London | Yet Another Accidental Spangling

Well I’m not on antidepressants anymore lol.

After my emotional article a few days ago, I went to the pharmacy to pick up my anti-D’s and spent the day working at my sharehouse. My friend Liv messaged me in the late afternoon asking if I wanted to hang out, and I said yes. Gobbling the first of my little no-sad pills, I pulled on my jacket and hopped onto the very noisy and horrible Northern Line all the way to Angel.

ASIDE: Sadiq, Boris, I don’t care who does it, fix the damn Underground. Why do Londoners just put up with it? It’s garbage, man! Garbage! Have you been to Copenhagen? Their subways look like spaceships! They’re nice places to be! Even Berlin’s U Bahns are spacious and well-ventilated and they don’t reek of coal and hate. Honestly. It’s 2021 up top but it’s still Victorian fucking England down there. London, mate: commuting doesn’t have to be awful! Spend some money!

Anyway.

At Angel I got off the Tube and walked fifteen minutes to meet Liv and her friends at a bar called the Wilfred Pickle or something. I drank a can of beer on the way, because the sun was shining and because I felt like it. I arrived, waved hello to Liv and her gang, and perched on the end of the table and smiled and said hello to the new faces around me. Then I was off my tits.

It happened that quickly: absolutely fine, saying ‘how do you do’, then from nowhere, gurning and swaying in my seat with enormous pupils. It took a minute for me to figure out what was happening to me. Eventually I was able to fight through the sudden come-up to remember the little 100mg Sertreline pill I’d taken an hour previously. I hadn’t particularly wanted to have this conversation with a table full of strangers, but I didn’t really have a choice.

“Hello everybody, yes, sorry to interrupt, but my name’s Dan—nice to meet you—and I am a depressed man. This morning I took a tablet to make me not a depressed man, but now it seems the pill is kicking in as though I’d just banged a gram of MDMA, and I really sort of feel not brilliant. Does anybody have any information relating to my predicament that might be of use? Again, lovely to meet you all. A pleasure, truly. Forgive me.”

Thankfully—god love Millennials—almost everybody at the table had been on antidepressants at some point or other. One girl (her name escapes me, I am sorry) had been on the same tablets I’d been given. She told me it’s normal to feel off your tits for a week or so, after which your body finds a new equilibrium—one with more serotonin and less staring at the ceiling yelling ‘FUCK YOU GOD’.

Though I was grateful for her advice, I couldn’t help my thoughts from straying furiously to my doctor, who had informed me merely that I ‘might feel a bit tired for the first three days’. She failed to mention that I would be absolutely spangled and gurning like a loon. Waves of nausea clapped at my face like moist haddock. I went to the toilet and shoved my fingers down my throat to make myself vomit, then I floated back to the table and drank three glasses of water and concentrated on not dying like in that meme I always send everybody.

It all felt a bit unfair. My partying days are behind me now. I’m a good boy. Berlin was ages ago, and I don’t remember the last night club I went to. I take vitamins! Two different vitamin tablets! Every day! I give a damn about my innards now! And yet such is my luck: I try a little pill to fix my poorly brain and my body decides to kick off and make a fuss about it.

When I got home—after a particularly joyous ride on the Northern Line—I lay in bed and read the label on the pills. In quite large writing I found it recommended that beginners start with 50mg.

“Good, good,” I nodded to myself as the Earth wobbled around me and my eyeballs throbbed.

The next day, after a night that can best be summarised as ‘Trainspotting’, I lay in bed for about twenty hours before eating a piece of toast and throwing the little box of tablets in the bin.

My attitude at the moment towards anti-D’s is conflicted. On the one hand, they help people, which is nice. On the other—well, read the above article.

I was at a fancy dress party in Clapham last night. The theme was the letter C. There were three cheerleaders, three crayons, a criminal, a cannibal, a Coachella-attendee, a chef, a cheetah, a cavalier (?!), two cowboys and a cock (the blow-up goolies of which slowly deflated as the evening wore on). I dressed up as Che Guevara and like, one person knew who I was. Everybody kept calling me ‘the dictator’ and turned away in boredom when I tried to explain the outrageous inaccuracies in their assumption.

Anyway, during this party I told my friend Sam that I had binned my anti-D’s.

“Fuck ‘em, man,” he told me. “Just do loads of fun stuff instead.”

And you know what? Maybe he’s got a point.

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