I started weaning off Paxil about four months ago. Started at 45 mgs, now down to about 25-28 mgs. a day. Taking the slow road here. I don't listen to the Grateful Dead much, but I agree: "what a long strange trip it's been."

So here's the history. This posting will be PART ONE of the  history of the drug-taking and will be followed by PART TWO and then followed by the history of a life-making experience. They are truly entertwined, as all things are, but not knowing until recently the life-making part of it...best to start with the drug taking.

PART ONE: DRUG TAKING HISTORY

When I was 19, I had just moved to Oregon. By myself, alone, in a strange town. My mom had died a year earlier and my dad was peripherally involved in my life after resurfacing after a long unexplained absence. And I had just left a very damaging relationship, in another state.

I became roommates with a girl who was entirely unlike me and she had an active engaged father. I started college and felt utterly alone, different, ugly and ashamed. I also weighed 300 pounds.

At this time I couldn't eat, woke up super early in the morning, lost 20 pounds, felt panicked all the time. A kind middle aged woman, probably my age now, told me she thought I was depressed.

So I went to the student health center, saw a counselor and then saw a prescriber. She took my family history, which is a history full of terms like depression, suicidality and bi-polar and shock treatment and even "nervous exhaustion", a quaint term used in the 50s.  There were at least two hospitalizations in my family history. There is also a history of traumatic early death, alcoholism, abandonment, abuse, binge eating, cancer and pervasive cancer phobia.

That said, there is also a grand history of singing, laughing, wry humor, leadership, educating, community service, strong women, resilience, intelligence, resourcefulness and super intuitiveness. And generosity.

So, I accepted the prescription of an MAOI and it helped. It really did. And it was probably good that it did, because by this time I was closing my eyes while driving the car in the middle of the night, and hoping it would go off the road. I accepted and embraced the idea that I had had a "reactive depression". What I know now is tha it might be possible that if I had friends, support, a history of safety and stability, internal resources, I might have pulled through without meds. But I am glad they were there.

I was on the drugs for only a few weeks and managed to come off of them easily. I was not on drugs again until I was about 24.

When I was 24 I started feeling that I couldn't cope. My excellent therapist had just left town to become a Buddhist monk. I was sad, but I was  eating and sleeping and not waking up at funny times of the day.  However, I had just lost over a hundred pounds and was working, as I had since I was 18, in a field involving traumatic social work. I think that, in hindsight, if I had listened to my naturopath/MD, who really DID NOT want to put me on meds, but finally did, I would not have gotten on the meds. But I felt I could not cope. Everything overwhelmed me. Everything.

I felt acutely self-conscious at all times. I felt everyone hated me. I heard myself talk and thought that everyone listening thought I was stupid and awful. I felt ashamed after I left groups of people and I found groups of people to be overwhelming. Ironically, I also was performing in a rock band at the time and found that experience to be frightening but also liberating in a big way. I was working, I was singing, I was living a life and yet my days were beginning to be filled with shame and fear and what I called anxiety....

Stay tuned for the first days of Zoloft.