Name: Slappy

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The Reason

June 14th, 2013

I received this e-mail a few weeks ago … and it made me cry, mostly because THIS is why I tell my story.  I never said that it happens to everybody, but it does happen and it did happen to me.  Mr. Hyde ran my life for nine long years and now Dr. Jekyll is left to pick up the pieces and that’s exactly what I’m doing.  It’s amazing how clear things can become on the cloudiest of days.

This e-mail is reprinted here with permission from the original author …

Hi Gina,
 
Not sure what drew me to your blog months ago, probably the title, but I am so glad that I found it. I had no idea about the bad effects of SSRIs until I read your story and realized that I had been suffering bad effects also. I SO appreciate your honesty and openness about what happened to you  (and I don’t need any details)  because it really helped me to understand my own wacky-assed behavior and ridiculously stupid and impulsive decisions that took place during the height of my SSRI days.
 
The first five years on Paxil were fine. But the next five years were a nightmare. I totally fucked up my finances, lost my home and 2 other homes, declared bankruptcy, and everything that could go wrong during that time did. I was a horrible parent. and being a single parent, my kids didn’t have a normal parent to turn to or balance things out. It was hell. I wanted to kill myself every day for a year during the worst of it. I  had no one to turn to – my mom is dead and my dad has Alzhiemers. I was too ashamed to tell my friends what was going on.
 
When we moved out of our house after it was foreclosed on, I decided I couldn’t look back anymore. I spent 2011 learning to forgive myself and working on healing. But I had no idea that my “happy pills” contributed to the craziness. 
 
Thanks to you I am weaning myself off those evil little pills (with my doctor’s approval). I am back on track rebuilding my life. In fact, my friends say I look and seem so much happier and that I glow.
 
Anyway, this is a really long email to say that you telling your story in a public forum helps people. It helped me.
 
Thank you.
 
D

When I asked her if it was okay to post the e-mail … she sent back this:

Hi Gina,
 
Sure, post away.
 
You can add this: I went from being a responsible, stong, independant, level-headed, financially sound, good mom to a nutcase. And I really didn’t understand why that was happening. There was a triggering event, a breakup of a brief relationship that normally wouldn’t have had much of an effect on me, but at that particular time it sent my brain off it’s rocker. 
 
Hope all is ok with you. Lots of ups and down for you lately. The kids will be ok, they have a strong mom as a good role model. 
 

D

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In Real Life

May 29th, 2013

As I was waiting for my daughter to get out of dance class last night, I was scrolling through Twitter on my phone and there was a tweet by somebody who said something I assumed to be about me … nothing new over the past few days.  I started trying to think of what it could possibly have been that I had done to not make her like me …. and then this strange feeling of calm came over me and I said to myself “why the hell do you even care?”

I’ve actually been thinking about this sort of thing for months.  I spend way too much time in a digital world trying to make “stranger/friends”, but wasting my real life.  I spend time every day on Twitter, writing on here, on several forums and chatting with people that I have never met (some of whom I will probably stay in contact with, but some … probably not). 

I used to be one of those people who said goofy things like “everything happens for a reason”, but I don’t anymore.  There are some things that there are just no reasons for, but I do believe that we have a choice as to how we react to certain things. 

The past few days have opened my eyes to a lot of things and one of them is the fact that I waste a lot of time on things that really don’t matter …. and that needs to change.  I have a lot of work to do in a lot of areas in my life and some exciting projects coming up that could literally change my life … but those things aren’t going to happen on their own.   

This is my year of rebuilding relationships and changing my life and I can’t do that by sitting on my ass in front of a computer screen. 

I’ll continue to post every once in a while, especially when I have good news, but the days of me posting every detail of my life are probably over.

There are real people in my life whose opinions of me and my relationships with mean so much more than anything I can find online and that’s how it should be.  We should all be striving for “real relationships” and stop worrying so damn much about what virtual strangers think.

I appreciate the love and support I’ve received and will always cherish the “stranger/friends” that I’ve made for life.


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