Club Med

Hello. Is this thing on? When I first started Procrastibaking in 2016, I wrote almost weekly if not more when I had a lot to say. Now I haven't sent a dispatch in three months. Not a lot has been going on really, just starting a new job, getting on a SSRI for the first time, and buying a condo. Oh, I also went to Paris for four days in March, which felt more normal than anything else I've just listed. I want to say all of these changes have contributed to me feeling better, but if I'm honest it was mostly the Prozac.

If 2020 was a year of stagnation and 2021 was a year of forcing all the wrong changes, then 2022 is a year I actually improve my life by doing the things I've been afraid of for years. After unsuccessfully job hunting on and off since 2020, I finally landed my dream higher ed job in research writing, and just being able to write and not do the 25 other things that comprise "communications" has been such a weight off my chest. My coworkers are all former journalism and marketing people, so my office feels more like when I worked at the magazine than when my life was ruled by faculty whims. I still interview professors, but then I go back to my world of people who discuss Wordle on lunch breaks and actually take breaks. I rarely think about work on nights and weekends, which is something I've always aspired to, but in the past it felt like trying to win a stuffed bear in some carnival game—so close yet impossible to the point it seemed rigged. 

But even though I wasn't worried about deadlines and office politics in January, I was finding something else to worry about. My default setting was stomach-churning anxiety, waking up for an hour or two after I fed the cats at 4 a.m., stress-induced migraines, and depression irritability. If there wasn't an obvious threat, I would invent one from being so panicked about highway driving I'd deliberately double my commute time with taking surface streets or doomscroll until I found an article that matched my bleak mood (it didn't usually take long). This level of anxiety and depression was just my norm, right? Never mind my insomnia hadn't been this bad since high school and I was regularly buying enough antacids at CVS I was getting a discount. I couldn't Zantac my way out of this anymore.

When I told my therapist last December I was meeting even social plans with the level of anxiety I'd bring to a job interview, she suggested I get on meds. This was something I'd been avoiding for years as proof my mental illness really wasn't that bad. I was convinced I could control my anxiety with coping mechanisms, but I was spending most of my day decompressing that there was barely time for stuff I wanted to do. If I missed one of my coping mechanisms, like journaling or meditation, it would wreck my next day. I knew my mental health shouldn't be so precarious that skipping a 10-minute Headspace meditation would throw me into a tailspin. So when my therapist finally suggested I see a psychiatrist, I glumly agreed. It felt inevitable at this point, and I knew I had tried my damndest and still felt terrible and needed to try something new.

This is how I found myself explaining my anxiety symptoms and how happy my childhood was to a man like Captain Holt's husband, Kevin, on Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Despite how I was worried the psychiatrist would think I was totally fine (definitely a sign I have generalized anxiety disorder), he confirmed I definitely had a pretty gnarly anxiety disorder, some depression, no OCD, and no ADHD regardless of what TikTok tells me,  and sent me off with a prescription for Prozac. I went from avoiding meds to being put on one of the most famous for depression. 

Although the first few weeks were mostly dodging side effects like dry mouth and feeling manic (yes, somehow I was talking even faster than normal), I didn't really see many changes. And then about a month in I started noticing how little I was noticing. I wasn't letting minor inconveniences from traffic to work miscommunications bother me half as much. I had so much more time to do what I actually wanted because I wasn't getting lost in anxiety spirals or needing to take the edge off as much with one of my 400 coping mechanisms. I was regularly taking the highway to places. I wasn't getting all worked up about going to a concert or book event on a week night and just going. I was getting out of anxiety spirals before I even went on them and catching my bad behaviors and self-sabotaging patterns i.e. anxiety googling some weird thing happening to the cats. I wasn't nearly as irritable. I felt better able to show up for my friends and family and not center myself in the narrative as much. I was sleeping through the night. And I wasn't the only one who recognized these changes. My friends said I seemed to be doing better, and my own parents basically said I was less annoying. I agreed.

It wasn't a panacea. I'm still a cranky, neurotic bitch sometimes, and if I'm really stressed, I completely override my Prozac and find myself waking up too early with a panic in my chest. I still get overwhelmed, so much so I told a friend that even though I knew I needed to move, maybe I'd postpone my condo search because I just couldn't handle real estate in March. He wisely replied: "Wait, so you're saying you don't want to look at condos because you just don't want to deal with it? I know you hate moving, but you've never moved on Prozac, right?" And he was right. This process has been totally overwhelming, exhausting, time-consuming, and extremely anxiety inducing and...I doubt I could've managed a fourth of it and still enjoyed my life without a SSRI.

It's not that Prozac has made my life easier, but it has made it easier to live in. I don't think I even realized how hard I'd let things become. The pandemic made it seem like some type of mood disorder was the norm, and though these things are incredibly common, feeling their full effects doesn't have to be. I'm not my anxiety; in fact, there are many things I've learned are just inherently part of me and can't be blamed on mental health: procrastination, my brain working best at night, thriving on deadlines, being a bit late to everywhere but the airport. Instead of beating myself up for it, I'm just embracing this is who I am and I'm not fighting her nearly as much. And I might actually be happy or getting there for the first time in years. 

Pimento Cheese Pizza

This is less of a recipe and more a fun way to use up one of my favorite Southern dips. You don't really have to make anything yourself here, but the results are just as satisfying as if you did.


Ingredients
1 premade pizza dough
3/4 a container of pimento cheese (if in Georgia, I recommend Homegrown.)
A few hunks of havarti or another strong cheese
Half a cup or so of jarred tomato sauce
Onions, spinach, peppers, mushrooms, etc. sauteed

Directions

1.  Preheat oven according to dough package directions. Roll out dough and place on baking sheet.
2. Pour a generous amount of tomato sauce and spread around crust. 
3. Top with pimento cheese and spread around.
4. Add chunks of other cheese liberally.
5. Top with sauteed veggies if using.
6. Bake according to package directions. 

Tess Recommends:

-I'm almost alarmed at how much I loved Apple TV's Severance, a dystopia where workers can have a procedure where their work and home identities are totally separate. It both makes no sense and perfect sense a comic like Ben Stiller directed this; the attention to detail is astounding. Everything from the scary symmetrical cinematography to the weird jokes work, and better yet the twists never feel obvious but are always satisfying. I can't wait for season two.