I write a line.
I drag the cursor over every word.
I delete.
It keeps going this way all morning, not because of a classic writer’s block but because the pathway into my creative sacral depths has gone quiet. Very, very quiet.
Last week I started onboarding Zoloft again and, if you were here for it, the last time I went on these meds I was crawling out of a dark depression. I was disheveled, bloodied, and quite fragile. So I can recall the onboarding process, but I didn’t have the margin then to attentively observe what happened in my inner territory as I did. This time, however, I’m not depressed. Just seasonally low with a quickening in my OCD patterns and an increase in hermiting. This time I’m softer and sharper, more capable of witnessing myself.
And with the first few doses something in me went very still. Part of me has gone to sleep.
I don’t begrudge her needing to rest. That part of me has always been hypervigilant and in my most formative years, she had forged a long relationship with Self, nature, and sacral oceans through the splintered doorway of suffering. She’d clawed through underworlds, gathered audaciously from wells of ancient medicine, hoisted new stories onto her shoulders, and climbed scraggly inner mountains to bring it all out into the light. She has kept me here and - as she should be - she’s tired.
I’ve spent the last week or so navigating all the initial side effects, forcing me to slow down, to steady up inch by inch. Nausea and headaches and small peaks of anxiety and tingly brain and stomach upset have all become loud bells clanging in my body. Every time one rings, I slow. I pause. I notice the part of me no longer reacting to threat or harm or disaster and I try to reach for her, but she’s far below the ground now.
A few days ago I went for a walk in the sunshine, the ground warming in the light and trees glistening against a rare blue sky. Winter is slowly peeling away and it’s really only been this week that we’ve started having multiple sunny days in a row. Walking through my neighborhood I passed a small stream on the side of the road and I thought about Liz Gilbert’s line, “I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on the water.” I stopped to watch the moving, glittery water and realized I couldn’t feel god. I could see how lovely the light was on the water, I could breathe that soft day down into my lungs, but I couldn’t feel it permeate any further. Proof that the part of me that had learned the secret language of Nature and the Divine has truly gone to sleep.
I remember this happened last time too, that the first week coming off of Zoloft I had a marked moment when I said, “Oh there I am.” And I know that this is why a lot of people suffer rather than treat. It’s disorienting to lose that vital doorway into Self. It’s lonely to feel a central, familiar, protective part of you go quiet. Sometimes the necessary response is to wake that Self up again. But maybe sometimes we learn a different way through and up and down and in to Self and, if we’re safe enough, we can let that overworked part of ourselves rest.
I’m juggling two and a half jobs while being the primary parent to my 2 youngest kids. I’m settling into a new town and trying to learn who I am here, far from the desert that cradled me for 31 years. I’m learning seasons again, finding more and more of my father in me as I go, standing in wooded realms to cut old cords and welcome new possibilities. I’m letting a slower pace settle my nervous system, repairing old wounds with my ex-husband, leaning in with my dragoning daughter, and experimenting with a garden that grows in soil so rich I could almost eat it. I am different now, transforming still in the chrysalis that started webbing around me when we moved 7 months ago. I think this time I might be capable of more.
I see now that the last time I went on an SSRI I needed to get my head above water and nothing else. I just needed to breathe again. That loss of connection to Self was scarier then and it left me feeling wobbly and directionless. I didn’t have the margin to draw new maps, to explore unknown ways into myself. I didn’t have energy or soft edges or a desire to try. When I watched the light on that stream, felt the hollow clang of nothingness in me, I realized that I’m not scared of the closed door or the sleeping part of myself. I’m not worried that I’ll never again be able to translate the language of my soul. I’m not afraid because I trust myself to find or create doorways where there seem to be none.
It’s likely going to take me a while to find new pathways into my creative Self, to learn how to write and breathe in that sacral salt air again. I’m sure I’ll stumble like I have this morning - typing and deleting. I don’t expect it to be easy or simple, but I am aware of this one thing: in a brand new way, I truly feel capable of learning how to access my deepest, most vital and thriving Self through unfamiliar, untested, unrecognizable pathways. I haven’t lost my connection to Nature or god. The part of me that knows how to interpret those Wild energies is simply resting now. She’s small like a seed, curled up tight and far far below the surface. “Baby,” I find myself saying to her while I struggle to write, “if any part of me has earned it, you have. Over and over again, in fact. It’s your turn and I can let you sleep.”
This birth-death-rebirth cycle keeps circling, doesn't it? Love you so much, so deeply inspired by how you demonstrate feeling a way home to yourself, over and over.
You put my(and I'm sure a lot of ours) feelings into words that didn't have the right words to explain them. To read the things you write, I find myself thinking, "Yes! THAT'S what that feeling is," to everything. So thank you for putting those vital things into words.