Before I really understood what was happening, I was really thinking of it in terms of the symptoms, honestly, mostly insomnia but also anhedonia, and got diagnosed with unipolar depression and put on Lexapro

(I’ve never been professionally diagnosed as bipolar, but at this point if a doctor did anything else I’d seek a second opinion)

That, ironically, gave me a mental disorder, I certainly had more baseline momentum but was completely disinhibited and my personality changed so that the narrative fencing constraining me in my head was still there, but I was way over in another pasture entirely running free getting in fights and grabbing asses in bars then sleeping like 13 hours straight, which, to the extent I still retained some of my “old self” in there to reflect on it, counted as a significantly distressing personal impairment

To an extent what “saved” me was the Lexapro didn’t make my executive functioning any better, so I didn’t bother to renew the prescription

Honestly it was Sady Doyle giving a similar account of treatment going haywire that got me putting 2 and 2 together, and then in view of that looking back on her airmail tumblr/Tiger Beatdown era where she was a real spitfire gave me ideas on how to wield it better

Just the memory of the experience, and knowing that some of the things about myself I took as constant and narrative were variable and chemical, changed me though, and I’ve carried that on. I used to be pretty submissive in courtship and sex but in Lexapro mode I was markedly dominant, and knowing I have that capacity inside somewhere, I’ve been trying to reconcile the two better