The last 25mg

Sometimes I feel something like hope.  It feels easy.

I've been doing a lot of reading about how we're able to heal ourselves.  We just have to give our bodies a chance.

I grew the world's most perfect people inside of me.  I was a safe place for a broken, beautiful boy.  I had a fever for hours that kept me from crawling across the floor to my phone.  I've put myself through a lot, but I've done amazing things, too.

I don't think about it a lot, but sometimes it's like I can picture all the hurt from all of my life, all balled up together and sticky like tar.  It's jammed under my ribcage, right next to my heart and there are days where I feel like I can't breathe.  I wake up in the morning and I'm humming with a negative current.  I'm tingling all over like I've been bitten by ants.  I think that if I could let go of that black mass of memories in my chest, I'd be able to heal.

I've talked about the fact that I take Zoloft.  I asked for it when I was pregnant with Louise, because I had postpartum anxiety after I gave birth to Scouty.  I started taking it the day after Louise was born.  It helped immensely, and about a year later, I didn't want to take it anymore.

It took me a long time to get up the courage to try, though.  I started at 100mg and I'm down to 25mg, now.  I'm weirdly ready to stop taking it altogether.  I just need to give my body a fighting chance.

I've slowly discovered over the years that the way I feel is very related to the way I eat.  If I eat gross things like sugar, (which I'm a fiend for), salt, white flour, lots of dairy and things like birthday cake and potato chips and the "bread" from Subway and pizza and cheese cubes... well, these spring birthdays are killing me.  When I eat all of those kinds of things, I feel irritable, anxious and exhausted.

When I eat mostly raw foods and none of that other crap, I feel awesome.

Raw food doesn't have to be like... all health food person-y.  It just means eating a lot of uncooked fruits and veggies.  You don't have to make a carob sweetened sprouted grain ball dessert, if you don't want to.  (But, please understand that I'm exactly the cheesy sort of person who wants to.  Kurt gets home from work and I say, "Here, I made cookies!"  And he says, "Are these not actually cookies but really a blended up mixture of dates and nuts that you soaked in water overnight and added to a pureed vegetable and formed into the shape of cookies?"  And I hang my head and say, "Yes.  Yes, they are.")

Anyway, I'm going to go on a short-ish juice fast, I think.  I might choose to eat raw fruits and veggies on the fast, depending on how grumpy I feel, in which case it would be more like a detox diet.  (I hate the phrase detox diet.  Only the douchiest douches in the world talk about "toxins" and "detoxifying.")  But, my plan is that this... ahem, diet or whatever you want to call it, will the be the thing I need to let go of the last 25mg of a medication I kind of desperately don't want to be taking, anymore.

I'm not trying to tell you that I've gone anti-meds, or that I'm ruling out the possibility that I might need to take them again at some point in my life, but I really feel it, in the heart of me, that I'm ready to be off of them, and just see what it feels like to be on my own, with this.

I can do it.  Wish me luck.


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