Better Living through Chemistry

All of the women on my mother's side of the family have some form of panic disorder, which explains why we all grew up twitching and speak in REALLY LOUD VOICES. This, along with the asthma, eczema, hiatal hernia and bad arches are the reasons why I choose not to procreate. I curse my genetic legacy. Why did I get the fat gene? WHY??? Oh wait, that was from my dad's side. God hates me.

I spent four years in cognitive-behavioral therapy and finally decided, after I got married and the panic began to negatively affect someone other than me, to go on medication. Now, the decision making process was far more tortuous than the actual medication taking itself. My main worry was that the pills would make me less ME, that I would somehow lose that one thing that separated me from all other singers, that thing that made my husband love me. I weighed the pros and cons and decided to give it a try, and found that I LOVE being medicated. Love it. Paxil is my rock star. Going on Paxil was the most blissful transition I've ever made. Except for the lessened sex drive and feeling as though I had spontaneously contracted narcolepsy, I had never felt so good in my life. I understand that the euphoria felt by panic sufferers when starting SSRI's explains why people take the naughty kind of drugs. It's sooooo good, it should be illegal.

Which makes me half happy and half cranky about apparently becoming resistant to my current very low dose of Paxil. I'm getting the nausea, the low level anxiety, the need to self-medicate with caffeine, the electric shooters (oh yeah, good times, baby)...all the things I got when going through unintentional withdrawals when my doc wrote too few refills and I ran out of my drug. Ugh. I'm getting reaaaaaaally whiny and unfunny. All humor, gone. I have no wit. I am witless. The witless wonder. Wit-free for two weeks running. I'm really wondering, though, if upping my dosage can lower my sex drive even further, but, nothing minus something is still nothing. One positive side effect of the resistance (sounds like the French Underground in WWII) is that I feel horny again. Of course, the fact that I found Harvey Keitel in The Piano stimulating could mean that I have discovered a whole new side effect of Paxil withdrawal....