My Norah Ephron levels
Hi friend,
How are you?
I asked an IRL friend that the other night, too. Hadn’t seen her in weeks, hadn’t caught up for a couple of months.
She gave an honest answer along the lines of: “You know, I don’t really know, you know?” I knew. We talked about how sometimes you’re just kind of going and reflection doesn’t enter the picture. I think that’s common. I tend toward a dominant mode for a month or three at a time. Ruminative, or fretful, or planny, or go go go go.
I can see this mode pattern in my journal, which I’ve kept in its current form since 2011. There will be months with multiple entries per week, sometimes daily, and then six, ten weeks of absolutely nothing. What was I doing? How was it going? (The gaps usually mean it was going very good or very bad.)
My own “How are you?” answer was different, in that I know very well how it is going because I have an A/B comparison. If you’d asked me three months ago (A), I would have said “oh, pretty good I guess”. And I’d have meant it, because I was doing pretty good, relatively speaking; I wasn’t despondent, I was involved in some new creative projects and learning skills that were really rewarding, my partner and I were getting on very well.
Feeling like I was doing pretty good gave me motivation to not lose that, to not backslide to “pretty bad man, real low lately”. So I did something I should have done at any point over the last ten years when that was my answer: I got back on bupropion.
Bupropion, marketed as Wellbutrin (these names, jesus), is an antidepressant. It’s pretty popular, in part because unlike many others it doesn’t cause weight gain or impotence. Which, you know, not great if you’re trying to feel better about life. Not all antidepressants work for all depressed people. Thankfully for me, this one does.
My first time on it was many years ago, “off-label” for ADHD, a common application. It helped. I learned that it was possible, for instance, to leave space between someone finishing a sentence and me starting one. Wild! I went off of it eventually, for uninteresting reasons. It had worked well for my ability to focus, my patience, mood stability, and overall energy — and, bonus, weight loss from decreased impulsive eating.
But how to proceed? U.S. healthcare suuuuucks. I didn’t want to deal with referrals and judgmental P.A.’s role-playing doctor and DEA agent at the same time. Instead, I did a bit of googling to find a reasonable price from an online service, with low friction, that offered bupropion.
Regrettably, the best answer was “hims”, that telehealth startup that grew to a $1.6b valuation selling boner and baldness pills.
There’s me waiting for my “Doctor”, a dermatology clinic nurse practitioner who now finds herself part of the medtech gig economy. Capitalism, baby! So, ridiculous, but it worked.
And now I’m in the (B) group. Friends … this campaign is the clear winner. The pills aren’t magic, of course. It hasn’t all been rosy — insomnia, a sort of “head nausea”, anxious days thinking I’d damaged my hearing at the welding studio. But no, that ringing is another side effect, the sound of bupropion doing its magic on my Norah Ephron levels (as I choose to refer to norepinephrine).
In the (A) period I was doing better, but better didn’t mean that I was well. I was not. Mostly, I had no idea how utterly, entirely fatigued I was. Even having written about feeling utterly, entirely fatigued in this very publication! I couldn’t see that the depression had gotten down into my goddamn bones. I mean that, my bones. It took minutes in the morning for my feet and legs to even feel capable of human locomotion. I thought it was just getting older, where's my Metamucil, ha ha. Nope: fatigue.
I also couldn’t see that so many choices were shaped by this bone-deep fatigue and omnipresent tar of glumness. It sucked the life out of a lot of things and made my main goal many days getting back home into bed.
I’m reminded of a scene in Parks & Rec where the charmingly-dim character Andy describes depression to his friends without realizing it:
I’m fine. It’s just that life is pointless and nothing matters and I’m always tired. Also, I can’t sleep, I’m overeating, none of my old hobbies interest me.
It was a bit like that. I persisted out of stubbornness. I knew intellectually that it was not the case that nothing matters, and I held that understanding with a needful, white-knuckled grip.
It’s been about six weeks on the bupes now, and I could sprint out of bed in the morning. I won’t, but I could. I find myself amazed at how much can be accomplished in a single day when you aren't running on empty. I'm not always happy, I still get angry at bad drivers, but dealing with difficulties big and small is so, so much easier now.
This A/B test has been … humbling, I guess? It’s that “oh, this door wouldn’t open because it’s pull, not push” feeling except it’s not a random door, it’s something incredibly important in your life. But that’s just living sometimes, I suppose.
So that’s how I’m doing, presently: pretty good — now said with much greater confidence.
Take care out there,
Scott
A word on Content Career Accelerator
I’ve been doing a lot of calls the past two weeks to show folks the new-and-improved Content Career Accelerator. CCA is a private coaching and learning community for current and aspiring content professionals, and it’s my “big bet” for 2024 — meaning: this is the thing I really, really want to work.
I’m in that challenging chicken or the egg phase of community building where you're trying to prove the value of what is still a somewhat theoretical experience. But it’s picking up, and the first few new folks are moving through the enrollment process.
If you know someone who might benefit from support in navigating their content career — or in navigating a UX career with a background in content — please point them my way. Here's a link to copy-and-paste: https://kubie.co/cca/
If you yourself are interested, reply to let me know and I can share some details and a video tour.
Thanks. 🩷