thank you big pharma

no thank you ocd

I had been going to therapy sporadically through spring and summer. I started because I didn’t sleep for almost a week and was having panic attacks every day while walking Potato in circles around my neighborhood. I figured I would place the contents of my brain into a nice clean box and hand it over to someone with a social work degree. Therapy. My therapist gave me pre-elementary lessons, that were very much needed as silly as it is to say- on mindfulness starting by taking a sip of water with presence. Taste the water, feel it in your mouth and down your throat and as it hits your stomach. How does it feel in your body? Who knows. I would sit there and roll my eyes.

I’ve gone to therapy on and off since I was a teenager. I’ve never found it to be terribly helpful. I have never really felt like “I have it together”, but my voice is calm and I learned to appear reserved and steady in order to survive in this world. Mental Health Social Media calls this “masking”. That being said, I can be a hard egg to crack, because you only get as much as you put in and I am living inside a well-constructed fortress that few shall enter. So, I tend to quit therapy when they fixate on the small details I share in the intakes about my eating disorders history, my depression bouts, and how I have a tendency to be hard on myself- who doesn’t? It never really goes anywhere. I quit this therapy, too………

Our last spring in Brooklyn, after we witnessed someone be shot on our way home from the train, my nervous system set on fire and everything that has ever happened to me came up and swallowed me whole. My memories of this time are walking around Herbert Von King park trying to breathe and never fully being able to catch the whole breath. It would get stuck in my lungs, my body’s way of sounding the alarm since my brain and body were existing on different planes. Mental Health Social Media might call this “panic”. I started reaching out to find a therapist because I couldn’t sleep and couldn’t breathe and felt like I was going to die most days. I met with one who asked me “How often do you feel like you are outside of yourself? Like you are watching your life happen?” and I said… “always? most of the time?” and she said she was so sorry for all that I was dealing with but that my situation was too intense for online therapy and that I should find an in-person intensive support system. I respected her having boundaries, but do you know how hard it is to ask for help? Especially how hard it is to ask for help for someone like me? When the meme below goes around, several people slide it into my dms.

My therapist’s borderline-patronizing prompts of “where do you feel that in my body” were usually met with- “I don’t know? My stomach? My chest?” I am in the tummy trouble club and my panic attacks always start with the sensation that I can’t catch my breath. Last year, I dealt with a six-month-long knee injury that happened for no reason other than, what I believe now, was to stop me from literally running into the ground rather than feel my feelings.

In hindsight I can see that much of 2025 was tough. I’ve always dealt with anxiety/OCD/depression, but perhaps without the aforementioned outlet it flared “out of nowhere” and knocked me out like I was railed in the stomach by a soccer ball kicked 60 mph. When this happens, it comes hard and fast and totally out of left field and my whole life becomes about surviving each moment and holding extremely tight on the idea of keeping it together. My whole day is coping skills. My coping skills are about staying away from the feelings. Keep going, outrun it, don’t let it touch you. I live above my body so that I can spiral in peace while my body keeps going and going and going and can’t feel any of the chaos up top. Mental Health Social Media calls this a “trauma response” and also “disregulated”.

Funny that I didn’t connect the fact that this is the first time in my adult life I’ve felt some peace and perhaps my body and mind thought I was ready to deal. In a chaotic system safety can be perceived as the enemy. We gravitate towards the hell we know. In the hell we know, there is predictability- some safety in only expecting to feel bad. In waiting for the other shoe to drop. When we start to feel okay it feels crazy, because there’s a lot of risk in feeling okay. It means that it’s possible and that it could go away and then perhaps we would totally fall apart and then what would happen? The world would literally end.

My brain started telling me that I was fundamentally bad and broken. That I had caused harm, that I was a failure, that I hadn’t done a good job. That I was bad. There are a lot of times when my mental health has gotten in the way of me showing up in a way that I am proud of and my brain just loved to replay those over and over and over again. My therapist calls this confirmation bias. My brain looking for any and all examples of where I could possibly have gone wrong, where I have missed something. Sometimes I have. We are human and we are messy and we don’t always do our best. Especially when we are young and dumb and selfish and reckless. We cause harm, harm is caused to us and we are supposed to forgive and learn and grow. But when you’re having a major mental health flare, no. You must remember and ruminate and also fabricate things that aren’t true so you can feel worse and worse and less connected with reality. You are bad, don’t forget, everyone hates you! A text message left without a response for a couple days could send me into an endless spiral trying to dig into the pits of my brain to see what I could have done wrong only to get a response. The weight of the world would be lifted from my chest for a small moment of okay, you didn’t ruin someone’s life they still tolerate you for today- but then there are all the times I missed a message that I will remember and feel an endless well of guilt about. There is no space in this brain for peace or acceptance of the inadequacies we all end up carrying.

In April, we went back to NYC for the first time since leaving. When we first planned to go, I felt like I really needed it, when I was deep into this flare of bad brain. I also missed my friends and had a very romantic idea in my mind of what this trip would be. I imagined sitting outside of a restaurant in Greenpoint drinking cocktails in the day time and being enthusiastically embraced by all the people and places I missed. A thing I’ve always noticed after having lived in NYC is that I have some amount of Stockholm syndrome- like it always felt so bad in my system to be there, but it was that bad I was used to, the chaos I was hooked on. Though, sometimes I do genuinely miss the unburdened nature in which I was 23 as a young transplant in NYC who had 0 responsibility and was in a big moment of “fuck it”. 10 years later, that way of being doesn’t exactly light me up, and I ended up being quite disappointed. The city is as expensive as ever, whatever resilience I had built over the years to manage the trash and the smell and the people and the trains that you can never count on had totally disappeared and I felt sad and more isolated than I had been sitting alone in my house in Maine feeling like a brand new baby deer.

