I will not let you down

Behold the finely tuned machine
Who lacks a little Paroxetine.

I am in what is called a wash-out period for Paroxetine, which is two weeks long. After this I will be taking Citalopram. Should any reader be uncertain of these names, they are the presumed-active ingredients in two kinds of anti-depressant.

I have been taking Paroxetine more or less full-time since I was nineteen. That’s almost half my life. While it’s a drug that has made life very very hard for some, it has worked for me, as comforting as a lover who arrives silently and never leaves. I had not thought ever to set it aside any more than a diabetic might throw away their insulin, but depression is not diabetes: there are other treatment options for changed situations.

At the moment, even as my days pass within a happy superstructure of routine, change encroaches on the heart of the matter, in a chain of I-had-nots. I had not thought to plan to marry, nor to invite my lover to live in my house, splitting the home’s “my” with the hybrid “our”, and yet I’ve done both these things, within eighteen months of saying “never”.

Above all, I had not thought of a child in all of this; indeed, I had actively shored my life against it. This too is changing, however, as I open the window to another possible future. The señor’s family masses around him, and their memories are happy, and I see myself more hopefully in another role: I would not drop our child on its head. I would not fail to fit it with the basics of life. When I think about this I see the eyes of my grandmother, and think about what else she wanted for me, which is what the señor wants for us. If I imagine myself, alone, I say no to this, but as one standing at the present end of a long line of ancestors, it seems possible.

That there is an us, that I am not only a me, further enables me to imagine what previously I set aside. I can do, for the us, what previously I would not do for the me. I am motivated, viscerally, for the happiness of the us.

So for us I will give up Paroxetine, with which I have had the longest relationship of all, and try Citalopram, the drug suited to the liminal, acronym-heavy world of women Trying To Conceive. The señor points out that I think largely of failure in this regard, the significant impediment of PCOS, the spectre of being yet another woman with silent ovaries. I don’t know. What previously didn’t matter to me may yet come to matter very much. But this is me, washing out my drugs, mood all fractured and askew, and this is us, not much different in our desires from the rest of the middle classes after all.

The she that I become at the end of the wash-out will necessarily be different from the one I leave behind. Of all the everyday transitions from single to couple, this druggy transformation asks the most of me thus far. There is a personal, moral element to all this, one which I am struggling to articulate. An ocean of swallowed pride, perhaps. I’ll find out.

So I row to your isle
All that distance reconciled
Should my arms, shoulders fail
Put my trust in wind and sail

Tagged as: anti-depressants, home, paroxetine wash-out, trying to conceive