My prescriber said I could stop if I wanted to, and I hadn’t done any extensive research at that point, so I honestly thought I could just stop. Looking back, I try to be kind to myself about this one: I didn’t know. Nobody had told me, and the one person whose job it was to know had just told me it was fine.

The first days

So I stopped. The first couple of days weren’t too bad, and I remember thinking that maybe this wouldn’t be so hard after all. Then everything hit at once.

Everything at once

I couldn’t sleep, at all. My anxiety was unlike anything I’d ever experienced, my heart raced, and I felt like I was outside my own body. Lights were too bright, sounds were overwhelming, and I couldn’t think straight. I genuinely thought I was dying, or losing my mind, or that some neurological illness had picked that exact week to show up.

So I went to the emergency department. They told me it might be the benzo withdrawal and reinstated me to my previous dose. And that was that, sent home, back on my 2 mg, with one brand new piece of information: apparently the medication I’d been taking exactly as prescribed could do THIS.

And then I was like, WTF IS THIS HELL.

That question is where everything changed. Not the getting better part (that was still very, very far away), but the part where I stopped assuming somebody else was steering. What I did next, the reading, the Ashton Manual, and the very weird look my doctor gave me when I brought it up, that’s the next post.