Glennon: Her New Life Off Meds
September 10, 2024
Glennon Doyle:
Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things. Abigail, Mary, Abigail?
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
How are you?
Abby Wambach:
Oh, I didn’t know we were going to do this. I feel good. I feel like I’m ready to close the chapter of my life, the tough times, the challenging times, though they were beautiful and important, and I’ve gone through a lot. I’m just going to try a little bit easier, but I’m good. How are you?
Glennon Doyle:
Well, I’m going to talk about how I am the whole episode long. Sissy, how are you? Amanda, how are you? My therapist told me that if I say your name, I will remember we’re two separate people, so you might notice that I was saying your name lately. It’s very weird.
Amanda Doyle:
Oh, that’s interesting. Okay.
Glennon Doyle:
Also, Alex did. One day I was saying, “Sister, sister,” and she said, “Amanda.”
Amanda Doyle:
Wait, who did that?
Glennon Doyle:
Alex.
Amanda Doyle:
Oh, interesting, so she’s also on the train.
Glennon Doyle:
Whenever Alex throws in, something like that. I know it’s something I should pay attention to.
Amanda Doyle:
Oh, interesting.
Glennon Doyle:
Isn’t that interesting?
Amanda Doyle:
She’s wise.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Amanda Doyle:
Let’s see. I just feel very like tender-ish, and raw, and exposed, and I just want to be in my bed. I don’t know. It’s a longer thing, but I just feel like occasionally, I’ll feel like if something isn’t going right for the family, there’s this turtle thing that happens, where I just want to…
It feels too soft to be exposed, and I just want to pull us all in under the shell. It is a ick, I hate everyone feeling, but it’s kind of good, because it’s a very protective of the inner family situation. I don’t know. I’m kind of navigating all of that. Anyway…
Glennon Doyle:
I get that feeling. I get that feeling so much. I really do. Yeah,
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah, it’s weird.
Glennon Doyle:
A couple weeks ago, we were in the kitchen, and I said, “Okay, I think I know what we need to do. We need to just have Christmas right now. Can we just pretend it’s Christmas? Can we just put up the tree? We just need those vibes.” I had been feeling it in the middle of a day. I’d be like, “Oh, at least it’s Christmas.” I’d be like, “It’s not. Shit.”
Amanda Doyle:
Wait, you didn’t put up your tree?
Glennon Doyle:
No, because Abby said that will be stressful. Then I let my Christmas dream die.
Amanda Doyle:
What about it being Christmas made you feel like it was going to help?
Glennon Doyle:
Okay, here’s what I think I was having the same feeling as you. When I feel like everything’s happening and it’s too much, and scary things are happening, and this person is doing in our family, and I feel like icky about things, I feel energetically like turtling.
Amanda Doyle:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
To me, winter and Christmas is like, we are all going in, we are gathering the people close. We are shutting the things out. Everyone’s stuck with me. It’s like, I want to turtle with everybody. How do you deal with it when you still have that feeling of wanting to gather everybody together because you’re feeling vulnerable to the outside world? Would that be what it is?
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah, I guess so. I don’t know how I’m feeling. I just feel like part of me sometimes just wishes that we could run away to a different place and have no one else there.
Glennon Doyle:
You can do that. I did it every two to three years.
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Good for you for resisting the actual fleeing, and this sitting in the horrific discomfort of being in the same community. I don’t know.
Abby Wambach:
That’s why I didn’t want to put up the Christmas tree. It wasn’t because it was going to be too stressful. It’s because we need to learn how to sit in the discomfort.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s such bullshit. You didn’t want the discomfort of going to the basement and getting the tree.
Abby Wambach:
Yes, that too. I think that Tish was just about to leave. There’s a lot going on that-
Amanda Doyle:
You felt like it was a distraction?
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, and it’s all good stuff. It just doesn’t feel that great when you’re in it.
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah, because it’s another kind of geographic solution is like, “We’re not here, we’re at Christmas.”
Abby Wambach:
Exactly. Let’s just fake everybody out and pretend.
