The Other Me
‘Pharmaceutical Daze’ vi. Going into New Year, my steadiness grew and I again looked to ditching the meds. By now, I was taking only the Tofranil. They’d done their job. I wasn’t depressed, I wasn’t having panic attacks, my anxiety was probably as normal as anybody else’s (well, mostly), and the intrusive thoughts were few and dismissible. The worry was whether any – or all – of that stuff would come back once I went off the meds. Was it lying in wait? Already, when I’d decreased my dosage of Tofranil by one quarter, the anxiety had seethed. Maybe I hadn’t tried hard enough to get through it. For over…
The Other Me
‘Pharmaceutical Daze’ iv. Gradually, Ativan stopped working on me. But instead of it losing its effect, something else happened. Whenever I took one, the anxiety mutated into a disquiet where everything around me seemed almost unreal. One night, after taking an Ativan, I walked to my bedroom and saw down the hallway, by my parents’ bedroom, a hazy greenish-blue blob just sitting there on the carpet. I approached and it dissolved. I went to bed, petrified, and saw two other smaller blobs on the bedside drawer. Closing my eyes, I told myself I was okay. When I opened my eyes the blobs were gone. There was no doubt the Ativan…