During my second wrestling match with depression last year, my doctor put me on Effexor. I wrote about the debilitating initial effects on this blog some time ago, as well as the cavalier attitude of my doctor, who said “I knew I shouldn’t have given you that information leaflet. Just take the bloody pills”.

Effexor has really been a miracle drug for me. It lifted me out of a hole, and made me feel normal. I was able to make rational decisions, and approach daily tasks like food shopping, and washing up, without weeping with stress and confusion. I stopped having fruitless, angry conversations with people in my head. Life improved.

Unfortunately, now that I’m ready to stop taking it, I’m discovering that I am physically dependent on it. I didn’t know when I started that Effexor withdrawal can be a very long, painful and traumatic process, but boy, am I learning now.

It goes like this (and this isn’t from a sudden stop – it’s from a slow tapering of the dose as recommended by the doctor):

Stage 1: Brain Shivers.

I have discovered that someone has given a name to this unsettling sensation. To be honest, though, I don’t think ‘brain shiver’ really describes it. It is more as if you’re going along happily as normal, and you suddenly decide to turn your head to the left. Your brain is not ready for this, goes “Whoah there, cowboy!” and refuses to move. Your eyes feel a bit squiggly, and you are momentarily disoriented. The sensation, which is amusingly ticklish at first, worsens the longer you go without the drug. It usually results in

Stage 2: Nausea

Intense, although never actually followed through by the stomach, so not even throwing up will relieve it. Tends to happen suddenly, in shops or meetings. Inconvenient. Followed quite quickly by

Stage 3: The Shits.

There’s no delicate way of putting it. Suddenly, the contents of your intestinal tract have turned to liquid, and begun to boil. Understandably, your intestinal tract no longer wishes to accommodate this bubbling, toxic mass. On no account should you mistake this feeling for trapped wind, unless you have a change of underwear handy.

And as if these physical manifestations of withdrawal weren’t distressing enough, you also have hideous emotional symptoms.

Imagine, for example, that your perspective shifts suddenly, and you come face to face with your worthlessness. It becomes a logical deduction that anyone who says they love you must be lying, because frankly, why would they when you’re like this? Ergo, they are certain to abandon you unless you start behaving like a rational human being. Unfortunately you no longer have any idea how to behave in a normal fashion. It feels like being trapped in an invisible box.

Fortunately, I have a very understanding fiancé, who listens to me ramble on in tearful lunatic fashion, and when I ask him anxiously what he is thinking, he says things like “I was thinking that I’d like to go base jumping off El Capitan”*, which is just so irrelevant to my personal internal crisis that it is like being offered a firm piece of ground to stand on.

This phenomenon can last between anywhere from ten minutes to (in my case) four hours.

Also, I like to rant, but I’m now occasionally afflicted by brief, but irrational bouts of absolute fury. I can now empathise with screaming, purple faced toddlers in Sainsburys. We are as one. It’s almost zen.

Other, more minor side effects include uncontrollable teeth grinding, sudden bouts of intense apathy, memory loss, time-slips, loss of concentration… the list goes on. At this rate, I’m going to be toothless and temporally confused by the time I’m 35.

This has now become a personal challenge. I simply can’t stomach the idea that this one small pill is causing me so much trouble, even though once it made life so much easier. I’m not belittling the wonderful transformation to my life that Effexor effected, but why does it insist on hanging on in there where it’s not wanted? It’s like the one remaining drunk guest at the end of a really great party, and it’s really objecting to being evicted.

So here I am, stepping into the ring for a battle of wills against my own brain. It doesn’t get better than this.

*I am assuming that this is not necessarily translatable as “I wish to die, now, please”.

That said, there are a few reasons why I might have another appointment with my psychotherapist, who I haven’t seen since May. See if you can guess which one it is:

1. I have the fear about going home. I’m worried that I’m going to miss Namibia more than I have bargained for. I think sometimes that I take the vast blue skies, the balmy days, the hazy mountains and the splodgy bright bougainvillea for granted, and once I go home, everything is going to seem eternally grey.

