On meds and creativity

I was always afraid of going on meds. 

I didn’t actually even know what meds were but I knew I didn’t want to be on them. I knew from television that meds - whatever they were - would zonk me out, make me put on weight, lose my sex drive and steal my joy and my creativity. 

I grew up in a community that never talked about mental health. To be fair, in the time I grew up, even outside the Sri Lankan community there was limited nuance in discussions about the mind - you were either crazy or you weren’t. I watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest and knew I wanted to avoid any path that might end in a lobotomy. I would hang on to all the parts of my brain, thank you.  

I learned the terms depression and anxiety in my early thirties and started to understand the depth of its unregulated effects on my turbulent family history. One in three have died of cirrhosis. Maybe because alcohol is cheaper than therapy or because it’s easier to drink feelings than speak about them.

Mental health issues run rife on both sides of my family but still, I remained averse to any meds moderating my mind. Why would I ever choose to stop feeling feelings and risk losing my creativity?

My meds stigma only started to soften when I started doing comedy. So many on the circuit speak openly of their mental health, the meds they’re on, their divergent minds and lives. I was blown away by Nanette like the rest of the world. But even when Hannah Gadsby took apart the very notion of medication muting creativity, I still thought - well that’s nice for everyone else but none of this applies to me. 

When my father was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer across the country, my family went into meltdown and I hit my breaking point. I languished at creaking point for some time. I was the ship in that scene from Titanic where half of it is underwater but not yet broken in half. Yes since I last watched Titanic, I still think about it at least once a day.

The Titanic / my mental health stages (image credit: How It Works Daily)

I was the creaking ship through the multiple miscarriages, IVF, lockdowns and projects on our old house where fixing one thing meant uncovering another six things that needed fixing. I was doing regular psych sessions and we’d discussed meds a lot. I spoke with family and friends about it but I still thought - no, no and also, no.

The pressure kept building, till soon it felt like Charlie and I argued every hour of every day. We started with a couples counsellor and when he said that he felt I wasn’t coping, I felt betrayed. I was doing my best in the middle of a shit storm and I couldn’t believe it wasn’t good enough for him. 

One day I was so fed up of trying that I told Charlie I was going to stay at a friend’s for a week, to get some peace. I spent one night alone before I got a call from Perth saying that my father was in emergency care again. I was the ship when it finally cracked in two. I was on a flight to Perth the next morning.

What I realised on the plane was that Charlie was right. It wasn’t us. It wasn’t my family. It wasn’t work. It was me. I wasn’t coping. I hadn’t been for a long time. 

So finally admitting defeat, with much fear and suspicion and multiple conversations with my psych and GP, I started meds. I won’t tell you which one because this isn’t medical advice or a product placement. Meds affect people in different ways and if you’re struggling, start having chats with people you trust, get the number of a good doctor and take it from there. 

For me, the meds took a week to kick in. And I was stunned when they did. For the first time I could remember, the clutter in my mind was gone. It did not feel like failing. It felt like I’d been on a door in the ocean and finally a boat had come to rescue me. Sweet Judas I need to get Titanic out of my head.

Let me explain. I am an intense and reactive human. I move from extreme anger to sadness to irritability to joy - sometimes all in the space of an hour. I am a person who threw a lot of drinks at people when I first started drinking at seventeen. I threw the liquid, not the container - yes that is still obviously very bad behaviour. Especially because it happened because I was bored or angry and I only stopped when my ex gave me a (valid) talking to about how this was bad behaviour.

I could never seem to control my reactions or emotions in the way that everyone else seemed naturally able to. I am the person who listens to a song that I love on repeat for days - till I know every beat, lyric and key change of said song. Then I will apply myself with equal intensity to the next song. 

If I am driving and someone cuts in front of me, I will angrily hit the horn. Then if they give me the finger out the window, I will weep about how unfair that was. Anxiety spirals and panic attacks became norms for me in my early thirties and it was a long road to learn how to manage them when they descended on me. 

I knew this about myself but I didn’t know how intense the levels were until I started meds. What they did for me is like what happened on my last visit to a bowling alley. I missed the pins so many times that the staff raised the railings along the gutters. Look, yes I am a terrible bowler but one can’t peak on all fronts can they? The point is, they made it so much easier for me to hit the pins. I wonder if there was a bowling alley on the Titanic, I know cruise ships have them now.

The meds were the railing for my mind, they took the edges off my feelings and kept them in the centre. I still felt many emotions but my cells did not burn with the intensity of them. The space to react proportionately to every day occurrences was a gift - to myself, Charlie and many others around me. It is what allowed me to keep moving when my father passed away and try to handle the onslaught of admin that came in the wake of his funeral.

It is also what allowed me to keep creating. I had so much newly discovered space in my mind to fill - rather than dampening my creativity, it now had a place to fly. I went on meds in November 2022 and my stand up comedy career started lift off in January 2023.

I should have listened to Hannah Gadsby all along. I did not gain weight and I did not lose my libido. Meds are the single biggest life changing factor from the last decade and I wonder if my younger self could have avoided the hourly rollercoaster, had I been open to them. I wonder if I would have thrown anything at anyone at all.

It’s now two years since I started them and I’m slowly coming off them for the first time.  Life feels a lot more manageable these days. I’ve worked really hard to get my diet and exercise back to healthy spaces, my work life balance is back on track, we are off the IVF boat and there are no current family emergencies to douse.

An additional bonus is my marriage is remain intact

So it feels like a good time to figure out if I need meds forever or only to get through difficult times. I think one day soon we will see meds as crutches for the mind. Some people need them for a little while, some for a long while and some forever. 

I don’t know which group I’m in because I avoided going on them for so long. I don’t know if the meds provide something my mind could never produce, forgot how to produce or cannot produce in times of stress. I don’t know if I was born on a door in the ocean or if I ended up there after a very large ship definitely not called the Titanic sank.

I’m excited to find out. At the very least, I’m grateful that my understanding of mental health now extends beyond that movie with Jack Nicholson. And that I can talk about it openly, without fear, much respect and love. 

Big hugs to everyone out there

Sashi