If I’m honest, I’m still not sure what I’m doing – how I feel about my writing – but there’s been a lot in my head this week so I thought I’d just try and get it all down. Maybe it’ll help.

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it already but after two and a half years of trying medications, I’m back on Phenelzine for my depression. I’m back on the drug I was trying to get away from. Back in 2017, it was starting to fail but I was also starting to fight it. The lifts to my mood felt artificial and suffocating. I felt depressed but there was this thick layer of calm suppressing it and it was causing me great, great distress. I felt like I was scratching at the walls of my mind with my fingernails, desperate to get out and just feel how I was feeling. Of course, feeling deeply depressed is a miserable, paralysing experience but at least it felt real. It was the truth and the truth is one of the most important things to me.

But despite all of that, I’m taking it again and I can’t help feeling like we’re starting to run out of options. We must be if we’re going back to a drug that I struggled with, that stopped working – although it’s true that it did work for a significant period of time. But we started looking elsewhere for a reason. Multiple reasons. I voiced that in the session with my psychiatrist and he said that there are still options but I can’t help worrying. Because if I’m running out of options at the age of twenty four, that’s a lot of life left without much to work with. Will we reach a point where I just have to live with it? Live with crushing depression and paralysing anxiety?

And let’s talk about anxiety. Last time I was taking the Phenelzine, I also took Quetiapine, primarily for the insomnia that the Phenelzine caused but it also helped with my anxiety. Because it’s a sleep aid, it has a sedating effect, which helped me to manage that constant anxiety. But I can’t go back to it. The sedative effect almost seemed to increase over time and it got harder and harder to wake up in the mornings. It was like I was so deep underwater that I couldn’t find the surface; I could hear people talking to me but I couldn’t open my eyes or move or speak. By the time we were abandoning the Phenelzine, it was so bad that I was losing half the day just trying to wake up. I can’t go through that again. It was awful.

So that limits the options, if I can’t take that or any of the similar drugs. The drug we’ve decided on is Diazepam. I’ve been taking it on and off over the last year and it works; it stabilises my emotions when they get out of my control. But it has addictive potential and I’m not supposed to take it every day. So, every day, I have to look at my anxiety and feel my anxiety and assess whether it’s bad enough to take the medication. And that’s exhausting. I never get an escape from it. To me, that’s not living. That’s managing.

But this is it for the moment. This is life. We’ll reassess in a month.