Memoir of a Teacher: Chapter 4, The Zoloft Diaries

My psychiatrist waits in Consultation Room 2.

To get there, you have to walk up the hallway from your room, past the medication booth, then past the reception desk and then through the consultation room door. Safety screens cover all the windows so that all us inmates of the Mother and Baby Unit don’t gnaw our way out. You can’t have the motherly insane escaping. We might start fucking nagging someone or something.

I had never been here before. But I had heard of Zoloft before. Heck, this aint my first depression rodeo, I know zoloft. It was 2014 and zoloft was commonly prescribed for breastfeeding mums. I wasn’t to be one of the first to take zoloft, and I sure as shit won’t be the last. Let’s hope I don’t need to be on it for the next ten years. Fuck it, I’m going to try colonic lavage to fix my mood. I’m desperate.

My psychiatrist is a busy man. At least I assume he must be because he’s never around. Not that I can understand a word he says when he is around because he’s so freaking quiet. I need ear zoloft just to deal with him. He is handsome enough, I wouldn’t have shagged him back in my wild days but he’s not bad to look at I guess. He has a shining bald head and glasses so round you could use them for geometry. My mathematical knowledge is pretty poor so let’s just pretend I’m referring to the right area.

“Mwahflamammubble,” he said to me the morning we met. He gestured to a deep seat, and I sat as I assumed that was what he had said by his gesture but honestly he spoke so softly that I haven’t a fucking clue what he said. There was a silence between us then. A kind of awkward silence as I became increasingly paranoid that the mumbles were actually a question I failed to answer.

And that day was the beginning, the bare beginnings of a story very little like the popular zoloft myths–a wonder drug here, a drug that triggers violence there. No. For me the story of zoloft lies not between these poles but entirely outside of them. It is in the land of the bland and banal really. It just kind of takes the edge off, doesn’t cause hideous nightmares but also doesn’t make my whole world shiny and new. Should have gotten myself some seroquel whilst I was in there. In fact from time to time, when the panic rides me so hard I’m ready to peel my own skin off, I still regret turning down seroquel. But hey, a little bit of heart stopping anxiety for no reason is good for the soul, right?

I’ll leave my “appropriation” there because the original gets a little too scientific about prozac and I just can’t put my arty mind through that so close to bed time… fuck it, let’s be honest, the twins have croup and my little girl has gastro so I’m freaking exhausted and want to go to bed now. Yes it’s only 9:15pm but I’m really fucking tired.

This chapter of my “memoir” was appropriated from The Prozac Diary by Lauren Slater.  Read the real thing here: http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/slater-prozac.html

To read the gripping first chapter of my “memoir” please go here: https://riedstrap.wordpress.com/2014/10/31/memoir-of-a-teacher-a-red-hot-tip-for-nanowrimo/

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Confessions of a Mad Mooer: how to get that Hollywood look when you wake up

Dear Hollywood,

Please see attached what people really look like first thing in the morning.

Take careful note of the inability to find the energy to close ones mouth as a result of being woken up at 3am for the last three nights in a row by the little Princess who will not go back to sleep until 5am followed by the twins waking up at 6am. Also the hair that took a whole night of tossing and turning to create not a mere few hours of brushing and glossing like the magazines would have us think. So in short, that “first thing in the morning look” takes all night to create not hours… That doesn’t seem like a valid argument to be making… My point is… I’m tired and I would like a nap? Waaaaaa.

No.

No!

Yes!!