Why I started taking Prozac and why I dosed off three and half years later.
Emily Brodrick
As I laid on my friend Dylan Levene’s couch in her apartment in Burlington, VT, a thought occurred to me: Did I remember to take my meds? It was a cold, rainy afternoon on Monday, October 14th in northern Vermont, where I’d lived for 16 months before moving to New York for graduate school in 2023. I turned my head to the left, towards the arm of the dark gray couch that used to be ours when I lived in that apartment with Dylan. On the arm sat a translucent, orange, plastic bottle with a white cap that must be pushed down before it can be twisted off. The label on the bottle read my full name, an address I hadn’t lived at in six years, and the name of the medication within, in all caps. “FLUOXETINE HCL 10MG TABLET.” I had forgotten to take my antidepressant the night before.
Every night for three and a half years, at some time between 8:00 and 10:00 pm, I took the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) Fluoxetine, better known as Prozac. I’d taken different doses over time, fluctuating up and down between 20-40 milligrams as the seasons changed and I perceived myself as better or worse. I always wondered when a time would come when I would completely taper off, though. In May 2024, I was feeling ready to start. I dosed down to 10mg, where I rested in limbo for half a year. Too afraid to taper down any lower and simultaneously restless to be done with SSRIs. This liminality led to a handful of accidental skipped doses. But unlike previously, when I would take my Prozac as soon as I realized I’d forgotten to, those days, I didn’t always.
When I realized I’d forgotten to take my medication again, I leaned over and grabbed the bottle. Then I paused. I rotated the bottle in my right hand and scanned the label with my eyes. 10mg of Prozac is a pediatric dose, I thought. It wouldn’t have made any significant difference whether I took it or not. I wasn’t convinced whether taking it any day made a noticeable difference. Yet I was still doing it out of familiarity, out of comfort. Taking the SSRI had become temporally symbolic—there would be a time when I was on Prozac and a time after. I wasn’t sure I was prepared for the after.
There had been a time before Prozac, too. That period was also divided into two sub-periods: the time I was treading with my head above the water and the time when I was drowning. I’d always had periods of feeling heavy and volatile. At four I locked myself in the bathroom at a friend’s house, turned on the tub faucet, plugged the drain, and let the tub overflow because my friend and I had gotten into an argument. At fifteen I laid down on my kitchen floor and cried every day for three months because I fell out of love with a boy. But for the most part, I kept my feet in my shoes and my brain in my head.
Then, in October 2018 my boyfriend of seven years fell in love with someone else. I had to move out of our apartment in Cambridge, MA, where we’d lived together for five years. I was still recovering from that heartache when the pandemic started in March 2020. I lost my waitressing job and my best friend moved to California. I’d been living alone near Harvard Square since the breakup and was totally isolated. I was lost at sea.
As I navigated through high and low currents, I’d get wild ideas like I’m going to become an organic vegetable farmer or I’m going to go back to school for geography, but then I’d lose momentum. A year after the pandemic had begun, I was still unemployed. I’d applied and gotten into a graduate program in geography at the University of New Mexico and I declined the offer, convinced, after visiting Albuquerque for the first time, that living in that city would only worsen my depression. Many days, I had trouble getting out of bed. I cried all the time. My heart would pump so vigorously that it made my whole body thump along with it. Then, I’d sink listless below the waves to the bottom of the ocean, where no light reaches. An idea floated down there, though: This isn’t sustainable. In May 2021, I finally decided to give antidepressants a real shot. Within nine days, I felt hope for the first time in months. Within a month, I landed a job at a cafe. Within two, I moved out of my one-bedroom apartment to live with four other roommates in Arlington, MA.
Sometime in the spring of 2024, I recognized it also wasn’t sustainable to stay on a medication I no longer needed. Prozac gave me the extra push I needed to move forward, but I never believed I was going to take it indefinitely. The days of ritual heart palpitations were long behind me.
Over the course of the day at Dylan’s, laying on that couch doing almost nothing, I developed a migraine and became nauseated. I worried that skipping my dose was causing me discomfort. If skipping 10mg could do this, imagine what stopping altogether could do, I thought. I looked out the window at the waning day. The foliage was peaking in northern Vermont that week and while the warm and vibrant tones of the leaves were dazzling, they symbolized the passing of time. I realized what I was feeling wasn’t simply the lack of Prozac but sadness. Being in Vermont was causing emotions to surface in all their complexities now that my dose was so low. However, being sad in Vermont was a theme. Even when I was fully medicated, though the feeling was muted and less distracting, I was sad all the time when I lived in Vermont.
One of my wild ideas came to fruition and I did end up getting trained as an organic vegetable farmer. After living just outside of Boston, my home for eight years, I moved to Burlington, VT to take part in the Farmer Training Program through the University of Vermont from May - October 2022. Dylan and I met through the program. During month two we bonded over the cleaning of hundreds of little red radishes when we admitted to each other that we had both hooked up with someone in the program. Farming was physically overwhelming and intellectually understimulating. I continually considered dropping out. I skipped so many days the program staff almost kicked me out. I had few friends at the farm besides Dylan. There was also a man in the program I was convinced I was in love with who had a narcissistic personality disorder diagnosis. After the program ended I stayed in the area for a few months. Dylan and I got an apartment together. I got another waitressing job and applied to graduate programs again. Vermont itself was beautiful but had few opportunities for a 30-something seeking to build a network or profession outside of agriculture. Perhaps it’s unsurprising then, that when I returned to Burlington that week, I was flooded with grief. These feelings would have surfaced with or without Prozac. If Dylan didn’t still live there, I would never visit.
Luckily, I didn’t live there anymore and my visit was coming to an end.
Dylan drove me to the airport where I’d catch my plane back to New York at 8:00 pm.
“I love you. Thanks for having me,” I said as I grabbed my bags from the back seat of her car.
“I love you too. Text me when you land,” Dylan said.
The flight was delayed an hour. I had a glass of wine at the closing bar and watched the sky fade to black through the panoramic windows. My heart sank with the sun. I texted my mom that I was depressed. She sent me a frowning emoji. A few minutes later, the feeling had passed. I realized again that I was simply sad. I was feeling the natural ache of time passing - day to night, warm to cold, year to year - and the feeling came and went with the passing of time, too. If I was ever going to get off that medication, I would have to learn to accept my full range of feelings.
I wanted to taper off Prozac initially because I was ready to accept the highs and the lows. The numbness of my SSRI had served a purpose when the lows were more than I could take but they weren’t anymore. They were low-level and fleeting even on my pediatric dose. I understood their purposes and I waded through them with music, or tears, or a text to a friend or my mom.
In May of 2024, when I dosed down from 20-10mg, I took a walk through Tompkins Square Park. I had my headphones on and Free Man In Paris by Joni Mitchel was coming through them. I looked up at the fresh leaves on the big old oaks canopying over the park. A wave of warm hope pulsed through me. Goosebumps rose. I’d forgotten small joys like that. The little orange bottle and its contents were a cast for a broken soul but my soul had healed. I was ready to have my mobility back. I remembered this moment when I took my final dose of Prozac later that year in December.
I boarded the plane sometime around 9:00. As we rose into the dark sky, I looked out at the constellations that twinkled from above and below.