Quitting antidepressants

All the things that have made me cry since going off Lexapro.

Here is a short list of things that have made me cry since tapering off antidepressants:

• Trying to explain to my mom, who has never seen The Lion King, how Rafiki the mandrill holds up Simba the lion cub right after he’s born to show him to all the other animals of the jungle.

• Google image searching Rafiki holding up Simba right now to make sure I was picturing this correctly.

• Missing my mom since she’s gone back to Ohio.

• Describing to a friend how helpful New Yorkers are about helping me carry the baby’s stroller up and down subway stairs, and how diverse the range of people who help me are, and how it makes me appreciate what a special place this city is.

• Remembering conversations I had at my college reunion in May with people I don’t keep in touch with but still really care about.

• Thinking about thinking about the plot of Inside Out — I wasn’t actually thinking about what happens in the movie, I was thinking about how the movie made me cry, and I cried.

Reader, I have returned to my true form. Once again I am a sap.

I’m not used to crying like this because I was on antidepressants for about 10 years. I started taking them when I was living in New York in my early 30s, feeling alone and unmoored, like George Clooney drifting away into space in Gravity. Clooney faces his fate with brave-jawed resignation but I faced mine with despair and self-loathing, which was less cinematic.

Medication really helped, with minimal side effects, apart from stopping up my tear ducts. With the inner voice telling me horrible things about myself and my place in the world muted (or at least on very low volume), I could focus on making changes. I moved out of an apartment I’d found on Craigslist, which I shared with two roommates who were already friends with each other when I moved in. They weren’t mean; it was just as if I wasn’t there.

I found a new apartment in a brownstone on a leafy block, a studio with an alcove and a bay window and a bathroom I shared with an artist from Estonia who filled it with plants and left a little welcome bundle of homemade gingerbread cookies in a plastic bag hanging from my doorknob. I went jogging with her, made new friends at at a new job, felt my career taking shape. Relief: I existed after all.

Finding the right medication was a huge help, and I’d take Lexapro again in a heartbeat. But it was hard, once I’d been feeling better for a long time, to figure out how and when to try going off.

I attempted it once without proper supervision, mostly because I was abroad for a few months and hadn’t figured out a plan for getting the medication overseas. (Definitely do not do this.) At the time I was so single-mindedly focused on work that I devoted very little brain space to things like scheduling doctor’s appointments or planning ahead or caring for my own physical and mental health. I’d wake up every morning with a weight on my chest.

Back in the states, I went right back on medication. I got a dog, drank less, took an improv class, ate pie with friends straight from the box in the gold glow of the Lightning Field. But after about a year, the pandemic hit: Not an ideal time to start experimenting with what else your brain can handle.

Soon I was also doing IVF, which meant I needed all the mental health help I could get. And when, at long last, I got pregnant, my doctors didn’t think it wise to go off medication during such a vulnerable time. The same logic applied to my first year post-partum, a period when so many women struggle with depression and anxiety.

So it was only this spring that the timing to taper off medication seemed right — this time with a clear plan to lower the dose little by little and under the watch of my medical team. I had withdrawal symptoms for a few weeks, but I knew what to watch for, and they lifted. And here I am on the other side: A lot like myself on Lexapro, but somehow even more of a softie.

I may go back on antidepressants one day, whether it’s because my mental health has dipped or because life has gotten hard again, which I’m sure it will. (Perhaps we as a society should give up on the language around quarter-life and mid-life crises, which implies we’re enjoying long periods of stability in between, and talk instead about life as one big series of crises and losses, hurts and upheavals, though with love and lightning fields and strangers helping you up the subway stairs mixed in, too.)

For now what I feel is gratitude to the medication that helped me through the last decade of my life. The truth is that I was never George Clooney, floating out into the dark without a tether. But it was antidepressants that let me see what I could reach out and grasp.