horrid moth jail

I am once again endeavoring to taper off sertraline after getting stuck at 75 mg for a year or so. I thought going down to 50 was making the brain sludge intolerably worse, but I can't even tell the difference anymore, so I figure if I'm going to feel shitty regardless I might as well take advantage of that and stop having a chemical dependency on shit that doesn't work.

Which is not to say that NO SSRI HAS EVER WORKED for anyone ever and that no one should take them, but for me personally it's been more of a placebo effect with diminishing returns and inexplicably heinous withdrawal symptoms for a thing that hasn't markedly improved my will to live, like, at all. I had one (1) entire Thought this morning about how my decision to go on the shit in the first place, back in 2012, was for pretty much the same kinds of reasons I justified getting a shitty liberal arts degree in college, with the same kind of institutional arm-twisting in both cases. The same boomer brain worms that brought you "it doesn't matter what kind of degree you get, employers just want to see that you're educated!" also insisted that no therapist (sometimes in their own words) would continue to work with me unless I would at least agree to consider the possibility of maybe taking a medication for my garbage shit brain. I had a few encounters with therapists who threatened institutionalization if I didn't get a psych eval for meds, and this was them putting their foot down after repeatedly bringing it up when I said I wasn't comfortable with it. The argument was that the medications would improve the symptoms enough that I could actually start to make progress in talk therapy, but I needed to be at some agreeably medicated baseline before we could Work On Getting At The Root Causes Of Why I Am A Broken Pathetic Piece Of Shit.

So the first ironic thing about that is I wasn't even seeing a therapist when I decided to start medication. I was between the therapist whom I'd stopped seeing after she threatened to 5150 me for expressing suicidal ideation, and the one I started seeing in 2013 who didn't really "do" labels and promptly informed me that "you know, you could probably get off those antidepressants if you want to." My normie doctor actually prescribed the sertraline for anxiety, and it did help with that for a little while, to the extent that I was no longer sedating myself with benadryl to avoid having an acute anxiety/panic attack at my gas station cashier job every day, but it really has not done a shit of fuck all since then.

The second ironic thing is that I was so mcfucking depressed about my career prospects in 2012 that I tried to light my Useless Liberal Arts Diploma on fire during a particularly acute depressive episode (didn't work, idk what the shit those things are made of but maybe they should use them to insulate buildings or some fuckery, it'd be more effective than whatever my diploma is currently doing) and that was around the point that I decided that shit, maybe I do need to put drugs in my brain that will make me stop being like this.

The other ironic thing is the aforementioned therapist I started seeing a year later who was like "whoops, you don't need those after all!" and I didn't get off them then when it would have been easier, presumably. Said therapist also encouraged me to pursue a career in computer programming after I told him it was what I wished I'd done in college, which led to me landing a full-time job at the miraculous intersection of my actual field of study and the computer shit I wanted to do, and then getting fired a week and a half later because I'm stupid and the actual worst. And I couldn't follow up with the therapist because oops, no job! I'd quit my stable but soporifically boring temp job for the software company job and now I didn't have either of them, which meant no money for therapy. All in all, just an absolutely catastrophic fuckup on my part that resulted in me setting myself back another 10 years and doing shitty retail jobs and intermittent remote work in the meantime.

Anyway, so that's why I'm going to quit my shit meds and Learn Too Code for real this time, possibly. We'll see how hard I fuck that up, but my plan right now is to look into a certification and maybe start applying for some tech jobs by the end of the year, and if I can't do that, then the therapists were right and I'm going to either kermit myself to mental hospital or sewer slide so that my family can get on with their lives without my kafka bug ass dragging them down.

also amusing that I've been down to 50 mg for about a week and the warnings about SSRI discontinuation are like "you will BARF and SHIT TO DEATH and also OBSESSIVELY THINK ABOUT WANTING TO UNEXIST" so like, a typical wednesday then

In all seriousness, though, it does suck and has sucked for a while and I anticipate that this will just accelerate the descent into the gaping vortex of absolute suck that's omnipresent at the depths of Al Gore's green internet. I'll be, uh, "fine" in that twitter's model of engagement was uniquely atrocious for my mental health, and I needed an excuse to log off occasionally anyway, but I know a lot of people (other marginalized folks and creatives especially) who depend on whatever the current iteration of digital commons is for their livelihood and survival and their social lives and political organizing and everything else that's indispensable to humanity. I worry for my friends, and I'm also just really fucking tired of having to pack up and move my shit elsewhere every couple of years when some brainworm-addled neckbeard with unethical amounts of stolen wealth decides to shart it up in the communal swimming pool.

Also I keep lurking on twitter on my phone browser and getting psychically hurted so I guess I'll have to look into downloading a stayfocusd-type app for my phone, too, since I'm too much of a peepee poopoo pissbaby to have any self-restraint on my own.

ETA: Blugh, all the phone apps are paid or sus. I'll just have to get Jerami to make some kind of sci-fi taser plugin for my phone and write me an app that'll electrocute me every time I type "twit" into the address bar. Which kind of defeats the purpose of avoiding self-harming behavior, but you do what you gotta. :E