Simple Pleasures
Tuesday, December 19th, 2000 (49th day off Paxil).
Scott said:
“I was driving into work through the most beautiful countryside this morning and remembering something someone said about how the colours are so much more vibrant when you are off the Paxil, and I was thinking about the fact that nothing has really touched me since I went on the Paxil, and that I don’t feel like I’ve really experienced things deeply — colours or smells or joy or excitement.”
This is something I can relate to. It’s something I’ve noticed even more since I began weaning myself off the Paxil, which completely messed with my normal capacity to appreciate the world around me. Over the years I’ve developed an appreciation and a connection to simple things, uncomplicated things. Things which are diminished by words: sunshine, gut-driven laughter, a compassionate touch, a genuine smile, a cool breeze that can lift you out of the weight of your days, poetry. All that good stuff.
I can remember the last time I had a moment like this. It was somewhere between the hell of my cold turkey withdrawal and the beginning of my weaning off the Paxil. I was on shaky ground, but I remember taking a walk behind our house in the woods with my father’s dog. I was walking past a crab apple tree in our backyard just at the edge of the woods when I heard a thump. It didn’t make me jump ten feet in the air like it would later on in the withdrawal.
I turned slowly and looked around, trying to figure out what had made the sound. I was standing there looking at this crab apple tree, a crab apple tree that was weighed down with these huge red and yellow apples. Then I knew it: One of those big apples had fallen out of the tree and thumped against the ground. That was the sound. And just as I was thinking that, another apple fell free, and I smiled.
It was one of those moments that wouldn’t have happened had I been three footsteps further down the path when the first apple fell. The whole thing probably took less than a minute to be over and done with, but I can still remember the joy of being able to appreciate that moment, the calm and the quiet of it all. Reading this you may not have any idea what I’m talking about it. But it was a moment of deep of appreciation, of being glad to be alive.
That sort of appreciation requires a certain kind of willingness, a certain kind of calm that allows a moment like that to happen in the first place. And since I’ve been living in Paxil Hell, I haven’t lived a single second like that. Believe me, I have wanted to die.
But there is a happy ending to this (I think). But I’ll tell you about that in a day or two. I’m not ready yet.