The surprising benefits of talking to strangers. - not travel related.
This next chapter of my ramblings isn’t about egg sarnies and being in the most mind-blowing country on the planet. Sorry to disappoint but this one is on a deeper level.
I write this sat in a laundrette, you have to take your shoes off at the front door. They provide you slippers to wear so your feet don’t get cold. I don’t wear the slippers and I’ve frequented to this spot in white socks very often, they leave as clean as they enter. Well there you have a drop of Japan-inspired upbeat content.
I’m writing this raw (raw-dogging as the TikTok trend would say, what a load of shite). When I say raw I mean I won’t re-read this, I won’t proof read it, I won’t amend it in any way. It’ll be the first train of my thoughts to arrive at the station and my finger tips will stamp that one-way ticket. I proof-read for a global beauty brand so I’m not an idiot, but I want this to be as personal as it gets so don’t turn your nose up at grammar or spelling or flow that isn’t perfect. I’m not perfect but this is as open and honest as you’ll find.
That was basically a long-winded PSA for anyone that doesn’t like to hear about feelings. The food chat will resume on the next one don’t worry.
For any of you that don’t know, which won’t be many as pretty much everyone that reads this knows me personally, I was previously a radiographer. I fired radiation at people with the hope that the risk of it giving them cancer was less than the benefit it would be to them diagnosing a broken bone or locating a weird object they had pushed up their anus. Happens a lot, a lot more in Sunderland then Singapore but can’t imagine that to be of a surprise to anyone. I’m not talking about the broken bones. My previous carer path took me through the pandemic working as a radiation shooter, it was rough as fuck, my living arrangements changed and I lived alone for a long time. Long story short, the shit show of those years took its tole on me and I ended up on Sertraline medication (anti-depressants). As well as a few years of therapy, different types such as talking therapy and cognitive behavioural therapy.
The reason I first picked up the phone and called my doctor was due to my struggles with doing my day-to-day working responsibilities. The pandemic had fizzled out, sort of, so the work was less intense; but I felt quite a constant struggle with being able to concentrate at work and made a few mistakes that I wouldn’t usually make. After a very brief conversation with my doctor, I would honestly say it was 8-9 minutes long, he diagnosed me with anxiety and depression. Now I understand the strains on the UK healthcare system, more so than most, but the speed in which the diagnosis was made and to prescribe me very intense medication without too many questions; it still doesn’t sit right with me. However, in the moment I was very desperate and wanted any help I could get. The depression side of the diagnosis came from the fact I had been experiencing very low moods for a long period of time, I’m not talking a mood because they forgot to your garlic dip with your pizza delivery. I’m talking low moods like sitting alone at home and for no reason bursting out in tears like someone had died for no reason. Low moods like having absolutely zero desire to do anything that would usually give you joy, walking into work and not wanting to say hello to anyone, not wanting to be around anyone. Feeling like your world had been dimmed with a dimmer switch and everything was like a black and white movie, playing in slow motion and its constantly raining. Like a really shit British winter bout of rain that goes on forever. You get my point, a deep prolonged hangover. Fucking shit.
I hope none of you have experienced sertraline and the first week of taking it, imagine waking up and every living minute of that day until you go to sleep again that evening, everything is in slow motion. You are basically a zombie, it used to take me 45 minutes to empty the dishwasher. For any of you that don’t know me…I live life in the slow lane, I’m laid back, I’m chilled, I walk slow. Imagine ME in slow motion, fucking hell my wife doesn’t deserve a medal, she deserves a trophy cabinet. I couldn’t think straight, I couldn’t communicate at all really. Fortunately my employer at the time treated me like a human-being, it’s a rarity, but they gave me time off and checked in with me. They cared about how I was doing and I made sure every single person in that radiology department who helped me knew exactly how special they were.
The reason I’m coming at you from a very personal space is because I’ve very recently stopped taking my daily dose of emotion-suppressing medication. I started to wean off them about 5 weeks ago, I’ve only just began to operate daily without feeling any of the coming off side effects. I decided to come off them for a number of reasons, I no longer work in the environment that was one of the catalysts that took me on the journey to pop them. There was a mountain of side effects that I wasn’t aware of at the time that I began to become more and more concerned about. No need to go into the details of them because they could be of zero concern to the next person, there’s no benefit to that conversation. I am now incredibly fortunate to be in a working environment that is far far away from what it was back then, it comes with worries and ups and downs but as a comparison to back then it’s uncomparable. That was one of the main reasons I decided to come off, there were others, but that was a big contributor.
Since weaning off them the two most significant side effects were irritability and ‘brain zaps’. Irritability is pretty obvious, I felt a base level of being irritated pretty much all the time, from someone walking in front of me in the street to their being no egg sarnies left in the shop. It all pissed me off 1 million times more than it ever would, I hate this the most because being married to someone these changes have an effect on your partner just as much as they have an effect on you. The trophy cabinet my wife deserved earlier you may as well turn that into a fucking skyscraper. She put up with it and understood it like the angel she is, supportive and understanding with a heart of solid cold. Encrusted with diamonds because diamonds are considered the most precious stone on earth.
The not so obvious side effect of brain zaps, imagine someone sticking a metal clamp on your toe with an electric current running through it and it zaps your whole body every few minutes. The part of your brain that is effected by this also controls your eyes, so what I learnt from research is that it’s actually triggered by eye movement. Which is great if all you do is stare at a wall but I don’t so I walked around with an electric rod stuck up my arse for a few weeks.
It’s all died down as of about 5 days ago, I probably get a brain zap every other day as oppose to every other minute and my irritability is gone. My wife made mention the other day that I seemed very jolly and happy, not that I never do but I think this was a way of saying ‘it’s nice to have my jolly husband back’. Imagine sitting in a laundrette surrounds by 5 strangers and I’m typing away on my laptop crying. So woke. I feel happier than I’ve felt in a long time, not that I haven’t had anything to feel happy about but I now don’t have a medication suppressing my emotions. The good ones and the bad ones. The highs and the lows.
The medication had a purpose during a time of my life when I needed it, I was able to go back to work without shaking like a shitting dog constantly and feeling like I was going to piss my pants with worry doing the smallest of tasks. I did actually piss my pants at work once due to intense anxiety, that’s not TMI, it’s actually an honest point that maybe allows people that brush of anxiety as nothing to show that it’s really fucking real. It can be crippling and debilitating.
My wash has just finished which has conveniently came as I’m tying these ramblings up. Maybe someone will read this who has went through similar and will think ‘oh that’s reassuring that others have gone through similar’. Maybe someone will read it and think ‘fucking hell mental health isn’t to be dismissed, it’s not a social media trend and its as real as the piss that went into his pants’.
As a wise man once said ‘if ya not eating, there’s summit wrang with ya’, that wise man was my late grandfather. I have no idea why I dropped that in at the end but I wise man also once said ‘be kind to others, because you haven’t got a fucking clue what other people are dealing with’. That wise man was me.
See you on the next one.