Glennon Doyle:
Now, since I’m getting better about not moving in space, I need us to move in time. I need to control time. I need a time machine to make me more comfortable.
Amanda Doyle:
Oh, sissy.
Abby Wambach:
Also, your bullshit comment was pretty aggressive.
Glennon Doyle:
Well, I felt like you were making it seem like a spiritual guru move when really I felt like it was a-
Abby Wambach:
I know that that’s how you feel.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay.
Abby Wambach:
But it still was aggressive. You can just do one thing and we can move on from here.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. What, you want me to apologize? Is that what you’re asking for?
Abby Wambach:
It’s totally up to you.
Glennon Doyle:
I want you to know that I’m deeply sorry. Okay. We’re working on feeling sorry when we say sorry. That’s what I’m working on lately. All right. Here’s what we’re going to talk about today. Okay. I’ve been wanting to talk about this, but I’ve been also equally not wanting to talk about this, which is what we’re going to talk about is the fact that after, let’s see, about 35 years on antidepressants, some of those times were on and off, I went completely off my medication.
I want to talk about it, because I’ve been talking about my love for, gratitude for being on medication for a very long time. I’ve been doing that without shame, which everyone should do without shame. I think because I have been a champion for medication and for people on medication, I felt nervous about talking about not being on it. I feel like I felt the reverse nervousness that most people feel about it. They’re afraid of talking about it, but I’m afraid of talking about not being on it because I feel so strongly about people who want to and need to be on medication feeling glorious about that, and not ever accepting shame.
What you’re not going to hear from me is like, “Rah rah, right and wrong. It’s wrong to be on medication.” That’s not my journey in any way. I’m so incredibly grateful for the medication my entire life, and being off of it now, I’m thinking of more as an interesting adventure, experiment, I guess, more than I once was lost and now I’m found. I felt like that’s weird, self. You can’t hide that you’re not on medication now. We’re just going to always tell the truth about where we are.
Amanda Doyle:
I see that, though, because it’s a little bit like, it could be perceived as like, “Well, I needed it when I was less healthy, but now that I’ve gotten more healthy, I don’t need it.” If you do need it, you’re less healthy than me could be the takeaway from this, and that is not what you’re saying at all.
Glennon Doyle:
No, I don’t think so, but I don’t know exactly. What I want to reserve the right to do is just discuss, and for everyone to do, is just to discuss where they are in any given moment, and not attach a ton of right, wrong judgment or victory stories to it. I’m not saying that that’s not even true, what you just said. I don’t know. I’m just going to describe what’s going on. Okay.
Abby Wambach:
Yes. Perfect.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. Pod Squad, you may have heard, because I can’t shut up about it ever, is that I’ve been on this recent recovery journey over the last two years. Yeah, so you know that. It’s been really hard and incredible. A couple years ago, I was diagnosed with anorexia. That sort of woke me up to ways that I was living that I thought were just being a successful, strong woman, but actually was this kind of cult of control with one person in it who the cult leader and the cult follower. It was me, and the cult was anorexia and control of everything in my life.
Anorexia turned out to be this sort of high control, protection, religion way of living that I thought would keep me safe. For the past two years has kind of been a unraveling sort of all of that, which like losing any religion, which has happened to me before, is highly uncomfortable and wildly freeing. A year and a half into this sort of recovery, I felt like I had a pretty good understanding of how I was going to try to eat and be, meaning that I would not deny my own hunger.
I think that is the most important thing. It still happens to me several times a day where I’m hungry and then my first thought is, “Awesome, don’t eat.” Then that’s the wrong voice to listen to. Then I just kind of skip over that one and go to the next place, which is like, “Oh, you’re hungry. Feed yourself.” This is the simple after the complicated. I felt like I was learning and growing, and my life was very different over time.
Then for those of you who were listening to the episodes about Abby losing her brother, so my experience with that first phone call when we got, we were on our family vacation our first day after the holidays, and we got a phone call from Abby’s sister. We were at a restaurant, and Abby kind of walked away with the phone and sort of buckled. It was just all very horrific and dramatic. I went over, she kind of went over to a different table away from people and was just on the phone.
