An overly-personal ramble that I would have put on Twitter but I am now putting on Substack

Let me know if you'd rather I not write posts like this.

This is a screenshot from the music video for the George Michael song “I Want Your Sex,” but I have changed the word he has written in lipstick on his lover’s body from “Explore” to “Ben”.

Hello cats and kittens,

I was planning on writing a real, quality actual piece today which I thought of last night but the day sort of got away from me so it will have to wait until tomorrow, but as I mentioned in my post on Saturday, I am going to make a concerted effort going forward to put more of the dumb rambling I normally do on Twitter, on Substack, so that is what this post is.

If you hate it and wish I would only send you my perfect, clearly-thought-out 4,000-word posts about important topics like microwave beeps, you should tell me, because it will actually inform a lot of my content plans for Calm Down going forward.

If you think I’m just generally a toothless hunchbacked idiot who should blow my brains out, you should feel welcome to tell me that too because, as I explain in the following paragraphs, I’m probably not going to listen to you. (At least for the time being.)

I hope you have a nice evening,

Ben

---

I have been on the same antidepressant since I was 19. It’s called Cymbalta. When I was 19, it was really a godsend and there were very clear positive effects. Like every psychotropic medication that one takes for years and years and years, the noticeable benefits of Cymbalta have diminished. Given this and the fact that it does have bad side effects, among them a drastically reduced sex drive, I tried to quit it a few years ago. But, boy, that was a mistake. Any SSRI or SSRA is hard to stop, but even after I got past that part, I was still just obviously worse. I got really sad and depressed and spent 6 months doing really self-destructive things like isolating and feeling sorry for myself and pushing friends away and breaking up with people I shouldn’t have broken up with. Eventually, I relented and went back on Cymbalta with a renewed appreciation for a drug that doesn’t make me the happiest person in the world but does keep the most self-loathing voices in my brain at bay.

Then time passed as it tends to do and eventually blah blah blah we came to 2022 which was something like a very bad year for me in all the ways one would measure a year.

In the false version of this narrative that I would tell in a TedTalk or sell to Disney, this would be the moment where I said I made an honest effort to fix things and came up with some plans and then executed them and then everything was great. But in the unvarnished truth version, what actually happened was an accident.

I went to see my GP in January and we talked about my insomnia, which because of some problems I had with Ambien as a teen, has been treated throughout my adulthood with off-label usages of other psychotropic drugs. Mainly, Seroquel, an antipsychotic that knocks you out. (In prison, they apparently are all you can get from the doctor and they call them Snoozies, I think.) Seroquel also has bad side effects. For one, though it does put you to sleep, it also is very hard to shake off, so you can find yourself either oversleeping for 20 hours or at least having to fight mightily to be a normal human for a few hours after you wake up. And the second side effect it is infamous for is weight gain. I have dealt with body issues my entire life and the fact that I became such an out-of-shape blob during the pandemic is something that I have not handled well.

So I’m in my GP’s office in January and we’re talking about this stuff and I said I wanted to go off Seroquel. He tried to put me on Trazodone, another drug that has off-label sleep benefits. I’ve been there and done that and have never found it useful. So I mention another drug that I learned through Wikipedia also is sometimes prescribed off-label to help with sleep: Gabapentin.

Gabapentin is a drug that is prescribed in lots of different situations. It is prescribed for nerve pain to both humans and animals and apparently also is prescribed as an anti-depressant to some people and a sleep aid to other people. (I don’t know if they prescribe it to animals for those reasons as well, but I like to think they do.)

The doctor tells me that he likes that drug and suggests we give a low dose a shot. And it does help with my sleep! It doesn’t put me down to sleep like a sedative would or the way Seroquel did, but it does help create the conditions in my brain where I can sleep.

This is all great, but then something happened—and this is the accident. It started to improve my mood. After a few weeks, I started to feel better and have more energy and stopped being as much of a recluse.

This probably shouldn’t be a total surprise since it is one of the other reasons people are prescribed it. But it was. I’m not on a “therapeutic dose.” I’m not even sure I would be prescribed a therapeutic dose while still on Cymbalta. But the point is, I don’t really give a shit. It’s working. I feel better. I am remembering what ambition feels like and I am being proactive about trying to improve my situation. I am thinking about possibly downloading dating apps again. I haven’t dated anyone in almost a year and I haven’t tried in about as long. I was too “oh no im an unemployed unlovable fat one-eyed idiot.” But I’m obviously not those things. I’m a self-employed, funny, charming, out-of-shape, one-eyed person of average intelligence. And that aint bad!

I have been in therapy for as long as I can remember. Because of my eye my parents had me seeing psychologists from preschool on. And I have spent the last twenty years juggling various medications. I know that this dumb drug that accidentally is making me less prone to depression will, like Cymbalta, stop being as effective. But all you can hope from these drugs—aside from muzzling the worst devils of your nature—is that they give you the space to make material changes and improvements to your life.

That’s how I got into SoulCycle in 2015. The ephemeral boost of getting back on Cymbalta got me to walk in the door and sign up for a class and then I was high on endorphins and wellness gobbledygook for 5 years. The pandemic and leaving my staff job really threw me for a curve and upended all of that.

What I need to do is gather my rosebuds while I may and start cycling again and engaging the world and taking people up on the opportunities I declined over the last year and finding new literary agents and finally writing the stupid book I was going to write two years ago and blah blah blah blah blah/all of the things that happy people do in films and commercials and pop songs because doing those things creates healthy routines and good circumstances that reinforce healthy behavior and lead to other good outcomes.

And then eventually this dumb drug that wasn’t even supposed to do this will stop working as well and I’ll either slither back into darkness or have done enough to be one of those trapeze artists who doesn’t fall into the net but catches the next bar and gets to swing for the next one.

Anyway, as I mentioned up top this is not a thought-out post with a thesis and all of that. In fact, this is just me rambling aimlessly for mostly myself. But if I had to force some meaning onto this thousand-word public diary entry, I guess it would probably be something along the lines of: people are not unique. One of the worst things you can do in life is think your pains and passions, your struggles and triumphs, your worst moments and your best moments are one of a kind.

So, my own shit? There is probably some part that you relate to—or not! Your journey! But if there is, do with that recognition what you will!

---

If I were writing a normal post right now I would spend at least 2 minutes trying to think of a better kicker, but in this specific case it would belie the entire stream-of-consciousness point of the post for me to stop typing for more than 10 seconds, so that’s all you get.