2. I have the fear about what’s ahead. What happens when I go home, start a new job and a new life with a new man? What if it doesn’t work out? What if I don’t get this job and have to work in MacDonalds, or sit transcribing insurance dockets from an old tape machine for 2.50 an hour? What if the pair of us find that we can’t live together? What if what if?

3. I’m worried that I’m still on the anti-depressants. I don’t want to be on them for much longer. I’d like to stop now please.

4. She wants to find out how my international blind date went.

Answers on a postcard. The correct answer wins a packet of smarties.

UPDATE! So, no-one got the correct answer, which was, in fact, number 4. She wanted to catch up and see how I’m doing, particularly as she was interested in the outcome of the date. So, while I am worried about those other things, it’s certainly not to the extent that I’d seek professional help. I’m just a worrier, naturally. I think I’ll keep the smarties.

Usually ideas for blogging just pop into my head uninvited, the words jostling and pushing, assembling and reassembling themselves as if they have a life of their own, until I’m ready to put them on the page. For the last two weeks, there have been no ideas. The words have migrated south for the winter. I don’t know when they will be back.

I wish I knew why this was happening. I feel bereft without them, a little empty.

I just don’t know what to say.

So I enlisted a doctor, who gave me some pills. The pills made me sick for a while, and then they made me high. I am no longer high, which is occasionally a disappointment, but I expect it is for the best. My doctor’s bedside manner leaves something to be desired, though. Coming as I do from the UK, I would expect to be given some reason for the prescription of the particular brand of drug that was supposed to sort me out. My doctor just gave me the brand that seemed to sponsor his office accessories and so, a little sceptical of his motives, I looked it up. Apparently its side-effects include nausea (check), sleeplessness (check), constipation, anorexia, heart palpitations and… permanent dependence! Woo-hoo! When I phoned him up to express concern, he said “I knew I should have taken the information leaflet out of the box. Just take the bloody pills.”*

My doctor, in turn, enlisted a psychotherapist. My psychotherapist is lovely. She gives me free tissues and lets me blather on about myself for an hour a week. She gives me homework to do, which includes things like “Go to the supermarket” and “Clean out your fridge” – things I have been unable to face doing for some time. My fridge, thanks to her encouragement, no longer shelters the jar of gherkins that was in it when I moved in in November 2005, or the last cheese slice from the packet that I bought inadvisedly last January. My ex-bloke once promised me, when we were still together, that he would eat all of those repulsive plastic abominations so that they wouldn’t go to waste. I felt like sending it to him in the post, with a note saying “You missed one”.

My psychotherapist has in her turn enlisted a homeopath, who is also wonderful. She has given me a bottle of energised pills with ‘sepia’ written on them, told me to assess my earthly gifts, and forbidden me from wearing stomach jewellery (except “on high days and holidays, and when you want to seduce someone”). She has also told me that I should no longer eat pies. I am still sceptical about this. Surely it cannot be right?

Anyway, there seems to be an army of people now looking out for my mental wellbeing, which makes me feel alternately comforted and guilty. I’m not about to go on and on about being depressed, as this is no fun for anyone, not even me and the good lord knows how I looove to talk about myself. However, it seems that it may be a part of my life that I have to accept if I want to get over it, so I’m not going to avoid the subject either.

It’s nothing to be ashamed of, after all.

*I did get a second opinion, in case you’re worried.

Fortunately her attention was distracted. “Oh, dear, dear, dear no” she said, pointing an accusing finger at what I was about to discover is my manipura chakra, which controls higher emotion and energy.

It appears that one of the problems I have been having in combating depression is that I have a metal object stuck right in the very centre of my spiritual being.

If I want to get better, I’m going to have to remove my belly-button ring.

Outside the window, thunder grumbles, the clean smell of rain drifts in through the open window, moving the curtain and it makes you realize how grubby you feel. Beside you, someone takes deep, slow, sleeping breaths. You look at his smooth, soft back, his tousled, tow-coloured hair, and you try to remember what he looks like. He is less than a foot away, but the space between you may as well be a mile.