I could just tell that something horrific had happened. I left the kids at the table and walked over. She told me, I sat with her for a while. I turned and looked at the kids, and they were terrified looking at me, like, “What the hell is happening?” I walked back over and got them and brought them to the table, told them what had happened, and we all sat with Abby as she got the information on the phone. Abby was bawling. All the kids were crying. I was looking at all of them, and I was not feeling whatever they were feeling.
I was cognitively aware that this was a horrible moment, and that my wife was in a lot of pain, and that my kids were in a lot of pain. What I was doing was in my head, trying to figure out, “How are we going to get through this? How are we going to talk to the kids about this?” I was just doing logistics, but I had a very clear moment of, “Wait a minute, I am not experiencing this like they are.” It was like they were all in a moment, and I was observing them in a moment.
Then the next few weeks happened, and so we traveled to Abby’s hometown. We were in it with everybody. Every time we’d be in a room, I would feel like they were all having an experience, and I was observing their experience. I could cognitively empathize. I was hugging people, sitting with people, holding them while they cried. I was not in it with them, and that is what I kept thinking. “I am not feeling this. I am knowing this. I am serving. I’m showing up, but I am not feeling this.” Okay.
Amanda Doyle:
There was a plane of existing, and you were existing on one of the planes, but not the plane that they were, like the feeling plane. You were like, “I am present, I am aware. This is sad, very sad,” but you weren’t feeling in your body, “I feel sad.”
Glennon Doyle:
There was a mess of grief and people acting strangely, and people, all social norms not happening, and people collapsing. I was watching it all, but I was not in the mess. The way that I felt about it, which I don’t know if will translate to words, was like, “Oh, they’re all in a room together, and I am here in body, but myself is in the back of a hallway, tucked behind me, inside of me, but it’s like there’s a tunnel, and the tunnel is between me and these people. I’m back here, far back inside myself, and they’re out there.”
I could act it out, I really could be there for everybody, but I was not in whatever vortex they were all in. That was so interesting for me. There was a moment at the funeral when I finally, I was in a church. Then when the stained-glass and the fricking… Catholicism is my grief aesthetic-
Abby Wambach:
On Eagle’s Wings.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, On Eagles Wings came on and I was like, “Oh, thank God.” Then I just lost it, finally.
Abby Wambach:
It’s my portal to having a feeling.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes, God houses, God houses for whatever reason. I had asked my doctor long before Christmas, before the holidays, I had told him I was thinking about experimenting with not being on meds. He had said, “How about not till after the holidays?” Which I thought, “Wow, that’s a great,” and I said, “Tell me more about that.”
He said, “It’s just for everyone, it’s the most intense time, whether you’re the happiest or the saddest or you’re… It’s just a tough time to experiment with this stuff. Let’s wait.” I said, “Yay, good call.” I think maybe a month after we got back from the funeral, I said, “Okay, I want to do this.”
Amanda Doyle:
That was before the experience with watching Abby. What was making you think about it before, then?
Glennon Doyle:
I don’t remember. I just think it was on my mind. I think… Well, okay. I always thought that there was something different and wrong with me. As we know, this was my biggest belief. I think when I started to learn that I could eat food and be like a normal human being, I could eat food, digest it, well, okay, so this is how I think it goes, right? You eat food, and then you feel full, and then you don’t die, and then you digest the food, and then you are fine, and then you get hungry again.
I understand that this sounds, but I did not think that that is how it was for me. I thought I had a bottomless pit of hunger inside of me, and that if I tapped into it, if I allowed any of it, it would be so huge, and ravenous, and animal-like that I would be the one like those fish who eat until they die and then they explode. I don’t think this was all completely conscious. I didn’t say those words in my head, but that is what I, I believe I had to protect myself from my own hunger, because for whatever reason, I was a person who didn’t function like other people.
