I wake up between 6:30 a.m. and noon every day. The first thing I do is take my two multivitamins, my extra-strength vitamin D, and then my 10 milligrams of vortioxetine if I dont scare myself out of taking it. I take a swig from my blue Contigo water bottle to wash it down. I apply deodorant. I make my bed. I tiptoe to the kitchen, either well before Ewan wakes up or long after he has already left the house. I turn the stove on and wait for my non-stick aluminum pan to heat up - a Christmas gift from my mother, which I especially appreciated. I pour some extra virgin olive oil onto it, swish it around, wait a little bit more, and scramble three eggs. After an intuitively short amount of time, until the eggs are still soft but not quite burnt, I dump them on a small plate and squirt a poot of Huy Fong sriracha. With a fork, I shovel everything into my mouth and wash the residual sriracha off the plate. I then fill up my Contigo water bottle, pack one of my bike locks into my backpack if I don't forget it, grab my wallet, keys, my daily planner, my trusty Uni-Ball pen, and head out the door. I usually don't get home until somewhere close to midnight.
I bike everywhere, so I exercise every day. I bike with the other five people in my neighborhood still at it this deep into winter - the vast majority of them all healthcare professionals of some kind, presumably commuting to the nearby university hospital. They have thick, studded winter tires, bylaw-mandated headlights, back racks, and electric derailleurs if they're older. I use my summer tires all year round. The university campus is a hotbed of bike theft, so in the interest of not getting too attached to an item that is somewhat destined in this country to get stolen, I don't dress it up. I already have had one bike stolen. I ride on a Miele frame that my dad's beloved late cousin used to own. I covered up the logo with red electrical tape to disguise it from the eyes of homeless bike nerds who may recognize its value as a famously sturdy Italian-Canadian bike frame from the 1980s/1990s. I can never be too careful these days.
I wear gym shirts underneath the hoodies and/or flannel I wear every day. I sweat through my clothes otherwise. I carry deodorant with me wherever I go because of the one time Blaze's mom asked why her basement smelled "like shit" because I stunk so bad when I first met her. If I'm good about it, I apply it the second I settle indoors somewhere, lifting my shirt just enough to give me enough room to get all of my armpit, but not enough to expose my stomach to the droves of fellow puffer jacket-wearing, tumbler-carrying young urban professionals, who descend on these sleepy streets every morning around 7 o'clock sharp. I check my phone again, the third time of the day out of another eight thousand. I respond to all of my texts and emails, which I never seem to run out of.
It's been about three weeks on vortioxetine. You're supposed to start feeling it around the second week. I think I feel it. Antidepressants usually make people feel numb, and what I feel could be described as a kind of numbness, but it's not uncomfortable. My emotions don't feel so extreme and stark anymore. I didn't even realize they were so extreme and stark. I don't break out sobbing anymore, nor do I scream randomly as if the ghost of a more conscious self had possessed my secretly dying body to warn me that something is horribly, horribly wrong. I don't mentally catalog all the ways to mutilate my body, preferably as painfully as possible, with as sharp an object as I can find. The vortioxetine won't fully set in for another week, and according to my sister - who I have been purposefully avoiding talking to as much as humanly possible for the last few weeks , "it doesn't do shit." But I think I'm already feeling it. That perennial grief that used to always be there seems to have left me for the most part. I can get out of bed for the most part.
It's beginning to shock me how much of my life has been coated by it, and I don't entirely trust it being gone. I feel like I have a lot more work to do to fully get a handle of it. I haven't even contacted a therapist like I told my general physician I would. I keep expecting it to creep up and ruin my life again. I am not sure that I'm out of the woods just yet, and I trust that fear completely, to be honest. I can never be too careful these days.
Maybe this is it for me. Maybe I'm finally getting my shit together, and these are the first days of the rest of my life. Maybe by the time next Christmas rolls around, the events of this Christmas and the months leading up to it will seem strange and unfamiliar, as if it were the life of somebody else. Maybe the remaining seven years of my twenties will seem more certain by then. Maybe I'll start getting paid for this photography hobby like I plan to. Hopefully, I'll have more money by then. Maybe I'll have even a girlfriend.
I'm trying to tell myself every day that the future is unwritten. All this exercise is keeping me hungry. That's a good thing.
(To be continued)
