Anti Depressants Are God

 A few years ago, I tried my hand at freelance subtitling. I was fresh off a year of subtitling experience and had spent most of that time as the best final QA in my office. Freelance subtitling should have been a breeze. 

Photo by Fleur on Unsplash

A few years ago, I switched jobs and it went particularly badly. I was too depressed to function at the new place and ended up fired. That, obviously, kicked off another deluge of depression as I spent almost a year desperately looking for jobs that would pay me at least the bare minimum. I was so grateful to find one (1) place that would pay me a living wage that I stayed there for the next three years. Just. Absolutely. Terrified of unemployment.

Every year for the last 5 years, I've tried to write multiple exams simultaneously. These exams would often co-occur with intense phases at work, with house shifting, with breakups, with illness. And as I struggled with all of these things on my plate at the same time, I'd inevitably have to start tossing them, one by one, until sanity returned. 

At the beginning of this month, I carried out 1 job switch, 1 house shift, 2 (incredibly stressful and difficult) exams, and 1 intense orientation course on freelance subtitling all at once. 

Was it perfect? No. But then again, as my therapist asked me today, 'What is perfect?' 

I had to deprioritize some things and piss off some people. I had to live with the intense discomfort I felt at 'disappointing' them, at 'letting them down.' I had to shed the unnecessary guilt brought on by my inveterate tendency towards people-pleasing. They didn't have to live my life. They didn't have to handle the specific difficulties I did. Their difficulties were different, and trying to make everyone happy at the same time was only going to end with me paralyzed and frozen. And then I'd have to, once again, start tossing things until sanity returned. 

So given all of that, I'd say things are currently as perfect as they could possibly get. 

And a lot of that is (once again) thanks to anti-depressants. 

I know, I know. Every year, once a year, I 'find' anti-depressants all over again, and start singing their praises. To be quite honest, I don't really know what goes wrong every time. Keeping to the routine task of taking meds every day has, most definitely, been one of the greatest challenges I've faced over the course of the past few months. 

But now, 5 months into this latest attempt, things seem... okay. I'm not struggling to remember to take the meds. I have systems in place to remind me. A lot of the things I picked up in therapy are finally starting to make themselves useful. 

So, *touch wood* perhaps this time will be the time that sticks. Perhaps this is finally the start of the end - the end of my struggle with bloody depression and executive depression, that bloody bastard. 😋

PS: I still owe my doctor a yelling for ignoring the ADHD aspect of things.