Scrappy
Feeling is everything
When you have a grandchild, you’ll understand, my friends with grandchildren used to tell me. You love your kids, but this is different. They were right. A small being holds my heart in a way I couldn’t have imagined until I started Prozac.
I bet that sentence didn’t end the way you expected.
If you found it off-putting, I’m sorry, but this post is this is for those of you who may be feeling like observers in life, rather than participants. For those of you who can’t feel happiness in the moment because you are focused on the sorrow that happiness fades. That’s how I felt.
Everyone’s brain chemistry and behavioral tendencies are, of course, unique, but please don’t accept hollowness or disconnect as your life going forward. It doesn’t have to be.
Sure, I wish feeling like my old positive self was my natural unmedicated state. But filling a prescription is a small price to pay for readmission to life. Even though things aren’t always perfect and I still get annoyed and upset and tired and impatient and bored, my baseline is optimism. When my North Carolina morning run finds me glancing up to see that what I thought was a large dog is, in fact, a deer, I genuinely feel that burst of wonder. When it comes to holding my grandson, I feel the sustained glow of love and awe down to my soul. Being honest, I would not have, before Prozac. No one would have known except me, which is okay, to a depressed person, but to one fighting depression, it feels intolerable.
The milestones and simple pleasures in my life that felt muffled, I fought to experience; I am thankful for the pain of that awareness, and all of life’s abundant miracles big and small so worth fighting for.