Using antidepressant/anti-anxiety medication is a win/lose situation.

On the plus side, you don’t have any negative thoughts.

On the down side, you don’t really have thoughts at all.

It’s great that I no longer have intrusive, negative thoughts, but it feels as though I don’t have active thoughts or feelings at all anymore.

The benefits definitely outweigh the cons, but too bad there isn’t a good in-between. I want to be just on the side of having thoughts while also not having intrusive thoughts; feeling happy while also not feeling negative.

I do go through emotions as they arise, but they don’t feel genuine. I feel appreciation and gratitude, but it seems like not enough. I do feel happy and positive throughout each day, but it doesn’t feel real.

The goal is to not feel depressed or suicidal, but what about wanting to live and having things to look forward to? I do fear dying because I fear the idea of nothingness – of having everything I see and understand at this point just be replaced by darkness. I can believe in the afterlife to quell these fears, but the fact is that when you die, your consciousness dies because your brain dies so there is no conscious thought of an afterlife.

I can believe my soul will reincarnate, but I’d still have no recollection that I was reincarnated, so that’s basically useless.

Contrary to my scientific beliefs, I believe in tortured souls, ghosts, past lives. There is no rationale to this besides hearing/seeing ghosts in my life, believing that justice forsakes corrupted souls and binds them to earth as ghosts rather than letting them pass peacefully, and the idea that my problems now are a result of past lives.

But perhaps it’s all just my mind playing tricks.

I digress. Sertraline definitely works a lot better than Lexapro for me. Lexapro (escitalopram) did not stop the intrusive, obsessive, or negative thoughts, and possibly was the primary contributing factor to my attempted suicide in August 2021. Since being switched to sertraline, I don’t have negative, intrusive, or obsessive thoughts, but when I really think about it – I don’t have thoughts at all.

My primary care physician did say that some people stop using antidepressants because of the feeling of being “numb,” and I can understand why now. But I fear that the obsessive, intrusive thoughts will return once I stop using sertraline, and considering my previous suicide attempt, that’s not a risk I’m willing to take.

Antidepressants/anti-anxiety medications are not a catch-all fix to all of someone’s problems. Even if someone is taking antidepressant medication, it doesn’t mean all their problems are fixed and they’re a happy-go-lucky person now – which is something I previously believed. Before starting medication, I knew that medication would be the only thing that could resolve my negative thoughts, but I didn’t fathom the idea that there would be side effects besides possible suicidal ideations and increased depression (the general warning for all antidepressant medications). I didn’t even think that the negative thoughts would just be replaced by nothingness instead. I just thought the bad thoughts would stop and I’d be a happy person (again? For once?). It’s difficult to understand or think about this until you experience it. It’s hard to describe to others that just don’t know. Even I think to myself sometimes, what do you mean you don’t have thoughts or feel? What’s going on in your head right now? And if I were to try and answer what is going on in my head right now, I just imagine a hamster running on a wheel. Which is not to say that I’m air-headed or dumb, I’m actually fairly intelligent. I just can’t grasp a single thought in my head. Even now, I’m not actively thinking about what I’m about to write, it’s kind of just happening. Sometimes I do fret over a conversation I’m about to have, or an action I’m about to do that makes me nervous, but in day-to-day normal thinking, I definitely don’t have lingering thoughts anymore. And maybe that’s because my previous lingering thoughts were all intrusive. Maybe this is how everyone who isn’t depressed actually feels. Maybe I think I feel numb or don’t have thoughts because I just don’t have any negative lingering thoughts or feelings. Maybe this is how it’s supposed to be.

There are a lot of potential answers and I’m sure psychologists and psychiatrists have tried to figure this out as well. But the overall umbrella question is: Does anyone really know? Does anyone really know how the brain is supposed to work? Science is based on hypotheses and experimentation, things that can be proven – but that doesn’t mean we know it all once something can be proven true. It just means that specific hypothesis is true. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t one exception out there that exists – it just means we haven’t hypothesized or discovered it yet.