You told yourself that you wouldn’t do this again. Of the few one night stands you have had, not one has been satisfying. The sex is usually mediocre, the morning after goodbye perfunctory – you are already gone from his mind, he from yours. You have nothing else to say. The evening may as well never have happened for all the emotion either of you invested, and even had you lain there and gazed into each others’ eyes, it would have meant nothing.

The man next to you doesn’t know you – what makes you laugh, or cry. He doesn’t know your body, or where and how you like to be touched. It amazes you how many men believe that the more aggressively you manhandle a woman’s clitoris, the more pleasurable it is for her. “Be gentle” means “be gentle”, not “Oh yeah, baby, do me like your playstation”. You wince, and sigh, and reflect that you know just as little about him, and what he is like. He seems kind; you feel like a bitch.

You reflect ruefully that even had the sex been great, it still wasn’t what you were really looking for. After months being more lonely than you care to admit even to yourself (because being single is supposed to be fun, isn’t it? A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, right?), you eventually just wanted someone to laugh with you, to tell you you’re pretty, to kiss you as if he cared, to put his arms around you while you sleep. What made you think that empty sex with a total stranger might provide comforting physical contact or the illusion of closeness eludes you right now, as you lie like an island in bed, wondering what he is thinking, what he wanted, half-wishing that he would just make believe for five minutes and hold you.

But you both lie there, saying nothing, completely alone, and nothing is any different from how it was yesterday.

3.10am I try yet another sleeping position, but my feet feel like they are made of tin foil, and I can’t get comfortable. The lines “if you can meet with triumph and disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same” run repeatedly around the inside of my head, a train of words on a perpetual circuit. I start to feel murderous towards Rudyard Kipling and his ilk.

3.25am A cat jumps through the open window of my bedroom, and lands squarely with its paw in my groin. I sit up with a speed that astonishes my stomach muscles, and throw the cat at the door. I lie down. It does it again.

3.30am I get up, and put the cat in the kitchen. It looks mournfully at its empty bowl. I sit at the kitchen table and read People magazine for a while. Cameron Diaz really doesn’t look that great in scarlet lipstick, I muse. Then I eat a piece of chocolate.

3.50am I begin to compile an ‘Alphabet of Namibia’: A is for aeroplanes, from whence babies come. B is for banana trees. C is for chicken, that well known vegetable. D is for donkeys, lining the roadsides. E is for employment crisis. I get as far as O, when the sheer overabundance of Nambia-related words beginning with O makes my brain leak from my ears.

4.30am I decide to write a novel. I wonder whether anyone has ever written a novel about someone who works in a cat food factory before. Should it be a Cinderella, rags-to-riches tale of true love in the face of icky odiferousness? Or should my heroine leave the factory behind her in search of a better life, only to find that everything she calls home resides amongst the Whiskas tins?

4.45am I move my pillow and quilt to the sofa, in the hope that if my feet are elevated, they will stop feeling like tin foil, and allow me to sleep in peace. My arms begin to feel unnaturally large, and will not fit where I want them to fit. I wonder if I have clogged up my arteries permanently, and now all the blood is pooling in my feet and arms, leaving me looking like a balloon animal. I picture the headlines. “multiple amputee wins nobel prize for literature”.

4.50am The first two lines of ‘One is the loneliest number’ replace Rudyard Kipling in my head, and set up camp.

5am. I watch the sun come up. I examine my toenails and wonder whether I should get a pedicure. I come to the conclusion that I would be ashamed to let anyone see my toenails in this state.

5.30am I fall asleep, fitfully, with a cat sitting on my shoulder. It is purring loudly in my ear and dribbling.

6.30 amMy alarm goes off.

This was my night last night. It was not vastly different from Friday night, or Saturday night, except that I believe I got three hours sleep last night, whereas on each of the previous two nights, I got perhaps one.

I am so tired I am cross eyed. When I looked at myself in the mirror this morning, a pale, crazy-eyed person stared back at me, her pupils so wide that you’d think her eyes were black. God damn these bloody anti-depressants. They’re supposed to make you all happy and lift you from the depths of an inescapable emotional hole, but instead, they deprive you of sleep, and have you pondering extraordinary inanities at stupid o’clock in the morning.

