Sertraline is killing my poetry

This article has been two years in the making, and it is in writing it that I realise fully why it has been so difficult to write every time I had attempted it. 

I was originally inspired to explore the dynamic between mental health and writers by an Instagram story from poet Shaira Afrida Oishi that she had posted back in 2020, where she talked about how much her writing had benefited from seeking mental health treatment—how it allowed her to expand her perspective and explore themes outside of personal experience. You can probably tell just how impactful this one Instagram story might have been for me to remember so much of it after four years. Since then, I have sought treatment myself, got put on antidepressants, and continue to take 75 mg of sertraline everyday. Hence, while my initial idea for this article was to analytically dissect the relationship between mental health and writing, the past fours years' experiences, combined especially with the irony of coping through a mental breakdown at a Mental Health Awareness Program at my workplace just this Monday, I understand now that I cannot do this topic any justice without having it be a self-reflection of my own journey as a writer till date and the role my mental health has played in it.

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I always had an affinity for stories: my core memories include my nanu reading Bangla translations of fairytales to me during vacations from her teaching job and my father concocting winding tales of two "kathal gaacher bhoot", Chewra and Bewra, and their infinite shenanigans at bedtime. During the day, while ammu busied herself with housework and my baby brother's coos, in the solitude of a nuclear family's empty rooms, I relied on my imagination to keep me company. This intensified further when in class three I was suddenly taken out of school and my father stashed us away into hiding at his friend's place. I did not quite understand why we were hiding or whom we were hiding from, but for that entire year, devoid of any social connections or opportunities to interact with kids my age, I relied, once again, on words and my active imagination. I sometimes refer to this phase of my life as the Anne Frank Year: during this time, while I had not yet taken up journaling like Anne, I did develop something my  class nine literature student and a young poet, Bornil, aptly calls "internality." It takes guts to admit now but while I was still going to school, I would often allow my imagination and fantasies to bleed over into reality—claiming to have lived in Sweden to classmates while I'd only heard about the country from someone else. Essentially, lying about it. But my Anne Frank Year took my lying tendencies and turned it inwards, into elaborate and expansive escapist fantasies that I would slip into for hours. It made me, from a chapabaj extrovert, into a pensive introvert. 

For most of my childhood, stories and narratives were my go-to form of escapism; however, when I returned from Malaysia after my Anne Frank Year, and lived secluded in a new apartment, growing a newfound awareness of being a girl in her puberty, friendless and unable to voice these confusing feelings to anyone, I discovered how effective poetry was in processing these emotions. In the words of a poet acquaintance, TC Wiggins, poetry, I realised, was an excellent "coping-mechanism." With each bout of depressive episodes since then, I rediscovered this anew. At 15, while I sneakily cut miniscule pinches of my skin off with scissors, in my head I recited the words of my own poetry. At 17, I scraped tear-splattered pages of my journal with rhymes sizzling with anger and frustration. At 18, I read Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, and Virginia Woolf, and saw fragments of myself in their verse and respective biographies. At 20, I concealed the mourning of a long-term relationship by wrapping it up in poetry while I took classes and attended meetings. It worked.

Until it didn't.

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The chasm

The year 2020, as harrowing and cruel as it has been for so many people around the world, on the flip side, was a beacon of creative expression as Facebook groups such as The House of Art (THoA) and Castaway on The Moon (CoTM) rose to immense popularity (re: TC Wiggins, coping-mechanism). Inspired, that same year, I decided to participate in Escapril (a month-long poetry writing challenge observed on Instagram annually in April), thereby, allowing my nonsense notes app scribbles to meet the scrutiny of the public eye. The serotonin boost I got from completing a poem a day, followed by the dopamine feedback of the notification dings, provided me with a new hyperfixation. During this time, while my depression became increasingly debilitating, making me, an otherwise physically okay person, bed-ridden and neglectful of personal hygiene, my online writing persona kept me from wanting to give up on life altogether.

Unfortunately, however, this meant I was propping my will-to-live up on a shaky podium of procrastination. But this obviously was not sustainable. Procrastination was exacerbating my mental health struggles. So, I finally decided to see a psychiatrist. I had tried my luck with counselling before, only to pour my money down the drain of one of Lifespring's problematic peddlers. This time, however, I was prescribed! Sertraline, 25 mg. To start off. 

My procrastination soon turned into productivity as my sertraline dosage rose to 50 mg and then 75 mg. At some point, it started turning into hyper-productivity, because more task completion meant more serotonin. My writing, on the other hand, shifted from my internal world to the problems of the external world. So, I was finally able to experience first-hand what Shaira had meant way back then: my poetry, no longer limited by my personal struggles, dared to bite into the oozing flesh of systemic injustices. I bit and bit until I tore off more than I could chew. 

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So when this year's Escapril prompt from Day 8 posed the question, "what's the truth?" I realised I had never stopped lying long enough to know what the truth is. 

Since then, I have stopped writing poetry because throughout my life poetry has been trickery. 

Now, in the full honesty of my fatigued fingertips, I cannot end this on a positive note while the plaster of sertraline 75 mg is cracking under the pressure of my overflowing dam. However, I will be doing myself, my readers, and perhaps even the sentiment of World Mental Health Day, grave disservice if I do not at least try. 

So, I guess I will try. Maybe to get back to writing poetry again. Maybe not. But I will try to fix the sodden plaster of sertraline to keep my dam from breaking, so that I do not have to hide behind words anymore. So that poetry, perhaps someday, can be my guiding path to the truth. 

Tashfia Ahamed, 28, is a teacher at Scholastica school and a contributor for Star Books and Literature. You may reach her on her Instagram @tashfiarchy or her email, finitestinfinities@gmail.com.