Do You Really Want To Pick That Fight?

There’s nothing quite like managing a mental illness that teaches you the need to evaluate certain thoughts and emotions before acting on them. It’s a balancing act between re-examining our reactions and honoring our instincts. After all, feelings can be important in making decisions to preserve our safety, right a wrong, pursue an opportunity — you get the idea.

But they’re also data that must be interpreted and assigned a meaning, and even for people without mental illness, the automatic thoughts that come with them aren’t always the same ones we’d have evaluating the situation with a cooler and clearer head. For example, when we’re already dealing with stress from work, we might blow up at a partner, child, or other family over something that normally we wouldn’t mind as much. Or we might misinterpret someone’s words and lash out at them, only to regret it when we realize what they really meant.

Recently, I got a slap-in-the-face reminder of how our emotions and impulses can be disconnected from our true values when I damn near lost my mind over buffalo wings.

I’m not one to play fast and loose with my medications. There are two things I can be counted on to do every day, without fail, no matter how deep my depression: feed my cats, and take my meds. But due to a mixture of both depression and insurance fuckery, for a few weeks over the summer, I was out of one of my meds, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI).

For anyone who might not know, abruptly quitting an SSRI — commonly prescribed to help manage depression and anxiety — is terrible for your immediate health. Your doctor would not recommend it.

One of the withdrawal effects, I already knew to expect. Almost a decade ago, when I was new to taking daily medication, I’d flat-out forget for days at a time. After a couple weeks of not taking the pills consistently, I got mild vertigo. If you’ve never had vertigo, on a mild level it’s a constant low-grade dizziness that peaks into feeling precariously tilty any time I move my head. Like stepping off a merry-go-round whenever I look in a new direction.

What I wasn’t expecting, and what was much worse, was the rage.

Full disclosure, I get mad a lot. I read a lot, and I frequently make self-harming choices in reading material: namely news and comments sections. But my normal anger is a simmer, contained, able to be processed and let go of with relative ease.

Having control of my temper and not letting it spill onto anyone else is something I’ve worked hard on in order to love people better. It’s very rare now that I blow up at someone when I feel hurt by them, and for general anger-at-the-world, I won’t go to my friends to talk about it unless I’m really having a hard time self-soothing.

Of course, making my feelings smaller and more manageable is also what the medication is for.

Clinically, this withdrawal symptom would probably be termed “irritability.” In my case, what this actually translated to was the simmer being constant, and anything that on a normal day might annoy me a little instead put my blood pressure through the roof.

Really. Like jaw-clenched, heart-poundingly furious.

Which is why I wanted to tear Rhett McLaughlin’s head off.

If you’re not familiar with Rhett and Link of Mythical Entertainment, they create (in Rhett’s words) “highly sophisticated YouTube videos in which we do things like attempt to consume bovine bile cheesecake only to spit it into custom made barf buckets.”

It’s not always barfy, but hopefully you get the idea — they’re lighthearted comedians who gleefully dive into shenanigans for the internet, but they also encourage their fan base to “be your Mythical best.”

For their company, being their Mythical best includes contributing “to a variety of charities including LA LGBT Center, Make A Wish, Inner-City Arts, St. Jude, NAACP, vote.org, and more,” per their website. Their podcast is more personal and grounded than their normal fare, and they’ve frequently shared socially progressive, humanist views in their stories of growth.

So you can see why, as a socially progressive lefty, I regard them warmly. I don’t know all of their politics, but it seems like their hearts are in the right place.

Unfortunately, the wrath of withdrawal brain spares no one.

For some reason I can’t remember, they were talking about buffalo wings in one of their videos, and Rhett said (paraphrasing), “This is a problem with me, but I lose respect for someone if they get honey barbecue wings as part of a group order. I like honey barbecue, but they’re for children. I don’t know what that says about me.”

On a normal day, I’d probably shake my head a bit, and think, “Yeah, that is kinda douchey. I would order honey barbecue wings.”

On withdrawal brain, it was more like, “Yeah, you asshole, it IS a problem with you! Fuck you and your patriarchal superiority about something as stupid as hot wings! Why the hell are you still carrying around this bullshit machismo over how spicy someone’s wings should be? You’re progressive! You should know better!”

Probably not an unexpected brand of outrage from someone of my political alignment and demographics, but not one I feel good about.

Thank god, all the mental health work I’ve done isn’t for nothing. I knew my thoughts were unreasonable, and I knew not to invest in emotions that were only occurring because my brain chemistry was a mess.

Unfortunately, that recognition didn’t magically dissipate the fury or stop the internal tirade. I was locked in a struggle of one part of me hurling verbal dinner plates at the walls in my head, while another part tried to keep everything locked down with awareness that my reaction was out of sync with my values and “true” feelings. (Preferred feelings? Maybe that’s an article for another day.)

I stopped myself from going on a rant in the comments, but the impulse to say something was so intense that I did comment in a more direct and cold tone than I am happy with now. In the steadying light of medicated day, I really would have preferred to not have commented at all, because it was a waste of time and words — and it’s a bit of a blow to my ego. After all this time and practice, I was unable to overcome the intense impulse to say something.

I’m sure my therapist would say I should at least celebrate the half-victory of not giving in to writing something embarrassingly aggressive. And I guess, in writing this, I am recognizing it as a worthy try.

Being off medications offers an extreme example of reactive outrage, one that stands out to me because I knew that the intensity wasn’t “really me,” for lack of a better phrase. I was acutely aware that my anger was a symptom of withdrawal.

The practice that allowed me to separate myself from my anger has helped me in more mundane situations, too. It’s a concept in mindfulness meditation: we can divest our “self” from our thoughts and feelings. Those are things we have, or things that happen inside us, but we don’t have to accept them as fundamentally who we are. And we don’t have to accept them as the compass for our actions.

So, do we really want to pick that fight? Or is it stress? Loneliness? Habit?

If you’re interested in learning more about mindfulness, this pdf on the practice of “Seeing Thoughts as Thoughts” from Bowdoin College and this article about identifying cognitive distortions in cognitive-behavioral therapy are good places to get started.

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Previously Published on medium

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