Everyone I know is on something
Before you roll your eyes too hard or scream at me through your screen, you should know, I say this as someone who used to be on nine medications at once.
This isn’t a judgment. I want to say that upfront because this topic tends to make people defensive and defensiveness kills the conversation before it even starts.
But I can’t help but notice something, and I think more people are noticing it than are willing to say it out loud.
Everyone I know is on something.
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If you start actually inventorying the people in your life, you’ll see it gets strange fast. There’s the friend on Adderall who can’t work without it anymore because she started taking it in college and her baseline concentration is just shot now. There’s the colleague on Lexapro who says it saved her life but also hasn’t cried in two years and isn’t sure how she feels about that. The guy who needs a few drinks to be social. The girl who needs an edible to fall asleep… or relax… or take the edge off.
Then there’s the Xanax for flying, the beta blockers for presentations, the Ambien, the modafinil, the microdosed mushrooms, the Wellbutrin added specifically to offset the sexual side effects of the other antidepressant.
And underneath all of it, so normalized we forget to even count it: caffeine in the morning and alcohol at night… every day… like bookends of modern consciousness.
I’m not listing these to shame anyone, I’m listing them because when you write it out, the load the average functional adult is carrying (mind you, I’m not talking about addicts or people in crisis, just regular people with jobs and kids and social lives) is genuinely unlike anything that came before. And frankly I don’t think most of them need to be on any of it.
Before you roll your eyes too hard or scream at me through your screen, you should know, I say this as someone who used to be on nine medications at once.
I actually wrote about my journey quitting everything and finding my true baseline here:
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Anxiety, blood pressure, depression, sleep, focus, pain, nausea. I told myself I was handling my problems responsibly. Identify the issue and treat it with the appropriate intervention. That’s what being a functioning adult looks like!
Except, what I couldn’t see because I was too far inside it was that most of those medications were treating problems I was creating for myself.
I was nauseous every morning because I was drinking most nights, but rather than stop drinking, I took a pill for the nausea.
I was thirty pounds overweight and never moved my body, but rather than dealing with that, I took a pill for the joint pain.
I was on two anxiety medications for nearly a decade, and a significant chunk of that anxiety was downstream of the drinking, the weight, the inflammation, and the fact that my body was in constant low-grade revolt. I thought I had a chemical imbalance, but I actually just had a poor lifestyle.
I couldn’t see any of it. Or more honestly, I probably could see it, but I refused to acknowledge it (extreme levels of cope, if you will.) Every symptom had its own treatment, the treatments had side effects that became new symptoms, and eventually I was managing an ecosystem so complex that I genuinely didn’t know what I felt versus what the drugs were making me feel.