The buzz

04 November 2011 08:45 PM Categories: The struggle

Image by wallyg http://farm1.static.flickr.com/252/520933948_1abe16e5ec.jpg

The worst – and longest-lasting – side effect of the antidepressants is the ringing in my ears. Or the buzzing, the sound of activity, of blood flow or the crackling of brain cells, one nerve ending shouting to another and that one passing on the message to next and pretty soon it’s a skull full of shouting and buzzing, each message indistinguishable from another. All that’s left is a high-pitched buzz, a whine, a grumble of miscommunication.

I’m not sure why this particular side effect has stuck. My appetite has returned. I blame my sleeping problems on my mind now and not on the rush of my medicated heart. The jitters disappeared on week three of my regimen. I only notice the ringing when I am quiet, when I sit down to read or in the conversational lacunae, the slow moments when I can't tune out my head. Just after I started writing this post, the heat kicked on and so the buzz has been wiped out by the exhale of forced air, the concentration of warmth, but I can feel the vibrations just inside the bone.

I’ve grown used to talking casually about antidepressants, about being depressed, and I live in a bubble world where that’s ok. But in the online class I’m taking through a community college, well, not everyone has jumped on the depression bandwagon, meaning that not everyone thinks that it exists as an actual affliction.

I don’t know my classmates, don’t totally remember their stories. I do know they run the gamut from curious high school students to graduate students fulfilling a requirement. A number of them are from rural areas of California. Most are young, somewhere in their late teens or early twenties. There are people with shining positive outlooks and those for whom religion is vital, essential to their world view, and there are some who are unsure of their place in the world.

One of our latest class discussion questions was in part about whether feelings of anxiety and dread were a part of being human. Um, well, of course?? That’s not how I put my response, but that sums up my conclusion. We all experience anxiety and deep dread – or should – and perhaps we have to experience them in order to understand what it means to be human, to sit with the pain of other people and let them sit with ours. This doesn’t mean that we have to totally accept the feelings. There are ways of holding them close while moving toward the light, of keeping the worst of what is human in a carefully cupped hand and holding that hand up to the sun.

In the discussion, I briefly mentioned taking antidepressants. No one attacked me personally for this – it’s not that kind of forum – but I was surprised both by how some approached the question (“well, I certainly hope that feelings of anxiety and dread aren’t part of being a person!”) to their clear disdain of depression as an actual malady. Some incoherently compared antidepressants to alcohol, something the weak get hooked on. Others wrote that the idea of anxiety and dread as a part of being human sounded like something cooked up by a pharmaceutical company looking to market a new antidepressant (ah, if only the pharmaceutical companies were more existential in their marketing approaches).

I wasn’t expecting subtlety from my classmates. I wasn’t expecting a group hug. I don’t really care what they think about depression or antidepressants for my sake. But it worried me for their own sakes or for their family members and friends who might be going through a thick sad depressive hell and are afraid to speak up for fear that they show their weakness or their lack of “positive attitude.”

Depression isn’t a simple thing. The reasons for it are many, a weird concoction of genetics and history, of circumstances and chemistry. I resisted the idea of it lurking in myself for years, though now that I look back I can see how I’ve gone through bouts of depression before. Some of it originates in isolation and compacted grief. Some of it is from childhood experiences. I am sure there is a genetic component as well. But whatever the reasons, my experience of it is real and the antidepressants are helping. Are they placebos? Maybe. But I choose to believe they are working for me now in the way I need them to, that they are clearing my mind so that I can do the hard work of becoming a whole human being.

It’s worth the constant buzz in my head and the occasional judgment from strangers. I know what I am experiencing. I know I am not alone, that my truth is someone else’s, maybe yours, and that together we can support each other across the ether, can hold our anxiety and dread up to the sunlight while clasping each other's hand.