Well, I’m rewriting large chunks of this a couple days after I drafted a meandering series of complaints about how I was feeling since I finally came out of the brain fog enough to realize just how bad it was on Monday (a week before this posted, when I wrote those unfortunate paragraphs) and am feeling mostly clear enough today that I am not as concerned with my ability to string together coherent thoughts. As it turns out, what I wrote about just a few days ago (as this post is being published, anyway) was actually the beginning twinges of withdrawal from my previous antidepressant. Apparently, it can take as long as a week to start and last multiple weeks (or even months) beyond that. Thankfully, since I spent a month reducing my dose before stopping it entirely, I think I’m on the mend and will be fully recovered by the end of the week this post goes up or maybe sometime during the weekend following that [unfortunately unlikely, given the increasingly slow recovery I’m experiencing]. It is difficult to imagine how I could be doing any worse than I was from pretty much Saturday night through Tuesday afternoon, but I’ve got no guarantee that things won’t suddenly get worse again or that things won’t get bad in an entirely new way. I’ve never suffered withdrawl like this before. Caffeine withdrawal, sure, but I’ve spent my entire life avoiding any other substances upon which I might become dependent given that I’ve been consciously treating my depression with caffeine for over a decade now, so this is all a first for me. Even the caffeine withdrawal was carefully managed after the first unfortunate day of accidentally going cold turkey.

If I could, I’d be spending this week working from home as I struggled with my symptoms so I could handle them privately and quietly, taking what interventions I need to get through my days and trying to make myself as comfortable as possible to mitigate how awful I feel pretty much constantly. I wouldn’t need to be standing constantly, I’d be able to clock out for a quick nap if I needed it, and I’d be able to work in a comfortable environment free of the harsh fluorescent lighting that’re pervasive in my workplace. Unfortunately, that’s still not an option and I’ve already spent as much time off as I can afford to at this point in the year if I’m actually going to do some of the trips I want to do over the course of the rest of the year. So, instead, I’ve been in the office and suffering as I spent two days trying to stay focused despite my mind struggling to string more than a pair of thoughts together at the beginning of the day and struggling to remember the point of a sentence by the time I was writing the last words of it by the end of the day.

Turns out that the exhaustion just accumulates and while I was able to leverage said exhaustion to make myself go to bed at a decent time the last few nights, I have to acknowledge that this isn’t normal tiredness but a result of pushing myself as hard as I ever have in order to maintain a barely passable degree of function. I mean, it also hasn’t helped that the one thought I managed to keep in my head for the first two days was that I needed to restart my morning workouts, an important use of my limited daily energy that was probably the reason I was essentially running on fumes by the time I got into the office. Still, from what I’ve read, getting regular exercise and trying to stick to my normal healthy habits will help me push through the withdrawal more quickly, so hopefully I’ll be getting some benefit from the rather high cost of doing the bare minimum of exercising and stretched required to actually call what I’m doing an exercise routine.

For now, I’m drinking a ton of water, carefully rationing out my day’s worth of ibuprofen, going to the bathroom a ton, and doing what I can to get additional small amounts of exercise while I’m in the office. Lots of little walks to help wake me up by getting me moving without demanding enough from me that it might make me more tired. I’m not certain how well I’m striking that balance, though, because even if my mind is more clear today, I still start to fall asleep the instant I sit down long enough to let my legs and back relax. Despite still being on my “constant exhaustion” level of caffeine intake from when I was taking a medication that made me so tired I’d start to doze off while standing up if I lost focus for more than a minute. I’d really like to reduce that soon and hopefully the upcoming (now passed) holiday weekend will provide me with all the time and opportunity to sleep that I need to get through this withdrawal-induced exhaustion [it didn’t]. I can’t stop that yet, though, since the caffeine is the only thing holding the migraines at bay. I don’t need as much as I did on Sunday, but the hollow ache in the base of my skull is enough to tell me that it’s waiting to come back if I ever let my caffeine levels get too low. Just a few more days (two and a half, as of fixing this up) and then I can get some rest.