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah. It’s a reason if you’re insatiable in your appetite, and you’re like, “Oh, I understand how other people work. That’s not how I work,” you might also feel that way about your ability to experience emotion and all of it, that you’re just not like your average bear, and you need all of these additional supports.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes, because my recovery over the last two years has been a slow removal of the things that I built up to protect myself from life, and love, and existing. Anorexia was, or whatever form my eating disorder has been in for the last 30 years, was something that I built up, a little world that I lived inside of to protect myself from life, I guess. I think that what I’ve learned is that whatever that we are afraid, we feel like we have such a deep need for something, that if we allow any of it, we will drown in it is probably something that we were deprived of at some point.
Where there is deprivation in your past, you will have such what you think is an insatiable desire for it that you might think you need to protect yourself from it. Hunger for me, familial things, cultural things, individual things, that was something that I was taught, trained, drilled into my head. Do not indulge that. That is scary. That is something that you need to control and protect yourself from.
Abby Wambach:
I think I remember why you started thinking about this. It was after a few sessions I think you had with your therapist, and then you came in, you asked me and you said, “Do you think that I’m vulnerable? Do you think I’m a vulnerable person?”
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, yeah.
Abby Wambach:
My answer was, “No, not really. It feels like you keep yourself protected, in a way.” I think after that, you started to wonder if that also could be because maybe these meds that you were taking.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, it was just a lot of things.
Abby Wambach:
It was a lot of things, but I think that that was one of the conversations we had that made you really start thinking about it.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, and I think it was the trying out of human things that other people can do, and thinking, “Oh, I can do that too. Wait, so I’m not broken about that.” Maybe if I can go ahead and let myself feel hungry, eat, be part of that world, and not die, and not, I don’t know, then maybe I can also feel, like maybe I can let myself feel the things that everyone else is feeling and not die. It was because I wanted the most interesting life, because I want love. I want to experience love. I don’t want to miss anything.
Amanda Doyle:
When you’re on that plane and seeing other people operate on another plane of humanity, where they’re able to feel something so much that they’re crying and with each other in that moment, and you can’t go there with them, you’re like, “They are having a human experience that I don’t have access to for some reason. Why don’t I have access to that? Am I not letting myself? Am I not able to? Is there some wall I’ve built up that doesn’t let me cross over to their plane? What is it?”
Glennon Doyle:
I felt like I was missing that individual thing that each of them were having, even though it looked very painful. I was also missing, and I think what bothered me even more than the individual thing, is that I was missing a bonding thing.
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Glennon Doyle:
I was missing, my family was going through something that was making them something that they weren’t before together. Like grief, collective grief is a glue. It’s like a thing that you… There’s not many ways that you can evolve at the same time with people, but that seems to do it.
Abby Wambach:
I do want to just say that your steadiness during that time was so welcome to me, who felt so unsteady, and I didn’t put it together at the time that that was even happening for you in your mind in some ways because of the meds. I just thought that was just the role you were choosing to play, because you were like, “Okay, I’ve got to hold this ship down, because Abby’s down for the count.”
I know that there’s a feeling like a disconnection, or that we were not connecting, but I felt so connected to you during that time because of your stable and your steadiness. I just want you to know that, that I felt it was important to me that I knew that I could fall apart, and that I didn’t have to take care of you. I don’t know what is this to say, it’s just that I remember feeling like when you finally cried in the church, I was so grateful that you did cry, and it was a contained moment, and then you were done with the crying.
It was like, I did feel like I was able to really fall apart in this beautiful way. It’s not all for nothing. There was some good to take away from it.
Glennon Doyle:
I might have made this up in my head, but did you ever feel like I was not in things with you? I always feel as if other people think that I don’t care as much, that I had a coldness, a removed-ness, something that when our kids started crying so hard for you. I was like, “Oh, my God, they’re so caring. They’re so loving.”
Abby Wambach:
I never once thought that you didn’t care. I knew that you cared. I also know you, and I always give you the benefit of the doubt, especially because I know you’ve been on these meds, and I know how they can operate for you. I know that there are always parts to you that you might not choose to bring to the surface, but I can see that they’re there. What might look like coldness, to me, I can tell that it’s a safety mechanism that you’ve put in place.
