It’s been over a year since I last blogged, when I had the intention of documenting my experiences with ECT. My grand plan was to write after every treatment: to track my moods and document small improvements until I could finally look back and see the enormous impact it had on my life.
The good news is that, even without written artifacts, I can do the latter. I truly feel saved by ECT, in a way that’s hard to articulate (which is maybe why I haven’t tried). It’s a subtle kind of saving- I’m not always happy, and my happiness might not be as obvious to the outside observer (though I might be wrong in that: Maddie will tell you it’s like night and day). Still- it’s less about the intensity of the joy that I feel and more about how genuine it is.
I guess the best way I can describe it is that for the first time, maybe in my whole life, I feel really, really stable. Like I can experience the full range of human emotions without letting each individual one of them consume me. ECT has quieted my depression, while my medications continue to stabilize my moods. I can now recognize that I have always experienced emotions in the extreme, even prior to my diagnosis, though they were at more manageable levels back then.
I think it’s mostly self-evident how my extreme moods of anxiety and depression were problematic. But now that I’m stable, I can also recognize the tenuous nature of the type of happiness I used to feel when I was “well.”
For one thing, it was truly exhausting. When things were good, I had more happiness than I knew what to do with, and I juggled it around like a hot potato. I was constantly seeking outlets for it, but never quite finding a place to put it. I most often threw it towards over-socializing, which often included over-drinking. I often threw it towards my work, which made for some really productive and creative accomplishments. Still, my happiness also made it really hard to focus most of the time. I would get so excited about starting something, but as soon as it led to another exciting thought I could hardly wait to start that instead.
I am definitely not trying to complain about or disparage the happiness I was so fortunate to experience for most of my life. I see the absurd privilege in doing that. But what I’m trying to do is explain the difference between the type of happiness that I felt pre-psychosis and the kind of happiness I feel post-ECT.
Since ECT, good things have felt good, and bad things have felt surmountable. I laugh at jokes, I sing along with music, I happy-cry at my favorite movies, and I can savor rainy days. I have a knee-jerk burst of joy every time I see Bailey scrunch up one eye as she thinks deeply about what you’re saying to her.
But, for the most part, it’s a joy that doesn’t singe my skin when I embrace it. I can sit still in its warmth and enjoy it.
Do I miss the old version of what it meant to be happy? In many ways, yes. But if I think about what feels really different, and what I’ve been lamenting for the past three years, I’m not sure that I actually miss feeling that intensity of joy as my baseline.
In truth, what I largely miss is the way others perceived me when I had happiness in those doses. I miss being the one who felt consistently capable of bringing up the energy in the room- of trying to release my happiness by sharing it with others. Sure, I had my awkwardness, but by and large I was fun to be around.
Yet under the surface, I obsessed over how other people saw me. I had a lot of social anxiety, and let way too much of my self-worth be determined by the opinions of others. It was a dangerous mode to be in: a house of cards just waiting to be toppled by one small (or, as it turned out, very big) disruption.
As I have written about before, I very publicly and thoroughly reached out to most people in my life during my psychosis. While I know that those closest to me understood and suspended judgment (at least as much as they were consciously able to), I fixated on the ways in which so many people’s opinions of me were forever altered by seeing me in such a state. What’s worse, I knew there was nothing I could do to change it.
Compounding the issue was the fact that my personality shift in the time after psychosis was swift and drastic. I could barely drum up enough energy to keep myself going, much less worry about boosting the moods and feelings of others. I was no longer quick with jokes, or anecdotes, or even heartfelt reactions to my friends’ experiences. I felt myself retreating from many of the people I had previously surrounded myself with and, of course, the isolation of the pandemic didn’t help.
The majority of my interactions became concentrated within my professional life, a previous haven for me. Yet as old coworkers who had known the “real” me moved on to other positions with other organizations and were replaced, I found myself in a sea of relative strangers on a daily basis. While this could have been seen as a welcome refresh, I couldn’t get past the fact that I could only offer them this new, subdued version of me: a version I felt was so deeply inferior that I avoided letting them get to know it at all.
After ECT, it felt like a cloud had been lifted, and I could see how lonely I had made myself. Being able to feel joy again highlighted how much of it had been missing from my life, and how much repair I needed to do- not just to my relationships with others, but to my relationship with myself.
Currently, I am working to regain a sense of confidence in and positivity about myself by accepting who I am, in this moment. I am allowing myself to grieve the parts of me I’ve lost while embracing the new strength and self-awareness I’ve developed over the past few years. I don’t know if I will ever be the life of the party again, but I have built myself up to a point where my happiness is no longer contingent on that happening.
There are quieter forms of happiness to be found in writing, and ballet, and motherhood, and genuine conversation, and they are just as valid. I am building something new while leaving space for parts of me that have just been lying dormant to return: like my sense of hope and my passion for the issues I care about.
While I am still working to rebuild, reconfigure, and refine the relationships in my life, I do so with a new realization that it is unsustainable to put my self-worth in the hands of others. I am able to recognize and appreciate myself in my own right, and to see how important it is to hold onto that perspective in order to strengthen the bonds I do want to forge with others.
I thought that treating my depression would make me happier, and it has. But I’ve found that, even more importantly, it is teaching me how to make myself happy. Which I’ve found to be even more valuable.
Postpartum Psychosisterhood 