I’ve been working on my self improvement since…forever, maybe. I don’t think I’ve ever not been working on a project to make over my life. Actually, I’ve gotten really good at starting over in life. It’s kinda what I do. My career has had more iterations than I can count. But now, I needed to do it again. It didn’t have to necessarily be in externals. No — that’s not true.
I tried to be happier in my job for a while. But that just wasn’t going to happen. I had to face the fact that I hated it. But more on the job front later.
I started out trying to feel better by trying medications. My doctor said we could go through as many trial and error periods as I needed to to look for the right drug, and she patiently prescribed medication after medication. Various forms of anti-anxiety and antidepressant medications were prescribed. I tried tracking my feelings, side effects, adjusting doses after several weeks and checking in with my doctor. There were a couple that seemed hopeful during the initial phases, some did nothing, and some side effects really messed with me, but ultimately after several weeks the results were all the same. And that was essentially, nothing.
My doctor was patient and persistent, and counseled me to be the same. That didn’t take much convincing. This wasn’t my first experience with this slow process of trial and error. She prescribed many different medications, from different classes and types of medication, and was willing to persist until we found something that worked for me. But nothing did. I tried five to seven different medications, and they all resolved proved to be ineffective. And there was another problem. The time it was taking to work with these prescriptions, with the various side effects, mood swings, etc, meant that sometimes I was hampered in using other means of working on my issues. For example, trying to make lifestyle and thinking adjustments was difficult when I didn’t know if my moods were natural, or if they were temporary side effects of medication. There were also various effects on my sleep, appetite, etc.
After months of experimentation with medications, I decided to hit pause on the anti-anxiety/anti-depression route, and try some other things. I thought that, after a lifetime of grappling with anxiety, including several years of therapy, that I had plenty of tools in my toolbox. I could just deploy these tools, and make myself better.
There were multiple problems with this thinking. For one thing, as happens when you’re inside your own head instead of observing someone else’s oh-so-obvious behavior, you lose your perspective. I had slipped into a state of anxiety that was so intense that it would normally be only sustainable as short-term, acute attacks, but it had lasted for so long it became my baseline. I didn’t realize how unwell I really was. Also, those ‘tools” that I learned weren’t sharp anymore, in part, and also the state of knowledge of psychology had made so many advances since I initially learned them I didn’t fully realize how much better some of the newer information was.
Finally, my framework was too narrow. I would come to learn that this wasn’t just an anxiety disorder. It included depression, burnout, and unhealthy patterns of thinking that I had developed over a lifetime, and which had come and crashing down on me now. Issues that I managed to live with my whole life, to compensate for in some way, were simply not going to be ignored now.
This burnout wasn’t the result of months, or even over just the year 2019. It had been slowly worsening for years. Probably four or five years. And it was, essentially, a reckoning. Old defenses were breaking down. Coping skills that let me deal with my demons were wearing thin. I hadn’t conquered them at all. Now they were going to have their way with me. This was and is – my midlife “crisis”.
Only it isn’t a crisis. It wasn’t sudden, it wasn’t a phase that was going to go away on its own, and it wasn’t just the result of age. I was getting crushed. I was in such a near-constant state of what felt like intolerable tension that I didn’t know how to go on, except that I just continued to exist from minute to minute.
For one reason or another — and I really don’t know what that reason is — I have never really suffered from suicidal ideation. I had just never considered self-inflicted death as within the realm of options that I could take. So, in some ways, that was never danger for me. But I had been thinking about it recently. Not in a serious way; this wasn’t a plan. It was almost a fantasy.
So it wasn’t something I was actually going to do. It was a realization, and understanding, of how people who do commit suicide feel, and what drives them to it. The stuck-ness, fatigue, the feeling that you just want it to stop. Maybe the only reason I didn’t kill myself, ironically, was my anxiety, and propensity to procrastinate. I did reach a point where I thought the stress was going to kill me. And I pushed through and kept moving forward beyond that. But finally, I got to a point past that, where I was afraid, no rather I realized, that the intense, relentless feeling of stress wasn’t going to kill me, at least not anytime soon. And that thought was worse.