Monday, October 17, 2022

My Paxil Withdrawl, Epilogue

Someone who read one of my reviews on my old It's Called Entertainment blog tracked me down on Twitter, linking to the review I had done, which then led me down a rabbit hole of scrolling through all my old blog posts again. And going over the personal blog (this one), I felt like it was left unfinished.The twists and turns my life took immediately after my last blog post so drastically changed my entire life, to the extent that it felt like watching the first act of a play that then just stopped. Trying to completely chronicle the other two acts could fill an entire book or two, so instead this is my PS, like that little scene at the end of a movie that tells you what all the characters went on to do after the events of the movie ended.

 That fifth-to-last paragraph on Part 3? That was the start of something truly terrible. I spiraled into what was possibly the second-worst depression spell of my entire life. By the time my post-Paxil follow-up came around in January, I was completely unable to function at anything. So my doctor tried putting me on Desipramine.

It took me six weeks to level out and become a functional human being again. And in that sixth week, my mother-in-law fell and broke her hip, and getting it looked at lead us to discover she had pancreatic cancer.

For the next 14 months, my wife and I took care of her at home until she passed away. So of course I was depressed the entire time, who wouldn't be? So we assumed it was situational. It wasn't until a year later at another evaluation when I was told that my medication wasn't working and I should look into getting it changed immediately. Apparently saying "Well yeah, I have a suicide plan in place, but no, I don't intend to actually use it" isn't as typical as I had assumed it was.

Two very big things happened within the next month: First, my meds were changed and I was put on Wellbutrin. And second, my egg cracked. Which means I realized that I'm transgender and there was no way I could continue trying to live as man, not even as a very feminine one like I had been doing for the previous 22 years. You can read all about in my upcoming book, Wellbutrin Turned Me Trans. (I'm only half-kidding about that.)

 I started transitioning and have now been living as Christa Feroniya for four years. I was intensely happy for most of that time, and I'm still happier in general even though my mental health has been more of a struggle for the past couple months.

But that's also why I changed the name of the blog. The original title is a quote from the movie 1989 Parents, so now it needed to be tweaked. But I don't really blog anymore anyway. Thank you to all of you who read it.