There’s times when we get into arguments, and you can go into that place, and that feels very disconnecting to me. For the most part, I’m able to kind of see through it and give you the benefit of the doubt, like, “Oh, yeah, that’s just what she feels like she needs to do to survive.” It’s like a survival technique, or so you thought.
Glennon Doyle:
No, it was. I’m so grateful for it. The interesting thing was that after a year and a half of intense recovery work that I was curious about it, because I have noticed that tunnel throughout my entire life and been utterly so grateful for it. I purposely wanted to be at the back of that tunnel. I don’t think it was a mistake. I think I needed all of that until I didn’t. What was different was, “Huh, I wonder if I want this anymore. I wonder if I’d like to try it a different way, and just see what happens.”
I talked to my doctor, talked to my therapist. They both agreed, “Great idea, why not try it?” I started tapering, which means you just take like, three quarters, and then one half. It means something different for… This is only something that you should do with your doctor. I have quit meds wrong many times in my life. I have gone cold turkey off of many things. It is not a good idea.
Abby Wambach:
For you.
Glennon Doyle:
No, it should always be done with a doctor.
Abby Wambach:
No, for sure with a doctor, but just for you specifically, because the doctor might prescribe somebody to go cold turkey.
Glennon Doyle:
Right, right, but it should be done with professional help. The tapering, I was so excited because I didn’t feel much difference. I felt like, “Oh, my God, what if this is just going to be okay?” I think I went down to half of what I was taking for a million years, and I felt relatively normal. I didn’t get a lot of the things that you get when you change a dose of this stuff, which is I get these crazy brain zaps.
I feel like I’m on a roller coaster constantly. It’s like this little zzz zzz zzz that happens in my brain, which I think is a thing about synapses or something. I don’t know.
Amanda Doyle:
Wow, even with this, this time, that happened to you?
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, the zaps? Totally, yeah.
Abby Wambach:
Not in the tapering time, in the time where she stopped full on.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Amanda Doyle:
Okay, wow.
Glennon Doyle:
The tapering time went great, and then at some point I was like, “I am ready to just be off.” I stopped completely. What I want to say is I have quit so many things. I have quit drinking cold turkey. I have quit, well, actually, on the same day when I was 25, I quit drinking, puking, cigarettes, drugs, everything in one day, and I was freshly pregnant. I once went off Klonopin that I’d been on for a year cold turkey by myself. I thought I was on this light little thing, and I was with a friend and she was like…
We were talking about trouble sleeping. I said, “Oh, I take this little thing my doctor gave me. I think it’s like a vitamin or something, and it helps me so much to sleep.” She said, “What is it?” I said, “It’s Klonopin.” She was like, “Okay. Well, that’s not a little vitamin. It’s like a fucking horse tranquilizer. No wonder you’re sleeping so well, lady.” Anyway, I didn’t talk to my doctor, I just went off it. I had the shakes for days. My point is, I am no newbie to withdraw. I have never experienced the hell that I was in day in and day out for what turned out to only be two weeks. I was actually very lucky.
It was as if someone had sucked even the concept of joy out of the earth. I was unbelievably irritable. I hated everyone. Every sound, I couldn’t take. I could barely look, I couldn’t even open my eyes wide. I just was so… It was horrific.
Amanda Doyle:
Did they tell you that was going to happen, or were you surprised by that?
Glennon Doyle:
They told me it might happen, and I didn’t believe that it would be as bad as… I didn’t believe them, because I’d been through so many withdrawals, and I thought I knew what it would be.
Abby Wambach:
The amount of Googling I did those two weeks about SSRI withdrawals just like, “What to expect?” I’m like, “Oh, yeah, check, check. Okay, okay, so we’re good. We’re still doing good here.”
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, I hated everyone. I really felt like, “Well, no wonder I’ve been on drugs if this is what people are like and the world is like, and I actually don’t want to live in this world with these people. I want to be sedated,” or “If they’re all okay, but this is how I am. Same conclusion.” I would go to therapy, and I would just stare at my therapist. I couldn’t even drum up the energy to describe the misery. One day, I think I emailed her or texted her, I say, “It’s just over. I can’t do this. I cannot live this way.”
