I’ve been taking an SSRI medication for a few months now.

Recently, I was browsing through notes on my phone and came across one that gave me pause. For context, I’d been trying to keep a journal of how I was feeling so that when talking to my therapist I’d have something concrete to refer to about “how I’ve been”. This was one of the entries in that journal (editing out personal details but retaining all grammar and spelling issues).

9/16

• Woke up from stress dream
• [Wife] started publishing things i say publically to make fun of me and show me im a terrible person
• The whole room wanted to watch me squirm
• I did squirm
• I was crying i just wanted it to stop
• Woke up to a chase fraud call(?) ignored it from an unknown number
• Getting paranoid— chase fraud ux is so bad i literally can’t tell real from fake fraud calls. There are a bunch of reports on reddit about this and i cant tel if they are real or fake either
• Feeling of frustration; no one cares; have to look out for myself

In previous SSRI posts here, I’ve talked about how I’m worried I won’t know how to notice changes in myself and whether the SSRIs are working or not. Reading the above note really brought such sharp contrast to how I feel right now and how I must have felt then. I remember experiencing that and I remember writing that, but at the same time there’s a distance to this memory I wasn’t expecting. Even though I can remember how this felt, I have this gut-level confidence that I don’t feel the same way right now and I’m not concerned I’ll feel the same in the future. Not to say I never will, but it doesn’t feel emblematic of my current mood. When I wrote it, it very much felt like a hyperbolic-but-nonetheless-accurate representation of my fear and my tension.

A few bits specifically stick out to me:

• [Wife] […] show me im a terrible person

• Getting paranoid

• no one cares; have to look out for myself

It’s surreal to see that written out; to know that I wrote that. I guess I just want to take a step back and remember that the worst of my anxiety last year was not limited to the more mundane things I usually attribute to it like analysis paralysis. It grew into genuine, irrational fear in parts of my life.

I was throwing out food for fear of getting food poisoning. I was triple checking the front door locks before bed. I was turning on stove burners just to make sure I saw them turn off. I was constantly looking for control to reassure myself that things were as expected, and anything that I couldn’t control, I couldn’t handle.

I haven’t even begun to really process the fear about my marriage and my external perception (which I was so sure was a damning and accurate one). My Wife loves me. I have no idea why I turned to this dark certainty that she didn’t and wanted to hurt me.

Again, I don’t know whether I should attribute these changing feelings to SSRIs or changing circumstances or personal growth – I’ve never liked to be so definitive about things without good reason – but I wanted to take a moment today to acknowledge the change.

I do feel different right now.

And I think that’s good.