[kkrrhh]

I've always said that I've spent so much of my life dealing with mental illness and on different meds that I don't know what "normal" should be or should feel like, and I'm really having that problem right now.

I'm worried that maybe I'm too soft on myself, and focus too much on how meds make me feel and not enough on if they'd maybe help me function better if I tried harder. Granted, if I feel crappy I can't function, so maybe I'm just finding another reason to beat myself up.

Basically, I've been worrying it's possible lamictal makes me feel too ok and too calm. Maybe it's really me comparing to my old, natural anxiety and just not being able to believe that being this calm is actually just "normal" and how it should be, or maybe not. Maybe I'm just romanticizing this idea of getting off of lamictal and unleashing this clearer-thinking, more motivated me when in reality I'm forgetting that I'd be extremely-irrationally-anxious-100%-incapable-of-functioning me and it truly is just the best/only choice to use lamictal even if it might make me a little foggy.

For a while now I've considered how I generally feel on lamictal my "normal" state, and if I add meds on I compare to how I felt on lamictal alone. I've always had a tendency to just get huge anxiety/worse depression/negative effects from 90% of meds I've tried, so I just assume that means the "right" thing is to go off of them, of course. But what if, rather than just adding irrational unhelpful anxiety, they're lifting a part of my depression in a way that makes me feel utterly panicked about my life and it only feels bad? What if, if I just committed myself to feeling like utter hell as long as I'm actually doing a lot, it'd actually turn out that the med allowed me to do that and in the end it'd be better? I know that the point of meds is supposed to be to help depression and anxiety, so am I being completely irrational, or am I actually babying myself?
I just took Nardil for 5 months or so and noticed a huge shift in some of my thinking. At some points I was just freaking out, this panic that I had to do everything at once, which sounds bad but in some ways I think it was because I woke up (even more) to how far behind my life is. Since I'd known Nardil to help in the past and was in just a terrible depression, I think I was even less able to accurately judge whether it was good for me. But now that I'm going off of it and feeling a little calmer and less panicked, I don't know which perspective is the "right" one. Should I remember the way I felt on Nardil and try to keep that kind of mindset of keeping my anxiety high to push myself hopefully and ignore how I feel, or should I embrace some of the slightly more slowed down calmer feeling and not drive myself to a nervous breakdown?

I thought about trying to stay off meds and last year I thought maybe it was working and I could do it, but now I'm pretty sure I was just so in my depressive bubble that as long as I could just exist, stay numb, and accomplish a few things here and there while telling myself the future would somehow be different, I didn't realize just how down I was, how much of life I was missing, or how horrible it'd be to stay that way.
I guess I kind of guilt myself because I'm so far behind in life and have been barely functioning for so long. If someone's pretty well functioning, working, has their life halfway together, and gets depression, of course making them feel better is a main function of meds and it's more straightforward.

It's like there's a range with, "I am 100% trying to make myself comfortable, get rid of feelings of anxiety and depression and that is my #1 goal forgetting everything else," to, "I just need the capability to do as much stuff as possible, a med could possibly make me feel like **** but somehow help me do more. If it helps me push myself so hard despite even if every second feels like hell it won't ever make me break down worse, I'm just telling myself that and will end up nowhere in life if I don't just accept that," and of course in between. And I don't know where I should expect to be, and I've over thought it to such a ridiculous degree that this probably sounds crazy.

I hadn't meant for this to be so long and complaining. But can anyone else relate, or does anyone have any advice or input?

[malika138]

What gets me is that I feel somewhat normal on meds, but then I feel normal, so I want to stop the meds because maybe I never needed them to begin with. Docs are always telling me that I should view mental illness like a physical illness (e.g. diabetes) that needs medication.

I'm not sure I'm helping to answer your question! I just wanted to convey that others struggle with being on meds and wondering what is normal.

[sonjaward809]

I also don't know what "normal" feels like, I'm so used to either being very depressed or manic. So I'm unsure of what my normal mood is. It's pretty frustrating. My meds don't make me numb or anything but my anxiety still runs rampant. So I'm pretty sure they're not working all the way for me, at least the anxiety meds. I still swing into a depression episode quite often too. I haven't had a full-blown manic episode in over a year though so that's good. Even though I enjoy my manic episodes .. I know they are very destructive. I'm soo used to meds making me numb .. so sometimes I feel like they're not working since I don't feel that way. I just wish I knew what "normal" is supposed to feel like :/