She, in a great act of mercy, actually described some things from her personal past, with a similar thing and how she experienced it, which helped me very much. She also kept saying, “I don’t care. Nobody’s getting a gold star here. Nobody’s saying push through. Who cares? You go back on that medication, but the only thing I need you to know is that this is not who you are.” What I thought was, “This is who I am now.” What this time is, is who I am without meds. What all my people are are who they are.
She just said, “What I do know, I don’t know whether you should just go back on your meds or you should push through. I don’t know what you should do. You have to decide that, but what I do know is that this is a period in time that’s going to pass. You’re not forever going to be this miserable, this joyless, this without joy,” whatever. I think I said, “All right, I’ll give it two more days, and I truly feel like that’s all I can handle.” That second day, for me, it was like a complete…
It wasn’t a gradual, “I’m feeling a little bit more normal.” It was like, I woke up one day and had a normalcy. I could find joy. I felt a little bit less irritated. It just turned off. I don’t know if how everyone’s experience is. There’s no moral to this story, other than I feel like people should talk about how crazy that can be, that kind of withdrawal that for me was 10 times more intense than alcohol withdrawal, cocaine withdrawal, cigarette withdrawal, Klonopin withdrawal, like eating disorder withdrawal. It was just a really serious, immediate depths of despair depression for two weeks.
Amanda Doyle:
How long did it take you, so you’re like, “Okay, I’ve been doing this for so long, I want to see if I can experience something different without this.” Then you have the two weeks of hell, where you’re like, “Is this me without drugs?” It’s like, “No, this is me in withdrawal of drugs.” Then the withdrawal is over. Then this is you off drugs, not taking drugs. What is the you off drugs compared to you on drugs, if you take away the middle piece?
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. Such a good question. That is what I am figuring out right now. I want to hear your answer to that, Abby, but just your observations. The time, so if I think about it in eras, my medication era, and then my withdrawal era, and then the era of, “Okay, this is a new situation I’m living in, me unmedicated, but not in withdrawal.”
Amanda Doyle:
Right, and newly unmedicated, which means that’s a different thing than a year unmedicated, right? Like everything’s new, you have little baby fawn legs maybe in some ways.
Glennon Doyle:
Exactly.
Amanda Doyle:
Nothing will ever be super consistent with right now, but I’m just interested in how your body is.
Glennon Doyle:
What I noticed about era three, which I’m just five months in, so in the grand scheme of things, that’s a very short time and more will be revealed, but what happened was that I found myself in confrontation after confrontation, after confrontation, after confrontation. For real, I found myself looking at certain relationships in my life, or relationships to everything, relationships to my work, relationships to my children, relationships… It didn’t feel like, and suddenly. It didn’t feel like that.
It just felt like slowly being like, “Wait, this doesn’t feel right. That doesn’t feel right.” I was saying it didn’t feel right, and so that was creating friction, problems, conflict in many, many different areas where there wasn’t conflict before, but I don’t think it was true to me before, but I think my eating disorder and my medication combined protected me from knowing that. I think it took the “edge off” of things, which allowed things to be tolerable to me that I actually don’t, in my truest self, want or feel are tolerable.
Making that less heady, it’s like, I’d have a conversation with somebody, and maybe something in it was kind of icky, but I was way back in the tunnel. I can make it through that. It would just be like, but without being back in the tunnel, I was like in it, and I kept being uncomfortable. It’s like, everything took the edge off, but I think what I figured out over time, well, I don’t even know, because I’m still in it, but I think the edge I need. I need the edge. I don’t want to take the edge off, because the edge is the growth edge.
It’s like if I feel like something is off or I’m uncomfortable, but I mute it, nothing changes. I’m not in the struggle of change, or making things different or making things better, or making myself vulnerable. I don’t have all of the fruits of that yet. What I’m saying is that what it felt like is why do I keep getting in so many fights? Why do I keep being so upset about things? Why do I keep, upset meaning churning, upset like a pond, when it seems clear, but then the bottom gets dredged up and suddenly, it’s mucky, that kind of upset.
