So.. you’re ALIVE. CONGRATULATIONS. MUCH JOY. What now?
This will be the last post in the Snowboarding & Suicide Series and I am so happy and appreciate anyone who even took a second to glance at it.
All I had to do was make it to the first week of December. I finally had my psychiatry appointment almost an entire month after I tried to kill myself. My boyfriend came for support and I was scared as HELL to bring it up to my doctor. Even in the past when I had felt suicidal I had maybe expressed the wish after the ideations had passed because I was always scared of being committed to a psych ward. The appointment went fine and we created a plan.
I agreed to start an antidepressant “Escitalopram” – also known as Lexapro. While I already knew that the majority of antidepressants take 6-8 weeks to fully kick in, it seemed like a fucked up amount of time for someone who is severely at risk for just …well, you know. But, for the first time in a while I felt an extremely pale shade of what I can only describe as hopefulness. & This is where it started.
Christmas came & went. I enjoyed it for sure, but I did not feel the typical Christmas euphoria that often accompanied the season, and I am like Buddy the fricken Elf at Christmas time. But I only saw a colorblind version of how I usually felt. After two weeks, I went back to see my psychiatrist to discuss how I was reacting to the medication. Nothing notable had changed and I begged to go up in dosage, but I couldn’t at that time and had to wait a bit longer.
The only bad side effect of the antidepressant that I experienced about 2 and a half weeks in were some pretty gnarly night sweats. They are sort of subsiding after being awful for a while, but we are still less than two months in.
Different Types of Antidepressants & Their Common Side Effects:
↓ SSRI’s tend to be most popular.
This is when snowboarding finally becomes relevant to this story. For the past three years, my boyfriend & I have gone snowboarding around my birthday time and this year, we did the same as last & went up for a few nights with our pup. I have been snowboarding since I was 9, and we maintained our new little tradition this year. This was the first time that life had a full blown COLOR.
I am not sure how to really describe what happened on this trip that won’t sound like a load of crap but for the first time in..I can’t say how long.. I felt HAPPY, ALIVE, FREE without trying. Any time before this, if I wondered whether or not the antidepressants were kicking in, I had to consider the situation and DECIDE whether I was happy or not. On the mountain that day, it was just the most surreal experience.
FOR ONCE my brain turned ofF
FOR ONCE I just was in the zone; in the moment
FOR ONCE I was happy without any substances involved
FOR ONCE I felt like I was excited to be alive for the first time in so long I don’t even have an estimate.
I knew that I had found my “thing” that thing that just makes you feel high when you really aren’t. This isn’t easy for me to find.
Somehow an activity I had engaged in for years became a completely different factor in my life, & made my enjoy and appreciate life genuinely.
That is what will be explored in the next series.
So, these days of snowboarding: 1/8/19 & 1/9/19 gave me hope for the future, and was the catalyst for starting a blog and trying to be real about my own issues with mental health to try to help others.
Now, a segue into the next series: “Snowboarding & Self-Care”