The Passage of Time Changes
Sunday, September 3rd, 2000.
Background information: I began taking Paxil last year after some unfortunate but traumatic events led me into a depression. After getting over all these experiences, and in a position to move onto greener pastures, I followed my doctors orders and stopped taking Paxil cold turkey. That was a couple months ago.
When I tried getting off the Paxil cold turkey, I went crazy for six days, and then decided to go back on it. But since then I haven’t been the same. Besides the trauma of the withdrawal, which I was totally misinformed and uninformed about, I’ve been feeling more apathetic than I was before I was even on the Paxil. If I told my new doctor this, he’d probably want to up my dosage. Screw that.
But since my initial withdrawal, time has changed completely. Now this may be a side effect of my withdrawal experience (or my experiences of this past year), or maybe it’s just the fact that my life has changed since the withdrawal, that I’m not as active as I was before. Your guess is as good as mine, but I’m inclined to think it’s the Paxil.
I lose track of the date constantly. I don’t tell anyone this, because it’s often seen as a sign of mental illness. I’d say it’s a sign of a slight mental disturbance, and I freely admit to having been mentally disturbed by my withdrawal experience.
Almost every day I have to look at my computer to see what the date is. I’m not sure if I’m actually forgetting the date, but I’m certainly not taking very good track of it. This whole summer seems like a blur to me. My normal grasping of that time just isn’t there. I feel like I’ve lost several months of my life, and that’s the weirdest thing I’ve experienced since my withdrawal experience.
On Tuesday I’m going to attempt to wean myself off the Paxil. But as much as I know about withdrawal now and how to wean myself off Paxil, I am scared to death. The passage of time has changed, but it’s not just that time is passing differently; it’s that those days are gone. It’s the feeling that I may have been alive for those days, but I haven’t experienced them.
Until the flow of my feelings returns to normal (because right now I’m feeling more or less numb, apathetic, like it’s hard to really care about anything anymore) — until I’m completely off the Paxil, which probably won’t be for another couple months, I expect that this weird sensation of time isn’t going to go away. I expect it’s going to be at least a few months before my life is back to the way I want it to be, back to myself, which is positive, good-natured, genuinely enthusiastic and all kinds of good stuff.
And I hate that. I was doing fine until I followed my doctor’s medical advice and tried going off the Paxil cold turkey at a time when my life was finally going well. He said, “Don’t go off it until you’re feeling settled again.” I was living in a friendly city, working at something I enjoyed, living with people I liked in a big house — things were settled and I was feeling good.
That was then.
I wish my doctor had been more informed.
Postscript - February 5th, 2001: In this post I said, “The passage of time has changed, but it’s not just that time is passing differently; it’s that those days are gone. It’s the feeling that I may have been alive for those days, but I haven’t experienced them.” This distorted perception of time, along with the sense that my life was being stolen from me by this experience, didn’t get any better as my withdrawal continued. Only after I’d completely recovered from the withdrawal (although I’m not sure anyone ever completely recovers from an experience like this) did my perception of time more or less returned to normal.
P.S. (Sept. 2006): I believe the psychological term for what I describe in the post is depersonalization. It’s been about 6 years since my initial withdrawal experience. I survived it, but it pushed me over the edge of my ability to cope and I somehow found my way back. But the experience has left a mark on me. I can’t forget it. My life is much better now, but that sense of unreality is still here to some degree. I’ve never been able to completely shake it.