After three months of miserable side-effects, unending exhaustion, and sleepiness that dominated my every waking moment, I’ve finally hit the end of my “wait it out” period for the antidepressant my doctor recommended. I had some small improvement from it at the highest dose I took, but I was also so tired on it that I’d be falling asleep every afternoon even when I was sleeping a minimum of seven and a half hours. Which, you know, wasn’t exactly a viable outcome for me. It took me a couple weeks to even recognize that the medication was having a positive effect on me because I was just too tired to feel anything but nigh-overwhelming exhaustion. It was a bit of a lateral move rather than an improvement or worsening of my general well-being, but I can work through feeling incredibly depressed and I cannot work through exhaustion that complete, as I learned throughout the last three months. It never quite got bad enough to actually make me mess up at work, but I also took a lot of vacation time during the peak of the exhaustion and I had plans for that time later this year. So it wasn’t great but I got through it, told my doctor it wasn’t working for me at any dose, and now I’m officially on the “slowly wean off the antipressant” path. As of this blog post going up, I’m one week away from my last dose of it and what will hopefully be the end of my constant sleepiness.

You know, it’s funny to think back to January and the incredibly brief period where I’d fully recovered from the medication that made me miserable almost all of last year and when I started down the path toward the three months of sleepiness I’m finally about to leave behind. I actually went out and did things! I talked to people! I tried to check in with people I hadn’t had the time or energy to keep up with! I started to actually try new things and stretch myself socially! It was really nice and it has sucked for these last three months that I’ve been too tired to do anything other than work and sit around my apartment. I’ve barely had the energy to exercise, I’ve almost never woken up in time to get to work early (so I could leave work early and do things in my weekday evenings), I have fallen behind in my blog writing because I can barely keep my attention focused on anything but video games for longer than five minutes (and even that is iffy at the best of times since I usually wind up needing a podcast to keep my mind occupied during the non-story parts of video games), and I’ve felt myself slowly turning from a human being into a sludge-person as my world slowly jelled into a homogeneous goop of blurred time and inattentive activity. It has sucked and only now, as I’m starting to pull out of it, can I appreciate how much I’d ossified as my exhaustion drove me to do less and less until work and Final Fantasy 14 were all I had in my life.

Which isn’t going to change much now that I’m breaking out of this rut since Final Fantasy 14 and the online community I joined via that game are a great thing in my life these days, but I’m also hoping to actually add things to that list and maybe feel better while I’m doing that stuff. I mean, I’d definitely be able to enjoy video games more if I wasn’t so tired I’m dozing off half the time I’m playing them. And I’d be able to get more done during my work days if I’m not constantly in pain like I was last year or barely keeping my head above the overbearing exhaustion that has been swamping me this year. And who knows, maybe the new medication I’ll be trying will even have a positive effect! It was the one I most wanted to try when I first saw my doctor about medicating my depression and anxiety, but I did go to my doctor for advise and she advised trying the other one first so I agreed to try it. I don’t regret trying something like that since it worked great for all of my relatives who have medicated their depression, but I’m definitely happy to be moving on to something else now. Honestly, it was bad enough for a while there that I thought about giving up on treating my depression and anxiety this way again (the last time I tried anything like this was in high school and it was so bad I didn’t even consider medicating myself again for over a decade).

I feel like a broken record as I continue to repeat that I’m ready to not feel miserable all the time, but it has been such a hallmark year and a half for misery that it’s all I can really think about when it comes to how I’m doing. I layered the most physically painful year of my life on top of a year and a half project that has demanded more from me than any other work I’ve ever done and did all of that at the end of a decade spent building up bad enough burnout that I’m constantly saying that it’s the worst it has ever felt for me. Which, you know, if I never actually got to recover from my burnout, makes sense. It’s not like it’s going to get better on it’s own. I can’t hard work my way out of this particular problem and me not quite grasping that for most of a decade didn’t exactly help me. So, yeah. I’m ready to not feel miserable and I really hope this it works out for me this time. I could really use some time to just not feel awful about everything. Which is probably going to take a while, come to think of it, given how shitty life in the US is these days and how shitty it is going to continue to become as the impact of Trump’s tariffs begins to be reflected in the every-day economy rather than just in the nebulous and largely inflated value of the stock market. Still, any reduction in the number of sources of my own personal misery will be deeply appreciated and might even give me the strength I need to power my way through the rest of them (since there’s no way I’m going to fix my burnout any time soon). Time will tell, but I’m hoping it won’t take another three months to get through this next phase of trying to improve my lot in life enough that I can tell if I should carry on or try something else.