Dark Horse

My First Winter on Antidepressants.

Mugshot: British Escape Artist/Sweet Feed Addict.

Hey Readers!

Quickly at the top: I wanted to let you know that along with these long-form essays I’ll now be adding audio versions for paying subscribers. I’m recording them here in my living room, and they will be archived under the podcast section at the top of this 'stack.

I will try to include a sample version of this post’s audio, reading along with as much of the essay that is previewed here so anyone that wants to give listening a try.

This way you have the option to play my writing while you do the dishes or walk the dog, a service I am happy to add! I’ll probably also include a short intro where I explain a little about what I wrote and update you on any farm news.

I think this will make the writing more personal and intimate, like I’m reading you the letter I wrote you aloud (which is exactly what I am doing). And know I’ve never done this before, recorded myself reading something this personal aloud, and I am doing it in one imperfect take. So be kind of any mistakes in this rough start.

Please give it a try. I’d so appreciate it if you did. Who knows? Might become your favorite way to follow this little farm.

Thanks Darlin’

-j

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Dark Horse

My First Winter on Antidepressants

What is happening in our brains that forces us from a deep sleep? The kind of panic that wakes you up with a swallowed gasp, like you were just drowning in a dream? The anxiety that makes your mouth dry and eyes strain; and it doesn’t matter how much water you drink or light is adjusted, you know, in your gut, something isn’t right…

Sometimes it’s stress and sometimes it’s your bladder; but last night it was the subtle clanking of a metal trash can. I could sense it like a bad memory. Even though it was dulled by distance and walls, I could make out the muffled clatter of the 1/4-filled grain barrel rolling around the driveway like a goddamned maraca.

Friday, whose back was pressed against my chest in her normal little-spoon position, was deep asleep. The kind of dog sleep that could doze through an action movie in a theatre. Why didn’t she wake me? What if it’s a bear? Or way worse, a person?!

I laid in bed listening, hoping it was something else, anything else going on inside the house instead of outdoors. I can not stress how much I didn’t want to get up. My brain and body were exhausted. Also, the middle of the night is rarely kind to me.

But as I became more awake, clarity came like a sword cutting through paper streamers: I knew what the sound was. It was Merlin, my 30+-year-old retired draft pony breaking into the sheep’s grain. Again.

I got up in the cold house and checked my phone: 3:25 AM. I let out an exhaled stream of curse words and got dressed. I grabbed the lead rope and halter draped over a saddle in the front room. As I shuffled around in the dark, pulling on the huge size 10 muck boots my ex left, I lost balance and fell over, yelping in pain because I hit my knee on a bench. This upset the goose in the corner.

Cyrus the gander let out a WTF honk. This is an alarmingly loud sound to be right next to after banging your knee. It wasn’t his fault. He didn’t understand why every other animal in the house was up and moving around. He watched from the hay-lined dog crate like we were neighborhood kids interrupted his nap.

(Cyrus isn’t in every night. I had brought him inside last night because he had been soaking wet from the rain. With his neck torqued, he couldn’t groom and dry his own down and would probably freeze, even in the barn.)

I strapped on a headlamp and headed outside, the dogs beside me. Friday bursting out into the dark and Gibson limping at a slow trot behind her. He’s still all there, but no longer able to run into the night after laying prone for 7 hours. My energy is somewhere in the middle.

We saw Merlin exactly where I expected, right beside the grain bin by the sheep gate. The dogs stood beside him, tails wagging as if to say, “Found him, boss!” I made some passive-aggressive remark to Friday about why she feels the need to explode into yowls at the sound of a passing car but allowed this to happen without so much as a lip quiver?

Friday still has no comment at this time.

But there he was, trying to break into the grain bin in the light of the lamppost. The sky was cloud-covered, there was no moon. Only the passing flurries in the glow of a dimming headlamp that needed fresh batteries. Thank the gods I had put his blanket on before bed, because everywhere that wasn’t draped in canvas and wool was COVERED in burdock burrs. Merlin is a fell pony, a breed with famously feathered feet and a long mane. Now he looked like a porcupine in a bathrobe.