We left early because we were bummed out and on the way back I was driving down 91 in Massachusetts and a raccoon ran across the highway. I didn’t know how to react and I couldn’t swerve on the highway and I had to just drive straight and hope it made it out okay. It didn’t, I hit it and was instantly horrified. Was I a sociopath because I didn’t swerve? Was it not a raccoon and actually a person??? I just murdered a living being with my car oh my fucking god. I freaked out and Jon told me I should pull over at the next stop. I got out and was shaking and walked inside and peed and he moved into the driver’s seat and the car looked fine and he talked me down off the ledge. I was not in fact a horrible human, these things happen, it would have been much worse to swerve and get into an accident and hurt all of us and whoever we hit. It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay. He was going to drive and I needed to eat a snack and breathe. An hour into this next stretch my lil Prius said “hybrid system failure” and then the engine made a crazy noise and the car shut off. We tried to turn it back on and it sounded like death. Thanks to my Dad, I have been a AAA member since I was 16. I sent him a blessing through the ether as I found my expired card and called them up. The tow truck driver, my lil angel, got there in half an hour and towed us back to Maine with Potato sitting in the driver’s seat. We’re a one car household and money has been tight so this was honestly a devastating turn of events. My car was dubbed totaled and so went the process of adapting. Everyone I told this story to said “FROM A RACCOON?!?!” which planted a seed that perhaps I had in fact not hit a raccoon, but murdered someone. So began my multi-week constant refreshing of the news reports on vehicular murder committed in Massachusetts on that day. Mental Health Social Media as well as my therapist call this OCD.

In high school, I first started dealing with panic attacks. I would have multiple a day for an entire year in which I remember very little from. I feel like I graduated by the skin of my teeth and failed all of my IB exams, although I had previously been a star student. My English teacher started calling me Spacy Lacy and I cried regularly during Calculus in between my daily visits to the nurse asking her to check my pulse to ensure that I had not, in fact, died. My sense of reality was completely fractured and I have come to identify this as a black out year. Sometimes I would get in my car to drive towards school and end up in a town in the opposite direction because I would be having a panic attack and fully on autopilot. It was extremely scary and I started to wonder what was happening during those episodes. What if I got in an accident? What if I hurt someone? Because of my bad brain???

Recently, I was visiting with a few of my cousins. I’ve been trying to show up better for the people in my life which means showing up in the familial sense. My family is very close and we were all very tight growing up, but I’ve lived all over and been caught up in my own life that I’ve become the distant relative and have been craving a return to closeness. To home. I got us all together to have a little night of catching up, touching in on what life is like for everyone these days. Two of them are parents now and it’s such an amazing thing to see them parenting in their own ways and doing it so impressively well. We each have our brands of brain troubles, and quickly slipped into talking about our individual experiences and swapping pharmaceutical anecdotes. I had been sitting in my brain stew mental flare for a few months at this point feeling totally insane and not talking about it at all and after a few rounds of listening to anecdotes I said “you know that thing that happens when you kind of leave your body and then when you come back you are convinced that you probably killed someone with your car and so you have to drive back to where you last were and check?”. Thank God for them and their resounding yes’ and the continuation of sharing anecdotes of our insanity in between giggling and realizing it probably all comes from Nana who probably got it from her’s and on and on. Thank you for these very special genetics and the dark humor that keeps me from feeling totally lost in this world.

One of my cousins particularly validated and related to my brand of OCD and told me she had been on Zoloft for years now and that it was the only thing that helped. I’ve dabbled with mental health medication over the years. It’s always the same pattern- I feel so low that I’m not sure I am still alive, I start medication, feel better, stop because I feel better. Medical providers are eager to prescribe, often presenting my pick of the litter…yet no one has helped me manage it. No one has followed up a few months down the road to see if I’m still on it, to see if I’m okay. I’ve learned you have to reach out to them, which I’m not going to do if I am healed and no longer need their services. Turns out, I am not healed, and do need their services because no matter how much Tulsi I drink, or self care I do, or breathing, or running, or sleeping, or chugging nervine tinctures like they are water, or running away to change my environment to feel better or to feel some little spark of being alive…my brain is my brain and it has been this way since as long as I’ve had memories and I do, it turns out, need more support than simply white knuckling my way through the day and hoping to make it morning through night. Suffering is not our identity.

In early June I started taking a low dose of Zoloft. Within two weeks, I stopped getting out of my car upon arrival home to check if I had hit anyone. I stopped wondering if I was a sociopath. My long distance bestie asked me how I was doing on it because I sounded so much lighter in my voice notes. I started thinking about other things. I stopped taking inventory of my entire day and cringing at every word that left my mouth. I have had hardly any insomnia. The “OCD thoughts” category in my cycle tracking book have been empty for months. I’ve stopped charting actually, in the cycle way and also in the way where I’ve written down everything I’ve eaten every day for at least ten years. I don’t anymore. I feel like I can breathe and stretch and take up space in my own life. That I can be angry and sad and present and messy. Most of all I feel free and I can’t believe the contrast of then to now.

It feels sticky to share all of this and to be so incredibly honest about the reality I live in. To be an herbalist that sings the praises of big pharma, but isn’t that what harm reduction is at the end of the day? Doing what we need to do to reduce the amount of harm we experience and cause? It feels trite to say that Zoloft saved my life, but it honestly has. I wish it were ayahuasca or the right diligent dosage of mushrooms or that running a few miles a few times a week was enough to grant me some levity, but I’ve truly tried everything and have never been able to take a full deep breath. There has always been so much noise and it really feels like magic to be able to give my brain enough quiet that I can start to sift through the mud and sit with the trauma and actually finally have the capacity to show up in ways that feel good and true. To ask for help and to receive it.

It’s probably time to get another therapist…