the teeth-gritting, soul-haunting, reality-shifting anxiety could flood back and that terrifies me.

I just answered my own question.

I'm not ready.

Yet.

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