So.

It’s been a little while, no?

And I see that, in my sabbatical, WordPress has gone and added some fancy new features to its editor. But I’m not here to mess with that, yet. And I’m also not here to kvetch about my time away. I’m just going to point out the current quandary, which is this:

Pills are a problem.

I want to disclaim, first of all, that I can’t officially speak as a member of a “community” or anything like that. I wouldn’t feel right doing so. I don’t have a diagnosis, I’m not in treatment. What I have is a touch of something like depression or anxiety or ennui or just a particular flavor of something like a mid-life crisis. But I don’t think I have capital-D Depression. That being said, I did go and see a doctor. And that doctor gave me pills.

And, I have mixed feelings about pills, because I’m a skeptic about a lot of things, and a cynic about even more things. On the one hand, here in America at least, I know we over-hype the focus on pills. There’s a pill for everything, and then there are pills for the side effects of the first pills, and then there are pills to level you out from the side effects of those pills. Something like 50% of the population is on some sort of medication all the time, which seems bonkers to me. We can’t possibly be that broken. So when the doctor reached for her prescription pad, I felt a certain resignation. I don’t want to be broken.

On the other hand, I also know that full-on, capital-D Depression is a real thing caused by real chemical imbalances and the way to correct chemical imbalances, in many cases, is simply to medicate. So: cynical about our society’s obsession with pills, and not happy to become part of that subset, but also willing to trust the doctor and attempt a chemical solution to what could be a chemical problem.

TL;DR, I started taking Lexapro, and have been on it for basically the length of my unintended hiatus, which is at — what — something like a month now? Maybe a little longer.

And here’s the headline. I feel better! Since I’ve been on the meds, I’ve had not a single “can barely force myself out of bed in the morning” morning,  zero “inexplicably breaking into tears when asked what’s wrong” moments, and a significant decrease in the sense of general existential dread (though I imagine I’ll never get rid of all of that because a) I’m still a self-doubting writer and b) just look at the world). Life, in short, looks brighter than it did, for whatever reason, a few months ago. In fact, things seem to have turned on a dime once I owned up and admitted that something was wrong, opened up about it a little bit, and sought out some treatment. I daresay that, today, and for the past week or two, I’ve felt darn near normal.

But here’s the thing: the medication is supposed to take time before it takes effect. Again, I’m hardly expert in such things, but I was told to expect as much as 4-6 weeks before I should expect to see results. But I was feeling quantifiably better the very next day after taking my first pill. Of course, I’m a good skeptic. The simple act of taking action may have been enough to create a placebo effect; moving towards a solution may itself have been the first part of a needed solution. But now I’m a month in, and wondering whether it’s the pills that have me feeling better, or just the fact that I got it off my chest and have managed to relax a little somehow. Or some combination of the two.

Or, who knows? Maybe my funk was just a passing funk that was never going to affect me for longer than a month or so in the first place.

The end result is, now I’m on medication and feeling mostly fine again, which has me thinking maybe I don’t need the medication anymore. Of course, going off the medication could screw up my biology regardless of any underlying issues I might be having. So I both desperately want to not be on medication any more at all because I think I may not actually need it, and desperately want to keep taking it lest I relapse.

This is the pill problem.

And it’s unfortunately a problem without a visible solution in the short term. Because as much as I want to not be on the meds, I’m not enough of an egomaniac to think that I’ll be the exception, and be just fine if I go off the stuff.

I’ll keep popping my little pill at 9 pm, even though I feel a little silly for doing so. Because I’m supposed to. And because I’m afraid of what might happen if I don’t.