About my novel though. Do you think the idea has legs?

Lesly asked me to take him to the location, where he is staying, promising to show me an easy way in and out.  I assured them that I have a remarkably good sense of direction, and would be fine, no matter how many twists and turns he wants to take getting home.  The way to the location was easy, but the place was crowded, largely with cheerful looking men in dark blue overalls.  Charmaine made a disapproving noise.  “Tsch, these Ovambos, they are everywhere”.

I was mystified.  “How can you tell they are Ovambos?” 

“Eish, because only those people work in the fisheries.  If you greet them, they will only greet you in Oshiwambo, they will say ‘ngapi tate’, to show you that they are Ovambo.” 

When I droped them off amidst the crowd of milling men, shouting women and gesticulating taxi drivers, Lesly shouted “Don’t get lost, Rachael” in farewell.  As if.  I am direction queen, and besides, the way was pretty much straight there and back.

Ten minutes later, I find myself in a twilight zone of low-rise pastel coloured housing.  There is not a single soul to be seen, and a clingy sea mist shrouds everything in ambiguity.  The place seems to have been designed by a team of architects with an abiding affection for twee portholes and ceiling-to-floor windows, and every house has a small family car and a 4×4 parked outside.  I have driven unwittingly in to a Barrett Homes nightmare – one of those places you see on tv, that feature lawns peopled with happy families in sports jackets and floral prints, whose children always look overly brushed and abnormally perky.  What you don’t see is the part where after they’ve moved in, the bright, perky children become dead-eyed and creepy, garden gnomes mysteriously move positions in the night, and when Mummy tries to drive her Toyota Hilux through the perpetual fog that leads to Town, she finds herself driving straight back in to suburbia again.  I am not driving a Hilux, but still I cannot find my way out.

I’m not sure how I could have become so completely lost. I am starting to become alarmed, and then I find a road that leads only into pale desert.  I can’t see much because of the swirling cloud rolling off the sea.  An eerie wind howls against the car. I decide not to drive that way because there might be giant flesh-eating worms down there.  You hear strange stories about the coastal section of the desert.

My only solution is to find the sea and drive along next to it until I reach a civilisation more suited to my taste - i.e. one with pubs in it, where I can also buy dinner, and be stared at by people.  Pink hair is somewhat of a trial in this department, but I’m consoling myself with the fact that this is what it must be like to be Angelina Jolie. 

I do eventually find the sea, and I am astounded to find that I have driven about 15 miles the wrong way.

I have decided that I shall not embarass Lesly and Charmaine tomorrow by letting them know that their directions were less than adequate. 

It’s been a tough year for me (oh woe, drama etc. Wish list on the right, thanks.).  There have been days, often many consecutive ones, when I’ve lain in the bath for hours, unable to move, or to stop crying, completely incapable of either understanding or getting rid of the cloud of despair that hovered around my head all day, every day for about three months.

There have been a few reasons for this: my break up and subsequent attempt to be friends with my ex-bloke has been particularly tough, and although I hate to admit it, almost six months on I still ache about it from time to time, even though I wouldn’t have him back now if the deal involved a lifetime’s supply of jaffa cakes and a beach house in the Caribbean.

Work is another reason.  I’ve felt consistently that I’m not achieving what I set out to do here, that I’ve set myself too big a task, and that I am being sucked into the quicksand of permanent unemployability because in the face of the biggest challenge I have ever faced, I have been sinking.   To say it’s been a blow to my self-confidence is an understatement.

For a while, I was desperately homesick, and lonely, and confused about the future, despite my wonderful friends, and an experience that most people would kill for.

And to top it off, I have had to work in close proximity with one of the laziest, most irritating and deeply unpleasant individuals you could ever have the misfortune to meet.  Imagine coming into work every morning to be greeted by such gems as “Don’t you think it would be fun to pick a fight with a paraplegic?”, or “You look like a cross between a 12 year old and a 40 year old woman in those stupid clothes”.  That’s not to mention the unwanted physical attention, the hair stroking, the head-kissing; the other things about him that made me feel physically sick.