Abby Wambach:
One of the things that I’ve noticed is to me, you went from protection to expression, and why I think this has been so transformative for you is because those feelings and parts of yourself were all there. I think maybe, I could be wrong, the meds were suppressing some of those parts from really blossoming up and out of you. A lot of the times, when you would feel certain feelings, it would be heightened. You had to go into protection mode.
Whatever would come out would come out in a way that was obvious, A, what the problem was, and B, what was going to happen moving forward. There was very little wiggle room, because this was now such a big problem or emotion that it needed to be dealt with right on the spot. Fast-forward, no meds, and all of these parts of yourself are coming to the surface. I think what’s been really interesting is trying to figure out the volume of which those are, because you’ve been so accustomed for your life on meds that when something actually surfaces, it’s a 10. It’s a problem.
It’s been really interesting to see and to kind of work with you through this process of being off meds is because things are coming up, and your instinct is to go fix it, solve the problem or whatever. Getting comfortable with some of these things coming up, and learning to figure out what size problem they are, I think you’ve been incredible at it, by the way. Also, there’s times when I’m over here going, “Oh, gosh, she thinks this is a 10.”
It feels like it’s a 10 to you, because you’re still trying to understand when something comes up, what level it is, at what height do I need to get to sort through and wade through this feeling? You’ve been doing such a beautiful job at expressing yourself, and it’s been so interesting to me. We watch movies now, y’all, and she cries when it’s a time to cry.
Glennon Doyle:
I can’t stop crying. That’s not true. I shouldn’t say that. I can stop crying. I stop crying all the time. I do cry a lot now, and I still have a double consciousness when I start crying, where I’m crying, and then I’m like, “Look at you, you little love bug. You are so human and precious, you are crying.” It feels like a miracle to me. I think that that, trying to figure out the alert level of things, and it’s like I had other things to make me comfortable and safe for a long time, which was like anorexia, medication, all the things.
It feels like, “Oh, now I make myself comfortable. I make myself safe, I make myself…” It’s a transition of overzealousness at first. I’m like, “Oh my God, I’m the only one around here now who I’m my only defense mechanism?” It’s just a little bit maybe overdone at first.
Amanda Doyle:
I wonder if it’s, because the edge off is a way of thinking about it, and there’s also a different way of thinking about it, which is sort of like how you’ve said, oh, you always thought there was something wrong with you, so you had to have these other things. I wonder if you think there’s something deeply wrong with you, or you think you’re too sensitive, or you think you don’t have an accurate read on the situation because you’ve been gaslit your whole life and saying that your read is not accurate.
Then of course, when you get in those situations where you feel conflict or you feel uneasy, and I think this is true of a lot of people, whether they’re on meds, or whether they’ve been addicted, or whatever, you don’t trust your distrust of the situation. You don’t trust, “Oh, I feel uncomfortable here, therefore, there must be something wrong here.” You think, “I feel uncomfortable here, and the reason I feel uncomfortable is there’s something so weird about me.”
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
The last thing I’m going to do is bring that discomfort up to the ecosystem, since I know it’s my fault anyway.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
I wonder if when you talk about confrontation, confrontation, confrontation, I wonder if it’s in part that you felt that conflict more, or in part that you felt like, “I’ve finally gotten to the place where I believe that my discomfort is relevant, and I believe that I can express that discomfort in a way that doesn’t mean scorching the earth, but does mean that we can navigate through this discomfort and make the situation better.”
Which if you believe that about yourself, and you’re not trying to squelch it, then that could exist in a lot of different contexts too, of just like, “No, I trust that this is something that is our problem together.”
Glennon Doyle:
That takes us to the next part I need to discuss, because what ended up happening is that I did not know how to do life, or survive, or handle relationships without scorching the earth. I had a big rock bottom about a month ago, which led me to a new thing. I want to talk about that in the next episode. Let’s stop there and we’ll come back, and I’m going to talk about this next part, okay? I love you all. Please, if you want and you need your meds, take your damn meds. Okay? I love you. Bye.
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