I’ve been listening to this book, one straw revolution. it satisfies my brain and my values so fully. it introduces the idea of do-nothing farming. the idea that the best form of farming is to pay attention to the plants, the ecosystem, and to interfere as little as possible. no tilling, no spraying, no weeding. masanobu fukuoka and his big aquarius energy developed this into an entire philosophy of life. what we eat, how we spend our time. I was so deeply satisfied by this line of thinking that I looked up his birth chart because I thought it must be so similar to mine. he was born two days before me, but has a lot more capricorn placements. of course he does, he was a farmer. I am not.
simultaneously, I have been suffering. one month ago I tapered off prozac. I wanted, primarily, an orgasm without delay. I recognized prozac as a buffer between me and the raw experiences of life, and I wanted to take that condom off and raw dog it, baby. (I’m sorry) (also that is probably the most accurate way I can describe it.) I felt there was a world of color and experience and… authenticity? that I was somehow removed from by one degree, a degree that was keeping me from truly inhabiting my messy human body, my messy human emotions, my messy human reality. I felt stable. in fact, I felt more stable and more connected to my relationships than I had in a long time. I thought I had arrived, that I could put down the crutch.
the first week off prozac, I was at the beach with my friends and it was heaven. HEAVEN. I started microdosing with the hopes that it would be a suitable alternative.
the second week off prozac, I was home. I was obsessive. I was cranky. I was pmsing. I started to panic. I considered going back on it and realized I was likely in withdrawal and decided to stick it out. in one straw revolution, fukuoka said you can’t just stop interfering with an ecosystem and expect everything to be okay immediately. that human intervention has an impact, and withdrawing that suddenly is akin to abandonment. that the systems become lopsided, dysfunctional.
the third week off prozac I was cranky. I was obsessive. I was avoidant, critical, rejecting. I was bleeding. I did everything I could think of to embrace my misery. I abandoned the idea of liking anything, and it helped. the fourth week off prozac I was all of the above, still. I blamed myself. I looked at the shadow work of it, the projections, the existential kink. I blamed myself so wholeheartedly because if this was my fault then I could somehow fix it.
I couldn’t fix it.
I looked into prozac withdrawal again and learned it could last up to six weeks, two months. no matter that I’d been on the lowest therapeutic dose for less than six months, I decided that must be it. confirmation bias led me to information that made this feel true. I felt relief that it wasn’t me, that I wasn’t just crazy. that it was something happening to me that was outside my control. I danced between surrender and control. my internal threshold for suffering drew nearer and I recognized that I don’t have the capacity to feel this way much longer. I wanted to do something, and at the same time, I felt less ability than ever to do anything. I speak in past tense but this was yesterday. and today, really. I wanted a plan. I thought okay maybe the microdosing is making the withdrawal worse, maybe I will stop that. and then I was like okay maybe the microdosing is helping and I should do more. maybe I will reintroduce a low dose of prozac and taper from there. maybe maybe maybe. exhaustion, despair.
and then, finally, I had therapy. I love my therapist, and I’ve been working with her for seven years now. she knows how much I squirm at the thought of meds. today she watched me suffering and sat with me in it. she sat with my in my frustration with not knowing what to do or how to do it. she sat with me in my frustration that no one really knows how these things work or why, in my frustration that even doctors I could talk to about it wouldn’t be able to tell me anything definitive. she supported me in taking (prescription) drugs, she supported me in taking (non-prescription) drugs, and she supported me in not taking drugs. getting to cry out all my fear and frustration and discomfort led me to a place where I could zoom out enough to see that the commonality of all my suffering over the past few weeks had been obsessive thoughts. and then she said the thing that clicked, the lightbulb moment, the ugly cry.
she said a lot of her clients with contamination OCD have trouble taking meds. she started to say she wasn’t sure if that was something I struggled with, but stopped because I was silently ugly crying into my handkerchief. I hadn’t made that connection. I’d never made that connection.
what is so satisfying to me about do-nothing farming is the purity of it. the simplicity of it. it feels right in my bones. the problem is that masanobu fukuoka was born in 1913. he was developing these theories in 1930. he was touring, talking about his philosophies in 1970. the world we live in is very, very different now. there has been so much human intervention that the deepest, most minute patterns of nature have been impacted. a common complaint about his philosophy is that it just doesn’t work. before I stray too far into the territory of humanity being The Problem and inherently unnatural or disruptive, let me stop. because this point right here, this tension between what should or could be true in a perfect world, or in a world that no longer exists (“purity”) and what IS true, right now, at this very moment (“contamination”) is the very tree my little buddha butt is sitting under, sobbing.
what I want to be true is that I can live the full spectrum of life and sit with the discomfort and embrace the grief and swim in the sorrow and drink in the joy and fuck the erotic and wring every drop if it into my greedy little mouth unassisted by modern medicine.
what is true is that, from looking at my recent history, I am most able to do that with the assistance of modern medicine.
it is possible that I will forever grieve my disability. that I will spend minutes or months or years putting masks on it and playacting out fantasies of heroism and defeat, but that eventually I will tire and pull off the mask and see again the fact that I am disabled in this world and that I do not want to be.
when I confronted the idea of getting back on prozac today, there was a storm threatening to follow it. the storm said “why do you keep destabilizing yourself?” and I asked how to answer this with compassion. sarah helped me step back and consider what purpose that pattern is serving. when I do this, I am looking for control and agency. I want to know what is happening, why, and how. I want to have a hand in my own healing. I am endlessly curious, and I love experimenting. I learn through experience, and so to learn I must experience. I am subjecting myself to opportunities to learn.
I have that queer confidence thing where I assume I can do pretty much anything, that I will figure it out. it has allowed me to fix my car, renovate my house, start a business, and do all sorts of fun and funny weird kooky shit in the world. I love this about me. I also think its important to recognize when I am in over my head and to call in the experts.
I am in over my head. literally. the thing I would use to figure this out is compromised right now. what I want is a person with prescribing power who also works with psychedelics and alternate modalities. as far as I can tell, that person doesn’t exist in atlanta. at least not yet. so the ideal isn’t available, but good enough is.
before I stopped taking prozac, I noticed a tendency to respond to things feeling good by wanting to make them bigger or permanent. the phrase that came to mind and carried me into our beach vacation was “let good be enough.” so maybe I don’t have a world or a life or a brain that could allow me to thrive unmedicated. and maybe I don’t have access to just the right doctorguru to lead me on a path to my perfectly medicated self. but I do have access to a medicine that has helped me access community, pleasure, play, and some amount of satisfaction. maybe I can let that good be enough, for now. maybe I can trust that when the next step is ready to be taken I will know because there will be someone there to help. maybe until then I can let good be enough. my little natural, unnatural, chemical, perfectly impure good can be enough.
sigh, grieve, accept.
Enjoyed reading this and relate to it, thank you ✨