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A is for Anxiety

Until recently, I spent roughly 25 years on various forms of anti-depressant or lately anti-anxiety medications.  

A problem inherent in being biologically female and Autistic is that one is almost never diagnosed correctly until much later in life.  Briefly, this is due to the vast majority of Autism research having been conducted only with data gathered from males, primarily young boys.  This led (incorrectly) to the conclusion that Only Boys Can Have Autism.  This has also led (infuriatingly) to girls with Autism being misdiagnosed sometimes multiple times over the course of their lives with depression, anxiety, Borderline Personality Disorder, etc.  Unless a little girl was overwhelmingly obviously autistic, they were never diagnosed as such.  Because Only Boys Can Have Autism.  Only recently have women begun to be recognized as Autistic.  I am part of that cohort.  

Anxiety is most definitely part of Autism, or rather a product of it.  I wouldn’t say a symptom, truly more of a product.  Try going through your life constantly befuddled by the world around you and tell me you don’t have anxiety.  Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Anyway.  So yeah, I was on anti-anxiety meds.  Until my doctor neglected to renew the prescription.  Despite 2 calls to the doctor by my pharmacist.  So suddenly I’m going cold turkey from a med I’ve been on for the last 10 years.  

But I’m no stranger to such situations, unfortunately.  In my 20s I got dumped from my state’s TennCare program without warning while I was on 80mg Paxil.  The highest single-pill dosage they make.  I had half a month’s worth left.  I started cutting them in half immediately to try to ramp down as much as I could, but after they were gone it was cold turkey.  If you’ve never been on anti-depressants, they tell you they’re not addictive.  The hell they aren’t.  They’re physically addictive.  I spent about 6 weeks with my head spinning like a top.  It got so bad that I couldn’t sit in a chair without arms because I would literally lose my balance and fall out of the chair.  But then I found the best thing -- Dramamine will stop the spinny head.  Not kidding.  Good old fashioned Dramamine.  Holy crap suddenly I could make it through work without vomiting in the parking lot.  So I stocked up on that and soldiered on.  After I put myself on St. John’s Wort -- highly recommended, at least by me -- and was all right with the world for nigh on 20 years or so, until I got on the anti-anxiety meds.  The two are not good together.  Don’t do it.  SSRIs and MAOIs do not mix, kids.  DON’T DO IT.

Anyway, again.  I’m trying to get to the point here.  So yeah, the withdrawal from the much lower dosage of anti-anxiety meds went comparatively smoothly, and I’ve been off completely for several weeks now.  I want to know what kind of baseline I’m working with nowadays.  I’ve been on meds for so long that I honestly don’t know who I am underneath it.  So I’m ... okay with it.  Being off the drugs.  I want -- I need -- to know how Autistic I am underneath it all.  Who is the unvarnished, unadulterated Aunty Proton?  I can’t know what I need to look out for with drug-biased data.  

Pursuant to this, I’ve begun keeping an Anxiety List.  When I get to bugging, I fire up my Google Keep app and write that sucker down.  How is this useful?  A common pitfall of Autism is meltdowns, where a person becomes overwhelmed by stresses or environmental conditions to the point that they just snap.  It may be due to sensory sensitivities, it may be due to an overwhelming load of demands, it may be due to social conditions -- everybody is different in their triggers.  It’s usually a situation of things building up until a final trigger just is too much.  So by keeping track of things that I sense are stressing me out, I hope to determine what kind of things in general could set me off.  I’m trying to adult here.  To be my own therapist.  Because I ain’t got the money to afford all my bills right now much less therapy.  

That’s a rant for another time though.  HOWEVER.  Thanks to a wonderful resource there is some hope in that regard.  If you’re Autistic and can handle working for a living but have trouble finding a job that you can do, well, I’m going to try Mentra at mentra.me.  The wonderful resource that made me aware of Mentra is known as neurodivergent_insights on Instagram.  Dr. Megan Neff.  SHE’S THE BEST PERSON EVER.  Please give her a follow if you haven’t, she’s honestly taught me so much about this crazy called Autism and made me suspect I may also be ADHD.  

So hoping Mentra can help me.  I haven’t signed up yet, planning on that starting today after I’m done with this post.  I will let you all know.  

Take care of yourselves, people, because once you hit 18 no one is going to take care of you but yourself.  Word.