This blog has saved me in so many ways.  Without it, I wouldn’t have had the incentive to get up every morning, and to try and find something to laugh about.  I wouldn’t have had the pleasure of writing to fall back on.  I can’t express how much I enjoy it, even though often I’m stuck for words, and feel about as interesting as a plate of semolina. I know that it’s probably silly to invest so much in a something so small, but I honestly feel that without it, I would have been so lost.

It got to the point, about six weeks ago, when I was ready to throw in the towel and go home, tail between my legs.  An argument with my dickhead colleague about an email I’d sent my boss concerning his behaviour resulted in death threats and talk of revenge, and two days of blessed silence.  When it all began again I went to VSO for the first time since I got here.

I spent so many months thinking that I should be able to do this on my own, that by the time it was almost too late, I did what I should have done in the beginning.  I sat in their office, and I tried to talk about my problems in a rational, and controlled manner, as befitting the professional person that I strive to be.  But in the end I just sat and cried.

Now, after only the second sexual harassment case to be brought in Namibia, I am free of my nemesis.  The experience was deeply unpleasant, particularly the hearing, where I had to sit next to him and elaborate on the many demeaning and sickening comments he has consistently subjected me to over the last five months; where I had to endure the questions he asked me that were designed to humiliate and discredit me.  Fortunately I had nothing to hide, and I’m glad that I went through with it.  I hope it encourages others to do the same.

As far as work is concerned, I’ve managed to complete the task that scared me the most.  I might still have fucked it up, but at least it’s done.  From here on in, it can only get better.

And as for my personal life, the fact remains that there seem to be no eligible men whatsoever in Namibia.  The prospect of a year of celibacy doesn’t exactly fill me with joy, but I expect there are positive things I can take from it, not least that by the time I do eventually have sex again, I’ll be so completely delighted that it’s bound to be mind-blowing.

So, things are looking up.  I’m not going home, even though many of my friends are, and some have already left.  I will miss them, but not as much as I would miss Namibia if I left now, before I am ready.

‘There’ll be ups and downs’, VSO said, when we were preparing for a departure, eager and excited, and all convinced that our time abroad was going to be a bed of delightful smelling roses.  ‘It’s going to be tough sometimes’, they said, ‘but it will be worth it in the end.’

I had no idea how right they would be.

I’ve had twinges of missing home for a few months.  I’ve occasionally sat in my flat, cosy and relaxed, a book on one hand, a glass of chilled white wine in the other, and suddenly I feel a deep longing for home.  I think how perfect it would be if I could be transported, Harry Potter like, my glass still in hand, to a pub where my friends sit laughing about men, and work, and people we know. 

Recently, though, in the last three or four weeks, I’ve been plagued with rosy visions of summer in England – you know, village greens that aren’t marred by vandalized bus-stops and piles of dog shit; pimms and lemonade; strawberries and cream; real ale; 99s; the crack of leather on willow: all that stuff.  I love summer in England.  It’s just wonderful.

I dream of spending a Sunday lying in Hyde Park with my best friend, slightly hungover, and getting slowly stoned and drunk while reading the papers in the sun.  I know that Hyde Park is full of inconsiderate wankers who kick footballs into your idyllic reverie, and shout a lot, and you can never find anywhere quiet to sit, but I still love it.

I also dream of having a job that actually stimulates me, and doesn’t make me feel as if my brain has stagnated to the point where it’s dribbling out of my ears, and where I don’t have to deal with comments like “I thought about you every night while I was away.  The last night, I threw up” from the person I share my office space with.  Then I remember that any job I have is going to be fraught with irritations, and my rose-tinted spectacles are getting darker, and more opaque with every day that passes. 

Namibia is beautiful, and challenging.  Often, I love it.  I’m lucky to travel as much as I do, and even in Windhoek, the light on the mountains is so magical that it takes my breath away every single morning, and every evening when I go home. I have learned so much; I dont’ think I’ll realise how much until I leave.  I also feel I’ve still got alot to achieve here. 

But I miss my friends.  I miss my family.  I miss home.  And it’s going to be another 14 months before I go back. 

Sometimes, I’m not sure I can last that long.