Creeping Back In

           I started taking an antidepressant a year ago after my mom passed away. It was not the first time in my life to ever take one. Antidepressants and I go way back. 15 years back. This particular time, they were the most helpful they had ever been. I had just lost my mother, and they kept me from drowning. I also deal with anxiety a lot, outside of these circumstances. This antidepressant helped tremendously with it.
         
          However, in the year since I began taking it, I have gained some weight. Not a few vanity pounds, but all of the weight I had lost I have gained, and I have not changed my diet at all. This is incredibly frustrating, and an anxiety source in itself. Aside from the weight gain, I finally feel like I am ready to try life without medication. Some time has come between myself and my grief. I still grieve, but not in that freshly wounded sort of way. It's manageable, even though it's the hardest awful thing in my life.

       But it's creeping back in. The anxiety, that is. I feel like I am holding my breath waiting for the wave to take me under while hoping and praying it will never come.

          I notice it when I am driving across the Pearl River Bridge. It's a narrow bridge and the guard rails are just outside of the lanes. There is no shoulder or room for error. If you veer out of your lane, you're donesies. The morbid thought of accidentally hitting the rails and going over engulfs me and I sometimes avoid the bridge and go around to get where I need to be. I know that it's not normal to think like that or being worried or even disrupt my route to avoid that anxiety. I also know that I didn't have this anxiety while taking medicine.

          I want to fight this on my own. I have overcome so much in the past year and I think I have learned healthy coping skills. I also feel myself coming back into myself, if you know what I mean. I don't feel that sort of numb and could care less about anything and have no personal interests thing. I can watch movies again. Read novels. Write things from my heart. These are things I have been so desperately trying to get back to.

          It feels good and this is me trying to get back to myself. Anxiety be damned.