Welcome, Vie! Good for you for posting despite your concerns about your cognition. I’m sure you notice problems in yourself, but, in fact, you come across as very clear, precise, and insightful!
I, too, had the experience of things getting significantly worse many months after my last dose. This is fairly common. It still turns around again and starts to improve.
Your experience of being confused about your sense of self is common for all of us, but it's particularly an issue for people who started taking the meds in their teens.
I think taking the meds causes a partial developmental freeze for all of us. It varies form person to person – some manage to still grow in some ways, but almost everyone gets kind of developmentally arrested to some extent.
Then, w/d really rocks your boat, and constitutes a huge, transformative experience that really changes you – ultimately for the better.
Now, if you started the meds as an adult, then go through w/d, you still have some point of reference for who you are. If you started the meds as a teen, you really don’t.
So, one way to look at this is that you are being born now, or picking up on your developmental path from where you were at the age you started the meds. Of course, you have learned and matured since then – I can see from your writing that you are very mature and sophisticated. But, I mean, the not knowing how you feel about things could be looked at as very normal for a younger person. (I want to give credit where credit is due – I am expanding on an idea of Laurie Yorke’s, administrator of paxilprogress.)
I think it’s a combo – you are still in w/d, recovering from neurological changes, and everything Luc and Stan said applies. But, as someone who started the meds young, you also have to develop now in a way that you were blocked from doing. Some of that development you can get started on now; some may require waiting for some more neuro healing to transpire.
We are really into helping people discover what they’re interested in, so maybe we can help you a bit. Is there anything that you feel an inkling of being drawn to? Or not really yet?