He was eating hay beside the sheep fence because he couldn’t get the lid off the grain bin, despite using the metal can as a soccer ball around the driveway. I wiped cold snot from my nose and haltered him. He walked back to his paddock without protest. Two short, stout, aging ghosts in the night slowly making their way into the woods by a dying beam of light.

I got him settled back in the paddock and went into the barn to grab some hay. I’m almost out, down to 15 bales, maybe less? Most farmers have barns loaded with hay all winter, but I have yet to achieve that level of financial solvency, so I buy 50 or so bales a month delivered 25 at a time by a local farmer. A new delivery is scheduled for Monday and I have been putting it off because I am trying like hell to make the December mortgage soon as possible.

And so the low amount of hay in the barn, the work of fence repair ahead of me, the cold, money, love, loneliness, death… the helplessness of handling this shit alone, all the time ... I started to feel a panic attack coming on.

For me, that means a rapid heartbeat, cold sweat, and a tingling that starts from the right side of my neck and travels down into my right arm. It happens when I’m really afraid, sometimes I get numb and can’t use it for an hour.

I didn't bite my lip and push through it, trying to fix things with a pounding heart like there’s a speed-run prize for night errands. I stopped in the night woods, got down on my knees, and breathed the way Jessamyn taught me. I called for Gibson and pulled his maned neck close to my own. I kept my breath steady. I held my good boy.

And in a few moments the tingling stopped.

If any of you deal with anxiety you know the way 3 AM hits. Everything you can handle in daylight feels impossible in the dark. And as I was walking back to the horses with as many flakes of hay I could carry from one of the last remaining bales, I tried to channel 6 AM Jenna three hours early.

Because 6 AM Jenna can handle anything. 6 AM Jenna has a brain fueled by hope and optimism. And 6 AM Jenna will now do whatever she needs to do to take care of 3 AM Jenna—and I remembered that. And it worked.

It wouldn’t have four months ago, though.

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This is my first winter on antidepressants in a long time. I’ve been on them a few months now, and I can say (for me) they don’t stop panic or negative thinking, at all. But they do allow space between the two Jennas. They make it possible to see, unequivocally, that this terrified version of me isn’t a cage I am trapped inside. It’s something I can observe and change.

I’m still afraid of the dark, but now I’m aware the fear isn’t permanent and will pass. Not aware logically, I always had that. I mean I felt that in my body chemistry. I felt the calm that distance granted. A feeling no amount of talking or alcohol or weed could repair because those things do not build serotonin; they deplete or distract it.

I still feel the very real fears of losing my farm, failing miserably, ending up in some homeless shelter telling the woman in the next bed station about how I used to ride horses across mountains and catch wild trout in my own stream. Now I observe the panic as something happening to someone I love. I have replaced disdain with empathy. That is a gift.

It took a long time to talk to a doctor about wanting help. Things had to get really bad. And when I say really bad, I mean pacing around my farmhouse, for months, feeling the warping floorboards under my 5’2” body give a smidge, convinced the same way people were in those last moments on the Titanic, that I was about sink into darkness.

Then it got way, way, worse…

Before I get into all these triggers and explain how I started to spiral, I want to make it clear that outwardly I seemed fine. People struggling with mental health are rarely acting “crazy” or in any way dangerous. That is a horrible, outdated, stigma and I do not want you to think that just because I am being honest about what was going on in my head, that I was lumbering around town unshowered and mumbling to squirrels.

All of what I am going to explain was happening internally, while self-isolating, a private struggle only my closest friends knew the full extent of. And no amount of matching lipstick, planned outfits, Instagram posts or chatty conversation that made me seem chipper as a receptionist at a doggy daycare - none of that portrayed the fear inside my head.

And, if one of you sees yourself in this, and gives yourself permission to seek help because of it - I could care less what anyone think about me.

Our thoughts and feelings are not special little secrets. We are not experiencing anything that hasn’t been experienced for thousands of years by billions of people. It’s not the people oversharing on substacks that need help; it’s the people embarrassed for them. The ones that feel that level of vulnerability is weakness, that keep their emotions bottled and hidden. These people are time bombs at the worst or prisoners at best.

This is for the person reading this that doesn’t think “things are bad enough” to get a therapist or talk to a doctor. You deserve to heal. We all do. Here’s what happened: