On New Year’s Eve we wrote about “practicing joy” as one of our aspirations/resolutions for the coming year. But what do you do when, as hard as you might try, or as much as you may want it, there is no joy to be found? When you open yourself up to joy and nothing’s there? When moments, places and situations that had previously brought joy now feel flat and empty.
That’s the place we both found ourselves last year.
July was an especially hard month for Cassie. She felt worse than she had in a long time which is really saying something. Tired is her new normal but this felt like more than that – overwhelming fatigue, some dizziness and a constant sense of feeling generally “ooky.” Yet the cancer was stable, so her oncologist recommended that she consult her general practitioner. After a full examination, the doctor suggested that on top of everything else (Metastatic Breast Cancer, recovery from back surgery, etc.), or maybe because of everything else, Cassie might be depressed.
It was both a surprising diagnosis and at the same time not remotely a surprise. Surprising because Cassie hasn’t ever struggled with depression and doesn’t see herself as someone who is depressed. Not remotely surprising because…well of course she’s probably depressed. The past three years have been filled with unrelenting stress, fear, sadness and anxiety. It never lets up and it probably never will. Depression is a perfectly logical extension of all that and we actually greeted the doctor’s diagnosis with some relief because it was a way of making sense out of all Cassie had been feeling (or in some cases not feeling).
Cassie started a low-dose regimen of Prozac and the results were pretty quickly transformative. She had significantly more energy, more get-up-and go and she welcomed anticipation and joy back into her life. It’s not like all was instantly good in her world, but for the first time in a long time, she found herself both looking forward to things and having the energy to do them as they arrived. A real gift.
Soon thereafter Cassie turned to Dan and said: “Hey these drugs (we call them ‘happy pills’) are really working, maybe you should try them.” To which Dan almost instantly replied: “I don’t think so. I don’t need those. I don’t think I’m depressed.” All of which were wrong.
Several months passed and two things happened. Dan continued to see the positive impacts of the antidepressants on Cassie’s day-to-day life and we went on two vacations with friends which were great but not the joyful experiences of Dan’s past. One moment in particular really stood out. We were at a vineyard in Oregon. Drinking wine, picnicking, taking in the gorgeous scenery. It was one of Dan’s favorite things in the whole world to do – drink good wine in a beautiful place with close friends – and had ALWAYS brought him great joy but on that day he felt….well not really anything, which some of his friends noticed and asked about with concern.
That sparked Dan to talk with his therapist who, naturally, was more interested in why Dan thought he didn’t need anti-depressants than whether he actually did. Once that hurdle was cleared, Dan joined Cassie in becoming a daily consumer of Prozac and was soon experiencing many of the same positive results.
So that’s a big part of why we can now go into 2022 and think about “practicing” joy. Yes we can make it a practice. Yes we can be more intentional and yes we can celebrate joyful moments as they materialize. BUT all of that depends on actually being able to access a sense of joy and for that we both needed some help. For us antidepressants aren’t a silver bullet. They don’t make our sadness go away, or lessen the hard reality of Cassie’s cancer. We also know that they might stop working and/or require adjustments over time. What the antidepressants are doing right now is helping open our hearts and senses to emotions such as joy and wonder that unbeknownst to us, had begun to slip away over the past cancer-filled years. We are grateful to have them back.
